The Sheer Lunacy of Trump’s Gaza Takeover Plan

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• United States
• Steven A. Cook

One of the special privileges of being the president of the United States is that people have to take what you say seriously no matter how bananas. So it is with President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Washington facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and then, when that task is accomplished, own the territory. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs new ideas, and Gaza, in particular, presents a set of extremely difficult problems, but Trump’s proposal is not just morally bankrupt—it is sheer lunacy.

Where to begin?

One of the special privileges of being the president of the United States is that people have to take what you say seriously no matter how bananas. So it is with President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Washington facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and then, when that task is accomplished, own the territory. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs new ideas, and Gaza, in particular, presents a set of extremely difficult problems, but Trump’s proposal is not just morally bankrupt—it is sheer lunacy.

Where to begin?

The president insists that world leaders, and even those within the region, support such a plan. Who? The Saudis issued a statement not long after Trump appeared with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterating their support for a two-state solution. The governments in Egypt and Jordan categorically reject the idea of transferring Palestinians to their territory, even at the risk of U.S. largesse. Not even Israeli settlers would support this plan, if only because in their religious-nationalist messianism they want to resettle Gaza, not allow American developers to build high-end hotels there. Yet Trump persists, insisting that “people” support his plan. He might just be riffing off a late-night phone call with pals from Mar-a-Lago. The danger here is that in response to the well-deserved storm of criticism, Trump feels the need to prove everyone else wrong and make ethnic cleansing and neocolonialism a policy of the United States in the Middle East.

Then, of course, there is the question of feasibility. No doubt U.S. armed forces can take over the Gaza Strip, though it certainly would come at the costs of American lives.  Despite Israel’s best efforts, Hamas remains well-armed and lethal. Does the president expect Hamas’s fighters to go quietly into the Sinai Peninsula? That’s a rhetorical question.

Trump reasons that after so many months of misery, Palestinians civilians would willingly leave the Gaza Strip to live in beautiful new places of his imagination. To the uninitiated, this may sound reasonable. Israeli military operations in Gaza have leveled significant portions of it, and the detritus of war is everywhere. But the president and whoever is advising him fail to understand that what Palestinians call the Nakba—the dispossession that made many of the Palestinians Gaza refugees in the first place—casts a long shadow. Palestinians will simply not be displaced again; no matter how difficult life may be in the Gaza Strip, it remains for them a toehold in Palestine and a stark reminder of the historic injustice that is the flipside of Israel’s establishment. Trump may deny this reality, but if he wants to transfer the Palestinian population, he will have to order the U.S. military to do so forcibly. That is an order that one hopes U.S. officers will refuse to comply with on the grounds that it is illegal and a crime against humanity.

If all of this were not enough, what makes Trump’s proposal so wildly irrational is that it undermines everything he says he wants to do in the Middle East. Moving 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza and assuming ownership of the area will end any chance of normalization between Saudi Arabi and Israel; break the Abraham Accords, Trump’s first term foreign-policy achievement; undermine the Egypt-Israel and Jordan-Israel peace treaties, which are pillars of U.S. policy in the region; and reempower Iran at a moment when it is vulnerable. It would also entangle the United States in a regional conflict—an outcome no one wants, especially Trump, or at least that is what he has told his legion of devoted followers. In his current spasm of megalomania, the president has apparently forgotten that opposition to American adventures abroad was a principal theme of his three runs for the White House.

There are good ways to be a so-called disrupter. This is not it. In just one press conference, Trump undermined U.S. credibility and added more uncertainty and instability to a region that has experienced too much of both.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.