Donald Trump’s proposal last week that the US should empty Gaza of its people, resettle them in neighbouring states so that the US could “take it over and develop it” has attracted both derision and alarm. The “plan”, if one can call it that, envisages the transfer of two million Palestinians, who have endured 16 months of conflict, to Egypt and Jordan and other Arab states, while Gaza is redeveloped for the benefit of “the world’s people”.
Unsurprisingly all of this has been roundly rejected by world leaders who continue to pay lip service, at least, to the objective of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, although Trump has received support from key figures in his Republican Party as well as from those on the increasingly influential fringes of the far-right in Israel.
The notion of transforming Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” would, as has been observed, entail no less than forced population transfer on a scale that would constitute ethnic cleansing and be in breach of international law, even if regard for international law has rarely seemed weaker than in the context of US foreign policy as elaborated in recent weeks by the returning American president.
More specifically any such plan would present vast practical, logistical and political obstacles, assuming that anyone was serious about the undertaking in the first instance.
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For the US it would overturn both settled policy in favour of a two-state solution but would also represent a reversal of Trump’s previous position on US engagement overseas – specifically his stated rejection of nation-building on which he campaigned for the presidency in 2016. The project of taking over Gaza and expelling its population could only be accomplished by the wielding of very substantial military power given the unanimity with which Palestinian opinion has rejected Trump’s latest excursion into the politics of the Middle East. It is unimaginable that either political or popular support could be secured in the US for the dispatch of troops to Gaza in the certain knowledge that there would be protracted and violent resistance to this. And if the US is not to undertake this task it is difficult to see who might.
Nor is there any practical likelihood of co-operation on the part of the Arab states identified by Trump as possible destinations for the expelled population of Gaza. Both Jordan and Egypt have roundly rejected Trump’s plan. Both states have enjoyed uneasy relationships with their Palestinian refugee populations in the past. Following the 1948 war which brought the state of Israel into existence, some 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes. Jordan got the largest share of these. After the Six Day war in 1967, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, a further 300,000 Palestinians fled their homes, mostly into Jordan. While those of Palestinian origin who arrived in Jordan before 1967 are Jordanian nationals, relations between so-called “East Bankers” and those of Palestinian descent have been fraught over the years.
After 1967 the presence of militant Palestinian factions alarmed the monarchy to the extent that in September 1970, King Hussein ordered his army into action in what became an all-out war with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, with the loss of over 3,000 Palestinian and 600 Jordanian lives.
More recently in 1994 Jordan became the second Arab country after Egypt to establish diplomatic relations with Israel despite popular opposition, receiving substantial aid from the US in return. The Jordanian regime has no interest in disturbing the political balance in the country by co-operating with Trump’s plan for Gaza.
For the regime of Abdelfattah al-Sisi in Egypt the prospect of opening Egypt’s border to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza is equally unthinkable for different reasons. Egypt already has a Palestinian refugee population, although on a much smaller scale than in Jordan and much less well integrated into Egyptian society. Overall, however, the country has a refugee population of around nine million while it is experiencing a protracted economic crisis.
In addition the regime in Cairo is deeply hostile to Hamas. Sisi came to power having overthrown an elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a Palestinian offshoot. Sisi has no interest in hosting what would likely be an influx of Hamas militants among the broader Palestinian civilian population should Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing come to fruition.
Finally, the Saudi regime has also made clear its opposition to Trump’s “proposal” stating that the establishment of a Palestinian state is its “firm, unwavering position” thus apparently closing the door on normalisation of relations with Israel for the time being.
Given the sheer implausibility of what Trump is suggesting, observers have speculated as to quite what might lie behind it.
For some Trump is displaying imagination in “thinking outside the box” – all the old approaches to the Palestinian issue have failed and new ideas are called for. More pragmatically it has been suggested that this is an elaborate bargaining ploy designed to place pressure on key actors in the current conflict. Hamas might be persuaded to make even greater concessions in talks with Israel in exchange for an abandonment of the plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians.
An alternative or parallel suggestion is that, despite their apparently clear position, the Saudis might be persuaded to reconsider normalisation with Israel for the same reason. There is some recent historical basis for this view. In 2020, under Trump’s first presidency, the United Arab Emirates established diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for Israel’s abandoning of a plan to annex the West Bank.
However, most attention has focused in the immediate term on the possible impact of all of this on the current ceasefire in Gaza. Negotiations on the second stage of the ceasefire were due to begin last week. At the same press conference at which Trump unveiled his master plan he stated that he was unsure that the ceasefire would hold, while Binyamin Netanyahu described it as “temporary”, asserting that Israel could not leave Hamas to continue the battle. Trump’s talk of a Gaza empty of Palestinians chimes with the views of the Israeli ultranationalists who prop up Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.
At the very least, outlandish and utterly unacceptable as Trump’s plan may seem, it may succeed in derailing negotiations to bring a long-term end to the conflict in Gaza.
Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East politics in the UCD school of politics and international relations
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