Trump’s nitwitted Gaza plan

Today's Gaza is a wasteland of devastation. There is no way that a Palestinian would want to live there, except for reasons of self-determination. And none of the Arab powers need to have the Palestinians there, except Hamas.

It would certainly solve the problem if the 2 million Gazans would just go away. So, what to do? President Trump came up with the quick answer, the easy solution.

Let’s move the 2 million permanently out of Gaza. But where? And how? And who will take them? Unclear. A nitwit idea.

Who would move them out and do the heavy lifting? The U.S. military on a dangerous mission? Hamas remains well-armed and lethal. Does Trump expect Hamas’s fighters to disarm and vanish into the Sinai?

And who would fund the reclamation of Gaza? Who else? The U.S., of course, perhaps with the money saved by defunding USAID and the Department of Education. Nothing like America First.

In Trump’s fantasy, Gaza would become a travel destination for the peoples of the world, a Valhalla in the Middle East. Its coastline would be studded with hotels owned perhaps by Elon Musk — a Gaza Riviera where Trump’s oligarch friends could moor their yachts while sunning themselves on the Mediterranean.

The idea was so bad that the White House was quick to dial it back. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified Trump’s statement that the U.S. would “own” Gaza: “The administration does not intend to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza, nor has it made any commitment to send U.S. troops there,” she stated.

Certainly not. That's too much American blood and treasure to waste on the Palestinians. But how do you own Gaza without paying for it? Maybe alongside an Arab consortium? It’s as easy as having Mexico pay for the wall.

Besides all that, the move would extinguish any chance of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It would abrogate the Abraham Accords, Trump’s crowning first-term foreign policy achievement; undermine the Egypt-Israel and Jordan-Israel peace treaties, the two pillars of wisdom in U.S. Middle East policy; and reenergize Iran’s ayatollahs just when we have them on the back foot.

Trump has seemingly forgotten that trashing American adventures abroad was a principal theme of the MAGA version of America First. It’s a Grimm fairy tale.

True, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs new ideas, and the war in Gaza would seem intractable, but Trump’s proposal may be quickly dismissed as a nonstarter, except it is such a dangerous idea coming from the president of the U.S. No wonder Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was smirking as Trump blurted it out.

Likewise, Trump’s suggestion that Washington facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Americans? Ethnic cleansing? Sheer lunacy!

The president insists that world leaders, and even those within the region, support such a plan. Rubbish. The Saudis issued a statement, shortly after Trump’s appearance with Netanyahu, reaffirming their support for a two-state solution. Egypt and Jordan have totally rejected the transfer of Palestinians to their territory. No one wants them. Yet Trump persists, insisting that “people” support his plan — perhaps the same “people” who told him he won the 2020 election.

Ethnic cleansing and neocolonialism have never been policies of the U.S. They cannot be our policy in the Middle East. It’s just not who we are.

Is it possible that after enduring so many months of pain and suffering, Palestinians would willingly leave Gaza to live somewhere else? Perhaps. But the practicality is where the somewhere else is. To a foreign affairs novice, this may sound reasonable. But, in the words of Macbeth, it is a “dagger of the mind, a false creation.”

Gaza may be a bombed-out bunker, but it is unlikely that Palestinians will be willing to be displaced again. Gaza is where they hang on to Palestine by their fingernails. Perhaps if Trump wants to transfer the Gaza Palestinians, he will offer them a package to move, as he did with workers at the CIA.

But what if they refuse? He will have to order the U.S. military to do so forcibly. And what will he do if U.S. officers refuse to comply with on the grounds that it is illegal and a crime against humanity? Put Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the case? If sober, Hegseth will know what to do. Court-martial.

Or have Pam Bondi prosecute them. She said she wants to make Trump proud. Either way he gets the recalcitrant officers exactly where he wants them — in the Supreme Court.

What makes Trump’s proposal so untenable is that it undermines everything he says he wants to accomplish in the Middle East: stability and the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Trump is an inveterate disrupter, and there are good ways to go about it. But this is disruption run riot. It is over the top and off the wall. It is thinking not outside the box, but outside the brain.

If, in just one press conference, Trump failed to undermine his own credibility, he certainly undermined that of his country.

James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin.

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