Gaz-a-Largo

At a joint press conference in the White House on 4 February, following an hours’-long meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump took the Gaza bull by the horns and laid out a halcyon—indeed almost messianic—vision for that minuscule territory of only 141 square miles (365 km²) and, by extension, for the entire Middle East.

This was no run-of-the-mill presidential press conference. It was historic—both because of the future it may portend and because of the essential understanding Trump conveyed about the region’s past. But whether Trump’s prescription for a radical remaking of the Gaza Strip along with the rest of the Middle East by dint of American military and financial power will work remains to be seen, given the complex realities on the ground and the divergent interests of a host of regional players. With Netanyahu’s smiling assent, Trump embedded the Gaza solution in a sweeping vision of an Iran defanged of its nuclear project and a Saudi Arabia that has signed on to the Pax Americana and normalised its relations with Israel, a necessary prelude to the definitive acceptance of the Jewish State in the region.

So far, Trump is the only political leader to have publicly pinpointed the basic problem and its possible solution. Currently, the overcrowded Strip is home to 2.2–2.3 million traumatised, radicalised and now mostly homeless Muslim Arabs. Before the war that began in October 2023, the annual natural death rate was 4,000; the annual birth rate was 50,000. Trump proposed that at least 1.8 million of Gaza’s inhabitants be transferred to “other countries” and that the United States “take over” the Strip—by implication, militarily as well as administratively (though his spokesmen subsequently said that Trump did not mean to put US boots on the ground)—and transform it, with the help of America’s Middle Eastern allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, into an economic and tourist hub, a Middle Eastern Riviera. But clearing away the massive ruins and reconstructing Gaza’s infrastructure and housing would probably take many years, perhaps even decades. Plus, it is unclear who Trump thinks would repopulate the reconstructed Strip.

In addition, the idea of American intervention in Gaza is clearly antithetical to Trump’s decade-long isolationist foreign policy posture and his aversion to American military adventurism. Perhaps his narrow victory in the presidential election has gone to his head and changed his view of what America can or should strive for on the global stage. His proposals vis-à-vis Greenland and the Panama Canal suggest as much. Or perhaps Trump was not completely serious and simply intended to prod Israel and his Arab allies to come up with some other formula for the “day after” the war ends. Either way, Trump’s Gaza proposal certainly left journalists at the press conference gaping.

In the weeks before the press conference, the President had repeatedly called for Gaza’s Arabs to be transferred to Jordan and Egypt: two relatively spacious Arab Muslim countries with large empty areas of land. He accompanied this proposal with an implicit threat, noting that both countries are indebted to the United State for the substantial financial and other aid America has provided over the years. But both Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi immediately rejected the idea, a rejection promptly reinforced by a formal declaration by the Arab League. Predictably, Gaza’s rulers, the fundamentalist Hamas—whom Israel has failed to destroy despite fifteen months of continuous aerial and artillery bombardment and a partial conquest of the Strip—also flatly rejected the idea, which they portray as heralding a second Palestinian “Nakba” (catastrophe). (The first Nakba took place during the 1948 War, when two-thirds of the Palestinians, some 700,000 people, became refugees, uprooted from their homes and lands in what became the State of Israel.)

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Like Netanyahu—and like most Israelis and Palestinians —Trump understands that to reconstruct the Strip but leave it under Hamas rule would mean a recurrence of anti-Israeli terrorism and rocketry and, once Hamas have rearmed, the possible recurrence of another mass assault like that of  7 October 2023, on which date 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, were murdered, and a further 250—almost all of whom were civilians, including babies and octogenarians—were abducted to the Gaza Strip.           

The problem of Gaza was created in 1948–1949 by Israel’s founding leader and defence minister, David Ben-Gurion, who oversaw Israel’s military operations in that first Arab–Israeli war. In hindsight, Ben-Gurion made a terrible—though possibly unavoidable—mistake. Over the course of 1948, some 200,000 Arabs were displaced from central and southern Palestine. Israel’s military actively channelled them towards the Strip, where they joined an already 60,000-strong native population to create the overcrowded, impoverished refugee camps that were eventually turned into cinder-block suburban slums thanks to funding from international—mainly Western—charities.

The Strip became a perpetual thorn in Israel’s side, only 45 miles (72 km) from Tel Aviv. The Arab states used the impoverished, stateless refugees and their progeny as a propaganda tool and political battering ram against Israel, which, they said, had driven them from their homes. (They generally neglected to mention that it was the Palestinian Arabs who started the 1948 War). Then, during the 1950s, Gazan refugees—some of whom had been recruited by Egyptian military intelligence following Egypt’s occupation of the Strip in 1948—raided Israel and low-level, tit-for-tat, terrorist–counter-terrorist warfare ensued, eventually resulting in the 1956 Israel–Egypt Sinai War.

