𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗔𝗡𝗔𝗗𝗔, 𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗡 𝗣𝗔𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗔, 𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗡 𝗚𝗥𝗘𝗘𝗡𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗗. . . 𝗡𝗢𝗪 𝗚𝗔𝗭𝗔. . .𝗜𝗦 𝗧𝗥𝗨𝗠𝗣 𝗧𝗥𝗬𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢 𝗧𝗔𝗞𝗘 𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗥 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗛𝗢𝗟𝗘 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗????

 

Netanyahu/Trump

                                                 

by Peter Baker, New York Times

(Feb.5, 2025) Once a critic of nation building, the president now envisions taking over a Middle East enclave, driving out its Palestinian population and transforming it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.

After President Trump said in a White House news conference that the United States would take over Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that was worth “pursuing,” without explicitly endorsing the idea.

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.

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

But now in his sequel term in the White House, Mr. Trump is advancing ever-more brazen ideas about redrawing the map of the world in the tradition of 19th-century imperialism. First there was buying Greenland, then annexing Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And now he envisions taking over a devastated war zone in the Middle East that no other American president would want.

Never mind that he could name no legal authority that would permit the United States to unilaterally assert control over someone else’s territory or that the forcible removal of an entire population would be a violation of international law. Never mind that resettling two  million Palestinians would be a gargantuan logistical and financial challenge, not to mention politically explosive. Never mind that it would surely require many thousands of U.S. troops and possibly trigger more violent conflict.

Mr. Trump’s idea would be the most expansive commitment of American might and treasure in the Middle East since the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq two decades ago. And it would be a jaw-dropping reversal for a president who first ran for office in 2016 decrying nation-building and vowing to extract the United States out of the Middle East.

“This is literally the most incomprehensible policy proposal I have ever heard from an American president,” said Andrew Miller, a former Middle East policy adviser under Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Mr. Trump insisted that he was serious even as many wondered if that was possible. “This was not a decision made lightly,” he said. Yet it seemed so fanciful, so devoid of details, so in conflict with history that it was hard to judge at face value.

Indeed, it seemed to be an idea that grew by the hour as the day went on. In the morning, before Mr. Netanyahu arrived at the White House to meet with Mr. Trump, aides to the president told reporters that it would take 15 years or more to rebuild Gaza after the destructive war between Israel and Hamas and that it would require working with partners in the region to find Palestinians a place to live temporarily.

By the afternoon, as he signed some executive orders, Mr. Trump told reporters that Palestinians would have “no alternative” but to move out of Gaza because it was just “a demolition site.” A little later, he welcomed Mr. Netanyahu to the Oval Office and went even further, saying he wanted “all of them” to leave and that Gazans should “be thrilled” to live someplace better that he expected Egypt and Jordan to provide.

Then at a formal news conference with Mr. Netanyahu in the East Room on Tuesday evening, he took it the final step, declaring not just that Palestinians should leave but that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip” and rebuild it into a prosperous economic destination.

This was not a temporary takeover, but “a long-term ownership position” and he made clear that he had no intention of turning Gaza back over to the Palestinians but would make it a place “not for a specific group of people but for everybody.”

What that meant exactly, he did not say. Nor did he say how this would be accomplished. Even he seemed to grasp how wild the whole thing sounded. “I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he said at one point. “But the Riviera of the Middle East!”

Others saw nothing cute or wise about what amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name,” as Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, put it.

“The notion that the United States is going to take over Gaza, including with the deployment of U.S. troops, isn’t just extreme, it’s completely detached from reality,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “In what world is this happening?”

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “truly bizarre and incoherent,” raising more questions than answers.

“Is he talking in geopolitical terms, or does he simply see Gaza as a massive beachfront development project?” Mr. Elgindy asked. “And for whose benefit? Certainly not Palestinians, who are to be ‘relocated’ en masse. Will the U.S. be the new occupier in Gaza, replacing the Israelis? What U.S. interest could this possibly serve?”

Mr. Trump was not wrong to say that Gaza is “a hellhole” after more than a year of war triggered by the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli bombs and rockets have leveled most of its buildings and destroyed much of the infrastructure necessary to sustain a large population. No one else has come up with any concrete, well-developed ideas about how to rebuild Gaza or offered tangible financial commitments to do so.

It was not clear if Mr. Netanyahu expected Mr. Trump’s plan, but grinned with satisfaction when the president talked about permanently clearing Gaza out of all Palestinians, an action that Israel has not dared itself. After Mr. Trump added that the United States would take over Gaza itself, the Israeli leader said that the proposal was “something that could change history” and that it was worth “pursuing this avenue,” without explicitly endorsing the idea.

Some Israel supporters were more effusive, seeing it as a way to secure the country’s western flank after years of attacks from Gaza.

“Trump’s proposed USA takeover of the Gaza Strip may sound out of the box,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, wrote on social media, “but it is brilliant, historic and the only idea I have heard in 50 years that has a chance of bringing security, peace and prosperity to this troubled region.”

In a reference to Mr. Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Friedman added cheekily, “Mar-a-Gaza or Gaz-a-Lago?”

Mort Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s announcement “is an extraordinary declaration that could assure the end of the Islamic-Arab terrorist group Hamas, and secure southern Israel after decades of terrorist attacks and missile launches from Hamas in Gaza. It will also be a major step towards a real peace in the region.”

In Mr. Trump’s telling, the whole idea of removing a population of people and taking over foreign territory sounded as much like a real estate deal like the kind he has pursued in a lifetime as a developer.

He seemed to be picking up an idea floated last year by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who noted in an interview that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and suggested Israel “move the people out and then clean it up.” But Mr. Kushner did not seem to envision forcing Palestinians out permanently or an American takeover.

The notion of taking ownership of Gaza would insert the United States into the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that presidents going back to Harry S. Truman have tried to avoid. The United States has long provided Israel with arms, backed it diplomatically and tried to broker peace deals. Several hundred U.S. troops have served as peacekeepers in the Sinai Peninsula for more than four decades, and Mr. Biden twice ordered U.S. air and sea forces to defend Israel last year against Iranian missile attacks.

But American presidents have shied away from deploying the sort of large force of U.S. ground troops in Israel or the Palestinian territories that would presumably be required to take and hold Gaza. Even last year when the U.S. military erected a temporary floating pier to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza, the Biden administration made sure that U.S. troops did not go ashore.

Mr. Miller pointed out that the cost of what Mr. Trump seemed to envision “would make the $40 billion foreign assistance budget that Trump and Elon Musk call a waste look like a rounding error.”

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Trump’s Gaza proposal fundamentally contradicted his own aversion to nation building and could undermine his desire to broker a deal with Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. It would also provide Russia and China “a green light to take over territory as they see fit,” he said.

But he added that “it’s safe to say it can’t happen,” at least as Mr. Trump described his plan. Instead, Mr. Miller said, it was a distraction from the rest of the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu, who goes by the nickname Bibi, who came under no real public pressure to extend the cease-fire deal that took effect last month, leaving him a lot of latitude about how to proceed.

“All of the hoopla on the U.S. taking over Gaza caused us to miss the real story from the meeting,” said Mr. Miller. “Bibi leaves the White House among the happiest humans on the planet. If there ever was a demonstration of no daylight between Israel and the U.S., this was it.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth  presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.