President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the Gaza Strip, remove its 2 million Palestinians and turn the coastal desert strip into some sort of Club Med proves only one thing: how short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking.
I can say with confidence that Trump’s proposal is the single most idiotic and dangerous Middle East “peace” initiative ever put out by an American president.
Still, I’m not sure what is more frightening: Trump’s Gaza proposal, which seems to change by the day, or the speed with which his aides and Cabinet members — almost none of whom were even briefed on it in advance — nodded their approval to the idea like a collection of bobblehead dolls.
Pay attention, ladies and gentlemen: This is not just about the Middle East. This is also a microcosm of the problem we now face as a country. In his first term, Trump was surrounded by buffers: aides, Cabinet secretaries and generals who deflected and restrained his worst impulses many times.
Now Trump is surrounded only by amplifiers: aides, Cabinet secretaries, senators and House members who live in fear of his wrath or of being set upon by online mobs unleashed by his enforcer, Elon Musk, should they step out of line.
This combination of Trump unleashed, Musk unrestrained and much of the government and the business establishment living in fear of being tweeted about by either man is a recipe for chaos at home and abroad. Trump is operating more like the Godfather than the president: “Nice little territory you have there (Greenland, Panama, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt) — be a shame if anything bad happened to it....”
That may work in the movies, but in real life, if the Trump administration actually tries to force Jordan and Egypt or any other Arab state to accept the Palestinians living in Gaza — and have the Israeli army round them up and deliver them, since Trump has said the transfer would not involve US troops and not cost American taxpayers a dime — it will destabilise the demographic balance in Jordan between East Bankers and Palestinians, destabilise Egypt and destabilise Israel.
It would be the single greatest gift Trump could give to Iran to make a comeback in the Middle East by embarrassing all the pro-American Sunni regimes. US companies like McDonald’s and Starbucks, which have already faced boycotts as a result of America arming Israel in the Gaza war, would get hammered even harder.
Coming back from October 7 to any kind of peace process will not be easy, but the notion that everything has been tried and the only option left is ethnic cleansing is wrong — but that is what the Israeli right and Hamas want everyone to believe.
One of the biggest problems with this Trump team is that its whole view of the Middle East is filtered through the lens of the Israeli far right and evangelical Christians. To the extent that the Trump people know the Arab world, it is through the Persian Gulf investment community. So they are complete and total suckers for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
If Trump really wants to make a radical departure and take advantage of some of the fear he instils in people, it is not with this juvenile Mar-a-Gaza proposal. It would be to publicly call out all the parties and challenge each of them to actually, in good faith, do the hard stuff required to dig out of this hellhole.
It would be to tell the Palestinian Authority that if it wants to govern Gaza it needs to appoint a new, non-corrupt leader and a new, effective prime minister — someone like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — immediately. This reformed Palestinian Authority then needs to create a technocratic Cabinet to invite an Arab peacekeeping force to take over Gaza from Israel, finish the eviction of the Hamas leadership and solicit the international assistance needed to rebuild Gaza. That Arab force would also have to commit to training up a Palestinian Authority security force so that it could eventually govern Gaza on its own, with Arab help.
And it would be to tell Netanyahu that as soon as the Arab peacekeeping force is up and running, Gaza will be divided into Area A and Area B. The Palestinian Authority and the Arab peacekeeping force will govern Area A — all the population centres — and the Israeli army can stay on the whole perimeter — Area B — for several years. After that, Palestinians will hold elections in the West Bank and Gaza and negotiate a two-state solution with Israel for both territories.
President Trump, I repeat: There is a real case for you to make for fresh thinking about this problem. But your plan for Trump Gaza is not fresh thinking. It is fresh riffing. It is loopy concepts of a peace plan tossed out without vetting by aides or allies, the details of which you change every day, forcing your bobblehead aides to nod vigorously — without any regard for long-term US interests or their own credibility. It is a plan that will love Israel to death, revive Iran to life and destabilise every American friend.
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