The Art of the Gaza Deal

President Donald Trump said last Tuesday that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip,” “own it,” and “level” and rebuild it—removing residents and sending them to neighboring Arab states, then reopening the war-torn territory as a new bastion of peace where people from around the world can thrive. Palestinians who’ve lived there for countless generations, Trump has said, would then be able to return.

It’s a jarringly original idea that no one seems to have thought of before Trump sprang it on the world. But unless he plays his cards right, the final stage of the plan may not unfold as Trump is hoping.

The president should take note: If he removes Gazans even temporarily to a neighboring country, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do everything in his power to make sure they never return to their homeland, sandbagging and sabotaging the whole project at every turn. In all likelihood, Israel will even send settlers into Gaza as they have done in the West Bank for decades.

Fortunately, there’s a way that Trump could thwart Bibi and his government.

The president should send Gazans not to Egypt or Lebanon, as he has proposed, but to the West Bank. Political analyst Khalil Sayegh offered this idea on X, and it just might work. As with Gaza, Netanyahu is determined to rid the West Bank of Palestinians, and he’d surely resist the influx of more. Nevertheless, Trump should push hard to make it happen. Moving at least some displaced Gazans there temporarily might be the only way to motivate Israel to cooperate in returning them to their homes.

Unfortunately, few in the chattering classes are discussing ideas, like this one, that would improve the odds that the Gazans themselves will benefit from Trump’s proposal. Indeed, some of the reactions make it clearer than ever that, to the worst parties in the battles and debates surrounding Israel-Palestine, the actual people of Gaza have never been anything but a means to an end.

On the right, some ideologues bent on the “Greater Israel” project see the humiliation and expulsion of Palestinians as a means of demonstrating the legitimacy and might of their own ideology. Meanwhile, many people on the left who hate Israel and the American “empire” use Gazans’ plight to bolster their case against Trump.

Both of these groups believe that Trump’s new plan would amount to a warlike occupation and ethnic-cleansing campaign, even if members of the “Greater Israel” group, who support the plan, don’t put it that way. Meanwhile, many left-wing opponents of the plan seem, in my view, to relish the prospect of Gazan lives being ruined, if only so they can say “We told you so!” over the dead bodies of Palestinians.

Almost no one with much access to state power or the opinion-making influence of the media seems to want what is best for Gazans. And with the well-being of Gazans so far removed from public consciousness, almost everyone has missed the possibility that the real motive behind Trump’s plan is to treat Gazans not as a means to an end but as ends in themselves – and to secure a future for them in their ancient homeland.

Trump is not pushing Gazans away, but embracing them. And by making the U.S. the next-door neighbor of Israel, he would block the overt plan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ethnically cleanse the territory. Checkmate!

Already, the Trump administration has sent out signals dashing the hopes and pretended fears that the president would permanently remove Gazans from their homeland. His decision to remove them so that U.S. personnel can rebuild the territory was made with a “humanitarian heart,” the White House press secretary said – to keep the population from danger. Asked at his initial announcement who would live in Gaza after its renovation, Trump was clearhttps://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-art-of-the-gaza-deal/: “representatives from all over the world. Palestinians also. Palestinians will live there.”

Some confusion has arisen on this point, largely because Trump seemed to say, during an earlier press conference with Netanyahu, that displaced Gazans would never return:  “If we can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes, and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed, not be knifed to death like what’s happening in Gaza.”

How to square this with Trump’s later statement that Palestinians would again live in Gaza after it was rebuilt? One interpretation is plausible, though absent in the media coverage. When Trump referred to resettling people “permanently in nice homes,” he may have been imagining Gazans living back in the strip after the U.S. restores it to a habitable state.

Indeed, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later clarified that, in the president’s view, Gazans “need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza.” Key word: temporarily.

While Trump’s earlier statement may have been confusing, the most likely explanation, in light of both his later comments and his press secretary’s, is that Trump never intended for Gazans to be permanently resettled abroad. At the very least, that’s Trump’s current position.

Now, the president just needs to consider where they will be temporarily located. If he wants the plan to work, his best bet is to let them live, for a time, in the West Bank.