Trump Moves the Overton Window on Gaza 

President Donald Trump hasn’t just shifted the Overton Window, the zone of what’s understood to be possible in politics; he’s blown it wide open. It’s now the Overton Vista. As the close Trump ally Marc Andreessen declared on January 25, “The last week has totally reset my conception of what’s possible.” Coming from a tech bro steeped in Schumpeterian disruption, that’s saying something. 

Bank on it: If the conventional wisdom thinks one thing, Trump thinks something else. Case in point: Gaza. In the wake of 15 months of carnage, the familiar assumption is that there will be some sort of “peace process,” as diplomats shuttle back and forth, securing a minimally worded agreement, to which the combatants are minimally adhered. Then comes the insertion of United Nations peacekeepers, and an international consortium of foreign-aiders, contractors, and perhaps even nation-builders. 

Such a scheme was never likely to work in Gaza. After all, in the wake of fighting far less primordially severe than in Gaza, U.N. troops dot the Middle East, the legacy of previous shuttle diplomacies. They accomplish nothing. 

Yet all this busybody peace-processing allows usual-suspect diplomats, activists, and financiers to do their international thing, gaining headlines, Foreign Affairs bylines—and oftentimes making good money from contracts and kickbacks. 

The result: The underlying fight is papered over for a few years. But soon enough, the political arrangements fall apart, the warriors return to warring, and sometimes, the peacekeepers become outright targets—as is happening, in real time, in Africa. (Those with long memories will recall the terrible fate of the U.S. Marines sent on that forlorn peacekeeping mission in Beirut.) 

Yet by the time everything turns to bleep, the earlier tranche of “peacemaking” diplomats and NGOs has gone on to new gigs and sinecures. So with the coming of the next round of the crisis, the cycle starts anew—high hopes followed by low blows. 

Dismissive of this dolorous precedent, Trump has a different idea; he wants off the treadmill of eternal return. Hence the January 26 headline from the Associated Press: “Trump wants Jordan and Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees and floats plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza.” 

“Something has to happen,” Trump said. “It’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there.” According to estimates, in addition to the tens of thousands of fatalities, 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced. As for the reing 10 percent, they might ponder the implications, for them, of Trump’s approval of sending 1,800 one-ton bombs to Israel, which the Biden administration had paused. 

Yet Trump’s point wasn’t hurting; it was helping. “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”

Live in peace for a change. Surely that’s a good goal, even if it ignores Woodrow Wilson’s idea of ethnically based “autonomous development,” the dictum that has guided American pronouncements for more than a century. Yet the collective volition of Gazans has been hijacked by the martyr-makers of Hamas—there’s no autonomy when held at gunpoint. 

“Gaza is interesting,” Trump continued. “It’s a phenomenal location, on the sea. The best weather, you know, everything is good. It’s like, some beautiful things could be done with it.” 

Hmm. Does that sound like the beginning of a Trump Resort? Maybe. But it could also be the start of a larger, broader development—housing for the masses, too, a sort of Florida-on-the-Med.

CNN quoted an Israeli analyst saying that Trump’s words were “not a slip of the tongue but part of a much broader move than it seems, coordinated with Israel.” 

But of course, there can’t be a single condo or casino on the Gaza Riviera if Hamas is still on the scene. And if Hamas is still calling (and firing) the shots, then the next Gaza war could be all the bloodier and more horrific. 

So maybe that means Gazans, many of them at least, for their own good, have to go. But where would they go? That’s a puzzle. The pre-war population of the Strip was about 2 million; between fatalities and flight, it’s no doubt lower now, but not by that much. 

In his calculatedly off-the-cuff remarks, Trump talked about sending them to adjoining Egypt, or perhaps to Jordan. Yet those countries are not enthused. Indeed, every government in the Middle East is on guard against the sort of jihadism Hamas epitomizes. Perhaps Trump could make those countries an intake offer they can’t refuse, and yet it does the U.S. no good if the relocated Gazans do what exiled Palestinians did to Lebanon beginning in the 1970s—plunge that once-happy land into a civil war that smolders to this day. 

Meanwhile, the liberal democracies of the West have turned illiberal—there are no more Merkels, Trudeaus, or Bidens to open the door to migrants and hand out the benefit checks. In fact, given the radicalism of at least some of the Gaza population, we have to wonder: Would any country, anywhere, want them? 

