John Jefferson
The critics are raving about President Trump’s comments at that February 4 press conference at the White House: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza strip, and we’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.”
Yep, that got ’em going: “Trump’s Gaza fantasy is a recipe for a forever war,” sniped the headline in POLITICO. “Trump’s Gaza proposal for ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ sparks global condemnation,” snapped Reuters. “Gaza plan sparks sharp criticism,” snipped CNN. Plus this header in the Hill: “Texas Dem says he’ll bring articles of impeachment against Trump over Gaza.”
In his report, the New York Times’ Peter Baker found plenty of experts who were hostile to Trump’s idea, and yet Baker espied Trump’s freewheeling imagination:
President Trump basked as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it came to Gaza, Mr. Trump’s thinking on Tuesday was so far outside the box that it was not clear he even knew there was a box.
That’s Trump. He eats mental boxes—and any other kind of conventional wisdom—for breakfast.
And as it happens, just four days before, this author, here at TAC, pondering pacific solutions for Gaza, had admiringly indulged in some imagery: “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.”
In that article, I argued there’s never going to be a peace deal between Israel and Gaza so long as the Strip is controlled by Hamas or anything close. Indeed, there’s going to be little if any reconstruction, either; the Israelis, mindful of who started this war back on October 7, 2023, don’t want to see Hamas replenished.
As for Trump’s America, it is withdrawing from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which seems to have dabbled—or more than dabbled—in support for terrorism. So where’s help for the Gazans going to come from? The Europeans, palsied by their Malthusian policies and needful of American defense against Russia, are unlikely to cross Trump with a big aid effort of their own. As for Arab and other Muslim countries, they, too, seem unlikely to mess with Trump or Israel. So the baseline scenario for Gazans is that they will be sitting, wretchedly, in tents and rubble for years to come.
Surely there’s some better way to uplift Gazans while protecting Israelis against another 10/7. In that same TAC piece I recalled a book I had published in November 2023, Create Gaza 2, Protect Israel, Build Peace, along with my co-author, Dr. Joyce Starr. We argued that the only hope Gazans had for a decent life was to live somewhere else. To sweeten the deal, we suggested paying them $100,000 each to leave. If the population of Gaza is 2 million, that would mean an outlay of $200 billion. For sure, that’s a lot of money, but it’s not so much compared to the cost of the carnage and the hit on the Israeli economy in the past two years—one recent international survey found that Israel’s national “brand” now ranks 50th out of 50 countries. In terms of business confidence and investment, that’s a costly cellar in which to dwell.
Yet if peace were to break out in Gaza, not only would Israel gain value, but so, likely, would other indexes, as markets priced in lower risks. If there’s ever a mission for enlightened capital, this would be it. With apologies to Churchill, spend-spend is better than kill-kill.
But where would the Gazans go? For his part, Trump has spoken vaguely about relocating them to other Arab countries. Yet embarrassingly for the Pan-Arab cause, Arab states don’t want the Gazans, or any Palestinians, as they tend to carry with them turmoil. So Starr—a veteran Middle East expert—and I suggested building them a new island, far from Arab crowds that the Gazans could madden. Thinking greenly, we further suggested making the island out of captured and solidified carbon—so the Gazans, too, could be part of the fight against climate change.
Striving for a Trumpy worldview, my TAC piece touted condos and casinos on the “Gaza Riviera.” So yes, when Trump mentioned Gaza as a potential “Riviera of the Middle East,” I was thrilled. Warming up, Trump pitched “economic development that will supply unlimited jobs and housing for people of the area.”
Alas, the critics didn’t dig it. Ignoring Trump’s positivity, they focused on negativity: “warmonger,” “endless wars,” “genocide,” “crimes against humanity.” In point of fact, Trump is against all those bad things.
Indeed, he’s been on Team Restrained Realist for decades. It was he who lanced the neocon bubble in February 2016, when he attacked George W. Bush for his disastrous Iraq War. A few days later, Trump won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, marking the end of Bushian save-the-world interventionism. Trump is willing to throw Uncle Sam’s weight around, but he prefers cruising missiles to building nations.
Okay, but what of Trump’s recent talk about “taking over” Gaza? Isn’t that unsettling? Potentially, sure. But the best frame for viewing Trump comes from journalist Salena Zito; back in 2016, she wrote, “Take Trump seriously, not literally.” Nine years later, Trump talks about everything and yet not everything he talks about comes to pass—or is even repeated the next day.
Still, oftentimes, there’s method in Trump’s meandering. Reacting to Trump’s Gaza newsbreak, Scott Adams tweeted, “King Solomon: ‘Cut the baby in half.’ President Trump: ‘America will own Gaza.’ Same energy.” That is, a bluff intended to get a reaction. Which, for sure, Trump got.
While it’s okay to shake things up, it’s not so good even to hint at a neo-Bush Operation Gaza Freedom. So within 24 hours, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff assured the world that no military operation was in the offing. For sure, this is a trust-yet-verify thing, and yet Trump’s anti-quagmire record sustains faith. A realist might say, Better ill-chosen words than wars of choice.
But still the question: Quo Gaza? Probably most Americans would say, “That’s someone else’s problem,” and they’d have a point. Yet that’s not quite Trump, who has never met a deal he didn’t want to “art.” At one time or another, the Dealosaurus rex has mused aloud about dealing and healing the problems of the Koreas, Ukraine, Mexico, and Iran, as well as of the Arabs and Israelis.
Indeed, in the Middle East, his Abraham Accords stand as a genuine achievement—any American president not named “Trump” would have received a Nobel Peace Prize. So now, thinking about Gaza, shrewd observers espy the hidden hand of Abraham Accorder and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Trump and Kushner, never having attended Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service—or any other school of the blob—have their own ideas, rooted in their shared experience in real-estate transactionalism. Such outside-the-box thinking is, of course, anathema to the State Department and cognate deep states, and yet over the past eight decades, the Middle Eastern experts haven’t exactly covered themselves in success, to say nothing of glory. So White House Communications Director Steven Cheung is calling them out: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting a different result. Peace—truly lasting peace—is the ultimate goal. And it can only happen with this President.”
We’ll have to see if Trump can do better than his predecessors, but at least he’ll get his chance. As they proceed with their plan, Trump & Co. will likely get buy-in from some Arab countries, starting with the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf—they hate missing out on a deal. And as for policing Gaza, it probably won’t be American troops, but it could be American contractors.
But there’s still the issue of where the Gazans could go. If other nations won’t take them, then perhaps we’re back to the idea of a newly built island, perhaps relatively near the Middle East—but safely far from Israel. Yes, an island refuge seems improbable, but it’s not impossible. And if Trump shied away from difficulty, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
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