With the help of Western funding, the refugee population burgeoned. During the Six Day War of 1967, Israel conquered the Strip, along with the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hamas, the Palestine branch of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, took root in the territory and by the 1990s there were recurrent bouts of terrorism against the Israeli occupation, including sporadic rocketing of Israel itself. In 2005, Israel withdrew from the Strip, while still controlling its borders and air space, and in 2007 Hamas took over, imposed totalitarian theocratic rule over the population, and continued to challenge Israel militarily, challenges that culminated in the 7 October onslaught. Israel’s prolonged subsequent counteroffensive against Hamas has caused some 50,000 deaths, devastated the Strip’s infrastructure, and resulted in the total or partial destruction of around 70 per cent of all housing and the displacement of some 1.9 million Gazans, most of whom were evacuated from the towns in the north to the south of the Strip and ended up living in tents or amid ruins. In January 2025, after months of mediation by the Biden and Trump administrations, Israel and Hamas agreed to a 42-day ceasefire and a staggered hostage–prisoner exchange, which is still ongoing, in which each week Hamas releases three to four hostages, while Israel frees 100–200 Palestinian prisoners from its jails.  

How Trump’s proposal to “take over” the Gaza Strip, move most of its population out, and defang Hamas will dovetail with Hamas’s continued implementation of the ceasefire and hostage–prisoner exchange is unclear. At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump vowed to press for a continuation of the ceasefire beyond 42 days, allowing for the release of all the hostages, dead or alive, and leading to the end of the Gaza War. Both Trump and Netanyahu have said that Hamas will no longer be allowed to rule the Strip and will be disarmed. How exactly that could occur is unclear, given that Hamas is unwilling to disarm and is still in control of the extensive tunnel system they constructed over the past two decades and in possession of a large amount of light weaponry. Will the IDF be allowed to renew its war against Hamas or will the fight be taken up by US Marines, perhaps supported by troops from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority? The IDF command appears to be unhappy with the idea of renewing the costly house-by-house, tunnel-by-tunnel fight in the Strip and I can’t see outside Arab forces joining a fight against Hamas, since they would immediately be deemed Zionist “collaborators.”

Nor is it clear that Gaza’s population, which overwhelmingly backs Hamas, will agree to move to “other countries.” The Nakba of 1948 traumatised the Palestinian, leaving few willing to challenge the concept of “summud” (steadfastness or sticking to the land), even though the portion of Palestine they currently live on is minute and devastated. But perhaps, over the coming months, as life amid the ruins continues to be painful and difficult, some may be persuaded to leave, given adequate financial inducements. But who will agree to absorb them? Some wags have suggested that Greenland’s empty spaces or the Panama Canal Zone—which Trump has recently indicated a wish to annex—could provide possible venues for their absorption.

The future of Gaza will also be impacted by wider, political questions about the future of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the Arab states and most of the West also consider to be “occupied” territory, and about the possibility of a two-state solution. At Tuesday’s press conference, Trump refused to respond to a question about his attitude towards future “sovereignty” over the West Bank, indicating only that his administration may issue a statement on the matter next month. In the past, Trump, like Netanyahu and the Israeli Right in general, has opposed a two-state solution that would involve the establishment of a Palestinian state with the West Bank at its core. Indeed, Israel’s right-wing parties favour formal Israeli annexation of the territory, which contains some 500–700,000 Israeli settlers alongside three million or more Arabs. But despite having been in power for almost two decades, Netanyahu has so far avoided making a move towards annexing the territory—probably fearing Western condemnation and sanctions as well as massive opposition from many of Israel’s Jews as well as from the country’s two-million strong Arab minority, who represent 21–22 percent of Israel’s citizenry. Annexation would likely mean that Israel would have to absorb the West Bank’s Arab population, unless they somehow agreed to leave.

But a few days before the press conference, Trump gave a clear indication of where he stands on the two-state issue. Confronting reporters from behind a large, clear desk, Trump brandished a pen and said: “This desktop is the Middle East; this pen is Israel/Palestine, a minute piece of territory. Can it really be divided into and host two states?”  

The problem is that neither the Arabs of the West Bank nor the 400,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem want to be governed by Israel. A lethal demonstration of this was provided hours after the Trump–Netanyahu press conference when a lone Arab gunman surprised and attacked a small IDF outpost near Tubas in the northern West Bank, killing two IDF reservists (aged 39 and 43) and wounding another eight before he himself was killed. Although Israel blanketed the West Bank with dozens of IDF battalions following the events of 7 October and is currently mounting a major anti-terrorist operation in the northern West Bank, Israeli security officers have described the area as “seething” and a potential “powder keg.”

Talk of scotching the idea of a two-state solution has also riled the surrounding Arab states. The main problem is Saudi Arabia, whose foreign ministry has publicly declared that there can be no “normalisation” of relations with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state. This was a key clause in the two-state Saudi peace plan announced back in 2002 and subsequently endorsed by the Arab League. At the recent press conference, Trump seemed to be implying that the Saudis could be persuaded to drop their insistence on Palestinian statehood and make do with a vague promise of a “road map to Palestinian statehood” rather than the actual establishment of a Palestinian state.