So what to do? This author has a suggestion, which he published back in November 2023: move the Gazans out of Gaza. Pay them, in fact, to move; as Churchill might have said, pay-pay is cheaper than war-war. Without a doubt, relocation as a permanent solution is a better investment than reconstruction as a prelude to the next round of destruction. 

But money aside, move to where? To an island, which would help with security and monitoring. The world boasts, in fact, more than 600,000 islands, of which only 11,000 are inhabited. 

But it’s also possible that an island could be built to Gazan specifications, perhaps in the Mediterranean or Red Seas. Such a topographical feature could be made, in fact, out of carbon captured from the atmosphere, and then solidified—so the new island could be a win for the environment, as well as for humanity.

To be sure, land reclamation from the ocean is a proven technique. The Dutch have been doing it for eight centuries; some 17 percent of their total territory was diked and drained. The Europeans are now too green to do much of that useful engineering, and yet many other places, including, most spectacularly, the states of the Persian Gulf, are into island-making. 

In an e-book, Create Gaza 2, Protect Israel, Build Peace, Dr. Joyce Starr and I argued, “Our solution, difficult as it might be, is hopeful and achievable. Providing protection and prosperity for ten million Israelis and two million Gazans is indeed possible…more land for more peace.” 

But okay, before we get to the “hopeful,” we have to get past the “difficult.” 

For openers, those who say they speak for the Gazans say they don’t want the huddled masses to leave Gaza. Immediately after Trump’s comment, the Palestinian Authority told Al Jazeera: “We emphasize that the Palestinian people will never abandon their land or their holy sites, and we will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes (Nakba) of 1948 and 1967. Our people will re steadfast and will not leave their homeland.” 

One has to wonder: Is this really what the average Gazan thinks? Has anyone actually asked them, honestly and without duress, what they want? Perhaps it can be arranged that the man and woman on the street can register an opinion—and make a move—without fear of death. 

Okay, but what’s the opinion of the average American, including American conservatives of the kind who might be reading this article? Trump’s ideas on the Middle East are not the same as the vision of restraint championed by many in and around The American Conservative. But then, Trump has won the presidency, twice—not Ron or Rand Paul. 

Yet still, there’s some important overlap between Trump and the Pauls; notably, a distaste for endless wars. As TAC’s Jude Russo wrote recently of Trump, “His tools of choice in the Middle East have been cruise missiles and diplomacy, not boots on the ground.” 

Indeed, maybe the best way to keep American GIs from occupying sand dunes—or, shudder, sitting as ducks in a Beirut-type barracks—is to find ways of fending off conflicts that could magnetize U.S. involvement, if not under this president, then the next. So if we want to avoid Bush Doctrine–ing, nation-building, and democracy-promoting, maybe we should support creative approaches that obviate the intervention temptation. 

So we’re back to the idea of moving the Gazans. Is that really so bad? Literally every people or population group on Earth has moved and migrated. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily; the common thread is that moving is the better option—it’s better than immiseration or death. 

In the last decade or so, some 1 million Rohingya have been pushed out of Burma into Bangladesh. It has been, for sure, a humanitarian debacle, and yet absent some intervener’s boots on the ground, there wasn’t anything to be done to stop Burma’s ethnic cleansing. For the Rohingyans, expulsion was better than extermination. 

Indeed, the U.N. today counts 122.6 million people as having been forced from their homes; if we reach back into just recent history, we see hundreds of millions more forced to flee China, India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Africa, Vietnam, and yes, the Middle East. All unfortunate, even tragic, situations, but Uncle Sam’s ability to do anything was somewhere between minimal and doubtful. 

With all these people in motion, maybe Gaza should be next. We might think of an island for them as an ark—a permanent ark. 

Oh, and one other thing: If we could get good at island-developing, maybe even island-building, it would be a heckuva business opportunity, as the need for new homes and living spaces, carved out of the natural environment, er, trumps the greens and Malthusians. 

In fact, Donald Trump has long had such visions in mind. In 2023, he highlighted a plan for new cities, so that Americans could spread out and flourish. So now that plan could be extended beyond the U.S. To Greenland, of course, and maybe, as well, to Gaza Island.

An ark that saves lives, builds peace, and makes money for somebody. Art of the deal, baby.