Trump is right on the Gaza Strip, but the details matter

Among President Trump’s provocative ideas that have shocked the world since he returned to the White House, the recent proposal to “clean” the Gaza Strip of the locals and turn it into a flourishing Mediterranean Riviera looks like the most outrageous. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it an example of “outside of the box” thinking. It looks ill-grounded and premature from many points of view.

Neither Egypt nor Jordan seem ready to welcome 2 million people, many of whom their governments reasonably count as terrorists and jihadis. Also, Israel doesn’t have full control over the territory it should “hand over” to the U.S. Lastly, the U.S. isn’t ready to send thousands of American troops to pacify this uneasy exclave. With only Israel expressing enthusiasm towards the plan, it is doomed to fail.

Nevertheless, I would argue that both the long history of conflicts in the area and the ongoing war — started with the cruel Oct. 7 attack from the Gaza Strip on Israel — suggest that in principle Trump is right. The population of Gaza shouldn’t be awarded the privilege of sovereignty after all that’s happened. Also, international humanitarian organizations, dominated by leftist and antisemitic groups, can no longer be trusted. Both Israel and other neighboring states cannot feel themselves secure with such a non-sustainable and chaotic entity nearby.

This all means that the fictious sovereignty of the Gaza Strip, used by Hamas leaders to steal humanitarian aid and prepare for new assaults, should be put out of mind. For good or for bad, it seemingly cannot be done either through an Israeli occupation or through invasion by any other state.

But there do exist legal mechanisms to push forward Trump’s plan (of course, somewhat, and even significantly, modified). The judicial basis for the implementation of such a plan is in general set up by the Charter of the United Nations, precisely Chapters XII and XIII referring to the trusteeship system and the Trusteeship Council.

These days both chapters have no importance as the trust system has ended in 1994 as the United States terminated administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands which was put under its control by the UN back in 1947. The unique chance for applying the UN rules to the Gaza Strip and for restoring the authority of the Trusteeship Council comes from Article 78 of the UN Charter which says: “The trusteeship system shall not apply to territories which have become Members of the United Nations, relationship among which shall be based on respect for the principle of sovereign equality.”

The Palestinian Authority, even while it has been a non-member observer state of the United Nations General Assembly since November 2012, is currently not a UN member and therefore remains one of a very small number of entities to which all provisions of Chapters XII and XIII may be applied.

The UN Charter, of course, says nothing about “relocation” of local residents. Quite the contrary, its Article 73 states: “Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present charter.”

In other words, as the first step, the U.S. should announce it wishes to re-empower the Trusteeship Council by initiating this issue at the UN General Assembly, as required by Article 85 (2), to propose the Council’s composition and to win the General Assembly vote on the issue. Then either the U.S. or other member states should bring the proposal of putting the Gaza Strip under the mandate system to the Security Council.

This would be an uneasy issue. But considering this territory's lack of strategic value and the risks it presents, many nations might support the move — including both China and Russia, which may hope the U.S. fails in this enterprise. Even if this particular effort isn’t successful, the restoration of the trusteeship system as the number of chaotic and unrecognized entities is growing, would be an important move for which the Trump administration might be well praised and remembered.

The Gaza Strip case shows that there are places in the world where the most basic norms of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are massively violated by their own rulers, and the international community has no means to intervene and to stabilize these territories. To my mind, the restoration of the Trusteeship System — already codified in the UN Charter — would be an important step in the right direction, whatever its concrete short-term consequences might be.

Vladislav Inozemtsev, Ph.D. in economics, is a co-founder and senior fellow with the Center for Analysis and Strategies in Europe, a Cyprus-based think tank.

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