Trump knows that—setting the Palestinian issue aside—the Saudis are extremely keen on signing a defence pact with Washington, which will protect them from possible attacks by Iran like those that occurred back in September 2019, when salvos of Iranian missiles and drones destroyed major Saudi oil installations. On that occasion, the Trump administration did nothing and the Saudis themselves failed to retaliate. The Saudis also hope the United States will provide them with the nuclear infrastructure essential to the eventual development of a nuclear deterrent that could counter Iran’s potential nuclear weaponry.

Over the decades, Netanyahu has inveighed against Iran’s nuclear weapons program in speech after speech. Under his direction, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, has periodically assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, devastated rocket factories and laboratories, and damaged Iran’s uranium enrichment plants. But these measures have failed to stop the Iranians, and Netanyahu has so far avoided sending the Israeli air force to bomb the Iranian installations, which are dispersed around Iran and some of which are buried deep underground, making them almost invulnerable to aerial assault. It appears that Israel’s military chiefs have told Netanyahu that Israel is incapable of completely halting the Iranian nuclear project, unless it uses its own nuclear arsenal and that a country as small as Israel might be unable to sustain a full scale, open-ended war with Iran, whose population is ten times larger than Israel’s and whose territory is much more extensive.

Netanyahu hoped that Washington, with its much more powerful military, would do the job, given that successive American presidents have understood that Iran represents a threat to American interests and to Western interests more generally, and not merely to the Jewish state. But successive American presidents have always demurred, especially after suffering defeats or at least lack of success in two protracted Middle Eastern wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the re-election of Trump, Netanyahu seems to have hoped that Washington would act at last. But during his first presidency, Trump limited himself to pulling America out of the 2015 European–UN–US–Iran nuclear deal, at Israel’s urging, thereby temporarily hindering Iran’s push for the bomb. Since then, despite Trump-directed economic sanctions and the impoverishment of Iran, Tehran has considerably increased its stockpile of enriched uranium, which it enriched to 60 percent over the Biden years—not far short of the 90 percent plus needed for bomb-making. Iran has also forged ahead with the production of medium and long-range rockets, which can reach targets “anywhere in the Middle East,” as Tehran usually phrases it. Most experts believe that Iran can carry out the uranium enrichment to 90 plus percent in a matter of weeks if not days but will require one-to-two years to produce nuclear warheads it can fit onto its rockets.

Over the course of the current Gaza war, Iran has used its proxies—the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraqi militias—to shower Israel with rockets and drones. It has also attacked Israel directly twice, though the rockets and drones launched from Iranian soil caused little damage to the Jewish state, whose defences were bolstered by American and British anti-missile missile batteries. In October 2024, Israel retaliated with successful air strikes against Iranian air defences and rocket-production facilities and stockpiles. Many Israelis hoped that in the interim between November 2024’s US presidential elections and Trump’s assumption of office in January 2025, Netanyahu would send the Israel Air Force to destroy what it could of Iran’s nuclear facilities. But he didn’t—perhaps hoping that Trump himself, once in office, would send in the American military to do the job.

But during Tuesday’s press conference, Trump made it clear that he intends to take the economic and political path against Iran rather than the military option. Netanyahu appeared to go along with this, though he could not hide his obvious displeasure. Observers in Israel have noted that, under the circumstances and given Israel’s military, financial, and political dependence on Washington, Israel has no option but to give the Trump strategy time to take effect. Meanwhile, Trump has announced a substantial tightening of economic and other sanctions against Iran, especially that country’s oil exports, the basis of the Iranian economy to place “maximum pressure” on the country, as Trump put it. The President hopes that the threat or imposition of sanctions will persuade Teheran to halt the push toward nuclear weaponry. Netanyahu probably believes that if the sanctions don’t do the trick, Trump may yet be persuaded to resort to the military option. After all, Trump himself has frequently declared that he will not allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons.

Last week, The New York Times reported—in an article perhaps planted by Israel—that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls the country’s nuclear and security policy, under the auspices of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has secretly started working on a plan to speed up the effort to produce nuclear bombs, however primitive, perhaps as a way to deter a possible American or Israeli air assault.              

To judge from the press conference, Trump and Netanyahu are now firm friends and the US leader has finally forgiven the Israeli PM for congratulating Joe Biden on winning the 2020 Presidential elections. Trump announced that he would be restarting the shipments of 500- and 2,000-pound (227- and 907-kilogramme) bombs and 155 mm artillery shells, which Biden temporarily halted a few months ago. Netanyahu, for his part, hailed Trump as “the greatest friend Israel ever had” and praised his Gaza proposals: “This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.”