January 27, 2025 - 7:15pm
Amid his recent flurry of domestic executive orders, Donald Trump has also weighed in on the Israel-Palestine conflict by proposing to “clean out” Gaza, with its Palestinian population to be resettled in Egypt and Jordan.
At first glance, this looks to be a non-starter, given the opposition of the Palestinians themselves, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and pretty much everyone else in the region. It also contrasts with the situation on the ground, where displaced Palestinians are now returning en masse to their homes in the north of the Strip — a blow to the Israeli extremists who want to recolonise the area.
It’s also the case that Trump’s foreign policy is capricious. At one point during his first presidency, he looked set to go to war with Iran, with Tehran hawk John Bolton installed as his national security advisor. But Bolton lasted only 16 months before he was cast out, the subject of jokes from Trump that he wanted to nuke as many countries as possible.
Yet if Trump’s foreign policy during his first term was inconsistent, there have always been some constants. Firstly, he has no time for the “grown-ups in the room” orthodoxy which laments that some situations are just intractably complicated and that threats of force are unnecessary in global politics. With only four years in office, he may consider it time to go for the nuclear option of removing the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and setting up a greater Israel from the River to the Sea, as a way of finally “solving” the problem of the Middle East. That he has also appointed and promoted committed Zionists such as his son-in-law and advisor on the Middle East Jared Kushner, his new ambassador to the United Nations Elise Stefanik, and his incoming ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, suggests this approach is likely.
Trump is also consistently transactional, with his career to date — from New York real estate to national politics — teaching him that, ultimately, everyone can be bought. This is what led him to the Abraham Accords of 2020, which brought the normalisation of relations between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and other countries in the region. In his view, Egypt and Jordan, along with the Saudis and the Arab world, have their price too.
So there is a good chance that Trump’s comments about “cleaning out” Gaza are not just a case of thinking out loud, nor a deliberately provocative statement to be denied later, but instead the opening salvo in a new policy. If this is the case, then the ructions which have convulsed the Middle East in the past few years might later be seen as the calm before the storm. Though Israel could, with tremendous bloodshed, drive Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan, it cannot force those governments to accept them.
Trump might believe that he can persuade the Arab nations with trade deals, investment, and defence pacts. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has already tried to ingratiate himself with Trump, promising to invest $600 billion in the US over the next four years. If Arab leaders feel they can appropriately distance themselves from the policy — positioning themselves as reluctantly accepting and rehoming the Palestinians expelled by Israel — so as not to suffer too much domestic blowback, then maybe they might tacitly accede.
This is hard to envisage, as is Trump finding enough leverage with the Arab nations to push it through. Given that Palestinian opinion, from the leaderships of Fatah and Hamas down to street-level, is fundamentally opposed to resettlement, it would not involve a peaceful process but instead tremendous violence on behalf of the Israeli military forces and settler populations in the West Bank. If we’ve learnt anything in the past eight years, though, it’s that Trump is able to pull off unexpected victories.
David Swift is a historian and author. His next book, Scouse Republic, is available to pre-order now.
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SubscribeThe author takes it for granted that moving Gazans to neighboring countries would inevitably require “tremendous bloodshed”. But an interesting question that is not asked is, what would the Gazan civilians prefer? (the author seems to think that what their leaders declare is dispositive, but these are the same leaders that sacrificed the regular Gazans on the altar of their war against Israel, and thus, do not represent these Gazans’ best interests). The fact is that at least 100,000 Gazans paid huge bribes to cross the Rafah crossing into Egypt when they still could.
Another interesting question is, since the majority of Gazans consider themselves refugees and, accordingly, receive services and stipends from the UN’s UNRWA, why would it be worse for them to be refugees in functioning Arab countries rather than among the ruins of the Gaza strip?
It would seem that this author is representative of those (many) that do not care about Palestinians at all, but are only interested in letting the “Palestinian problem” fester as a thorn in Israel’s side, no matter the cost to individual Palestinian civilians (and I say this as a proponent in theory of the “two-state solution”, but one who realizes that in practice you need two to tango).
If the people of the Gaza Strip want to remain it is because they favour a one state solution (a post apartheid state with equal rights for all to be known as Israel/Palestine) and believe, as I do, that it will happen. On the other hand, if they don’t believe it will happen, I imagine they would prefer to live anywhere (but especially N. America, S. America, Europe, S. Africa and Australia/NZ) rather than in the ruins of the Gaza Strip.
Probably not South Africa!
This may be true in your alternative universe. In the real universe, the Arab minority in Israel currently enjoys equal rights, whereas in the one-state solution that the Palestinians favor, with Jews becoming again a minority at the mercy of the Arab majority, apartheid would be the more benign outcome. The more likely outcome would be genocide.
Are you smoking something v strong? When were you last there? The constant murders would be intolerable for the Jews … remember the multiple suicide bombs on busses after Gaza was given to them that led to the wall being built …. They want all the Jews dead. It’s in their manifesto … they’re not kidding …. They have to go.
It’s a threat. In my mind, they should have been thus threatened a long time ago. Un pores money into Gaza and what does the Hamas government do? Build a citadel to martyr your population and then attack Israel.
Now it’s fair warning. Live in peace or get the boot.
You can sell it to the wokestasis by confirming all this global money could be used to fight climate change.
Hamas is a direct product of Israeli aggression. If you steal people’s land, terrorize and persecute them for decades, eventually they start to become violence. Netanyahu’s psychotic regime loves Hamas because they give him the chance to commit ethnic cleansing and steal more land.
