President Donald Trump is standing firm on his plan to relocate “permanently” more than 2.1 million Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip to neighboring countries. Trump said the United States would take ownership of Gaza and redevelop the territory to serve as prized real estate on the Mediterranean Sea. Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier that those living in Gaza would not be allowed to return.
Some commentators say the president should not be taken literally. They argue that Trump is attempting to secure greater regional efforts to support Gaza’s postwar development. That by dangling a deeply unpopular idea of displacing the Palestinians out of Gaza, America’s Middle Eastern partners will have to offer better alternatives. What these arguments fail to recognize, however, is that Trump’s rhetoric complicates rather than encourages greater regional support for efforts to stabilize Gaza and secure Israel.
As a primary case in point, Saudi Arabia has already made clear that the potential for a peace agreement with Israel is being greatly undermined by Trump’s proposal. And while it’s true that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has other priorities than the plight of the Palestinians, his supplication to a forcible relocation is a nonstarter. It would fundamentally undermine the crown prince’s key priority of establishing himself and Saudi Arabia as the rising global power of modern Islamic leadership.
Similarly, while Jordan is heavily reliant on U.S. aid, King Abdullah II would risk imploding his rule were he to tolerate Trump’s Gaza ownership plan. This would be a disaster for the U.S. both in terms of what might follow Abdullah’s government and what its loss would mean for Washington.
The Jordanian GID intelligence service is regarded by U.S. intelligence officers as the most reliable of all Middle Eastern intelligence partners in its service of U.S. security interests. The General Intelligence Department is viewed as even more reliable than the Israeli Mossad, which works to a distinctly Israeli agenda on Middle Eastern issues. This is not a peripheral concern. Alongside the Saudi intelligence services, the GID was instrumental in infiltrating the Islamic State during the heydays of the terrorist group’s 2013-2017 caliphate. This infiltration cost the lives of many GID officers and agents but helped prevent numerous mass casualty attacks in Europe and against American targets. Allies like Jordan are hard earned and deserve American efforts to maintain their stability. This is especially important, bearing in mind the deep Arab affinity for personal honor and trust. Trump’s Gaza plan serves the opposite interest.
Trump’s plan is impractical on paper and would cause great damage to U.S. and allied interests in practice. But Trump’s very articulation of his idea is already causing damage to U.S. interests. Even if their regimes are autocratic in nature, the Saudis/Sunni Arab monarchies, Jordanians, and Egyptians now face escalating domestic populist pressures against their alliances with America. Trump is seen to be pushing a nakedly imperialist effort not simply to sidestep Palestinian aspirations but to crush them. Worse, Trump’s "America will own Gaza" and "Palestinians won’t ever be able to return to Gaza" rhetoric is a near pitch-perfect replication of exactly that which jihadist propagandists have long accused American policy in the Middle East of pursuing. Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei might have diverging ideologies and interests. Still, all of them have had great success in mobilizing young Muslim men to their otherwise perverse causes by falsely portraying the U.S. as an evil empire that is determined to dominate Muslim peoples. The crux of their arguments has been supposed American support for Israeli efforts to subjugate the Palestinians.
It is for this reason that the overwhelming majority of U.S. counterterrorism specialists strongly oppose Trump’s Gaza rhetoric. While some supporters of the president wish to portray these critics as delusional left-wing activists, they include a large number of Joint Special Operations Command and CIA counterterrorism officers who made their careers finding and killing Islamic terrorists without remorse. Put simply, the serious voices opposing Trump’s Gaza plan cannot be characterized as Code Pink morons.
Regardless, there’s another glaring problem with Trump’s proposal: Even if the U.S. were able to persuade allies to host Palestinians from Gaza, many Palestinians in Gaza would refuse to leave. A large number of Palestinians would likely even take up arms to defend their homes. Their number would include a great many not affiliated with terrorist organizations. This bears note in light of Trump’s incomprehensible argument that the U.S. military would not be required to secure Gaza. The natural implication is thus either that the Israel Defense Forces will forcibly clear Gaza for the U.S. or that Palestinians in Gaza will suddenly somehow collectively decide they want to leave. Neither possibility is credible.
The military costs of forcible relocation of Palestinians in Gaza would be very heavy for Israel, entailing street-to-street fighting and clashes with mixed groups of terrorists, armed civilians, and unarmed civilians. The diplomatic impact on Israel would be catastrophic. The moral impact would also be highly problematic for the Israeli psyche. After all, the forcible relocation of an ethnic group from its home would stir traumatic memories of the Jewish people’s darkest days. That leaves the U.S. military option. Would Trump support such an action so utterly at odds with American moral authority and strategic interests? Doesn’t Trump insist he wants to avoid "stupid wars" rather than start them?
The heavy weight of evidence against Trump’s plan leads its supporters to make somewhat outlandish claims in support of it.
Trump’s first-term ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, claims that Palestinians want to leave Gaza but then implicitly recognizes that many may not want to do so. He then excuses this not-so-insignificant truth by declaring that “from a moral perspective, they have forfeited the right to the land which they have destroyed.” Friedman justifies this argument by pointing out that Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas in 2006. And while this is true, Hamas has long wielded power through coercion, violence, and bribery. Opposing Hamas in Gaza is a recipe for death. In turn, a vote for Hamas does not justify the forced relocation of 2.1 million people from their homes. Indeed, I would argue that the collective punishment of ethnic cleansing is antithetical to Israeli and American moral values.
What I suspect really motivates much of the Israeli-American support on the Right for Trump’s plan is how it would affect the future of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy — namely, by extinguishing even the longer-term prospect of a two-state solution, which led to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Trump has further fueled the optimism of the anti-diplomacy movement by suggesting that he might soon recognize full Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, much of which includes Palestinian settlements. But in contrast to the anti-diplomatic movement, I would argue that it is in the U.S. national interest to maintain political space for a two-state solution, which carries with it hardened guardrails against future terrorism against Israel.
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Yes, Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocity and the ensuing Israeli military response means that there is no reasonable prospect of a two-state solution being reached in the short term. But to eradicate even the future possibility of a Palestinian state would be fuel to the jihadist fire. Again, it cannot be emphasized enough how much this conflict serves as a nuts-and-bolts terrorist recruitment tool for young Muslim men. In the same way, only a Palestinian state that provides a sense of dignity alongside opportunities for prosperity will be able to divert young Palestinians and other Muslims away from terrorism. Other moral considerations notwithstanding, that concern is reason enough for why former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and first-term Donald Trump all attempted to pursue a two-state solution.
Trump’s greatest moral impulse is his desire to secure historic peace agreements that break decades, if not centuries, of cycles of war. But the president’s plan to dislocate Palestinians from their home is both immoral and impractical. And it would cause grievous harm to U.S. interests.