Hamas owns their own behaviour. And if they don’t own it then for the good of everyone involved they need to have a different solution.
So I guess you support a novel solution?
I don’t support Hamas, and neither do I support solutions which will increase Hamas’s numbers exponentially far into the future.
This proposed ‘novel solution’ is ethnic cleansing. It’s dead on arrival anyway. Back to the drawing board…
Just cut supports and it would resolve itself. My concern is that the seeds for the next martyrdom operation is not planted. Btw, trump may think that this is a gordian knot opportunity.
I think Israel since its beginning was about ethnic cleansing. It successfully drove away a large population and I don’t see why couldn’t do it again. So in what sense it wouldn’t solve the Palestinian “problem”? Because it would destabilize the receiving countries? Europe has been accepting millions of people of radically different culture and no language annually and still stands somehow, and Arab countries would receive the people of the same culture, religion and language. It would surely bury the Palestinian dream but as a solution for increased stability in the region it could work
If, somehow, a two-state solution were found which resulted in a Palestinian West Bank and Palestinian Gaza, wouldn’t this likely end up like East & West Pakistan did? Would a two-state solution end up being a three-state solution?
Maybe. So perhaps we need a one-state solution: Palestine. Jews could live under Palestinian rule and protection.
Your one state solution is basically the death warrant to eight million Israeli Jews. No thanks.
There is only one aim for the Palestinian political leadership of whatever hue and that is the destruction of the Jewish State and the annihilation of its Jewish population. All the talk about Palestinian national aspirations is just baloney.
So when the Muslims (Ottoman Empire) ruled the holy land for 4 centuries and it was an exemplary peaceful, secure place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims got along… that’s just edited out of this revisionist history by the Israel lobby where anything less than the total genocide of Palestinians from ‘Israel’ is antisemitism(!) and speaking out against Likud party psychopaths is “calling for the death of 8 millions jews” Lmao. You’ve all been had!
Are you really so ignorant? Or just really dishonest. In no part of Muslim ruled lands did Christians and Jews live in harmony as equals with Muslims. Not in the numerous caliphates of the Middle East, nor Spain nor the Ottoman Empire. They were dhimmis- protected peoples where the “protection ” was like that offered by Al Capone- pay up or something nasty will happen to you. Alongside the extortion of the jizya which everybody had to cough up at the price of collective punishment for not complying there were a whole pile of rules designed to constantly enforce the status of second class citizens. No riding horses, no bearing arms,special clothing to mark them out as non Muslims , no loud singing of hymns or other manifestations of their religion that might irritate the first class citizens. But I’m sure you know all this. I am sure you also know that the main support for Likud originally came from those Jews who had been expelled from or fled MENA countries with not much more than the clothes on their backs and had far more recent and bitter memories of how Muslims treated Jews when “protecting ” them than their secular left wing Ashkenazi compatriots.
So back to dhimmi status for the Jews eh? Just like in the good old days.
Hamas is a direct product of Islam. Islam is a direct product of a childish 7c death cult that values violence, control pride and ego over diplomacy peace and compromise. ISIS wasn’t the product of the Iraqi government was it?
When Jared Kushner headed off to the Middle East there was much tittering about how deeply out of his depth he was. Of course the Abraham Accords were a great success. Trumps great strength is that neither he nor his supporters care what NGOs, the UN or university professors have to say about him or his policies. There is no reason why the neighbouring Arab countries can’t solve the Palestinian ‘problem’. They just don’t want to. Trump can credibly say that either you do it with me – or I will do it on my own. He has already declared that foreign students in the US that support Hamas and other terrorist groups will be deported. So at the very least there would be less sound and fury on university campuses.
No matter what horrendous schemes the Israelis and their globalist friends conjure up,
No matter how horrific their war crimes,
No matter how many children they kill, hospitals they bomb, or prisoners they gang rape,
No matter how much AIPAC controls the flow of information through big tech,
No matter how many western politicians are bought off/blackmailed,
No matter what,
Israel will lose and the Palestinians will triumph. Whether its it one year, or ten, or a hundred, Palestine will be free.
Martyrdom is your super power?
I believe it means winning by demographics.
They could help their cause if they don’t decide to martyr 50k of their population.
May I ask why? Replace Palestinians with Native Americans and say it again. Who said that violence is not effective? The Bible/ Quran would disagree. ( oh btw I don’t think that Israel is remotely just and fair towards Palestinians)
Palestinians haven’t given them an opportunity.
Plasticine is free. It’s called Israel. It’s the Jews homeland.
It’s hard to see how pushing Gazans into Egypt and Jordan even temporarily during reconstruction will be a fair and just solution. That said, Hamas has clearly not been defeated but is in charge in Gaza, so moving forward with reconstruction now will make the Gazan war mostly meaningless. It’s conundrumous.
Israel shows no signs of a serious effort to create a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. It treats the Palestinians like interlopers in their own land, killing and persecuting them to drive them out. That’s a national disgrace, but in the face of Palestinian barbarism like the October 7 attack, an understandable stance.
I would like to see Israel come off of its war stance in Gaza and seriously work with Gazans to install a new government and rebuild the cities that Israel destroyed. That Israel refuses is a shame and a disgrace. They are trying to steal land that is not theirs.
I’m afraid “fair and just” remained in the past. We’re deciding what would increase stability in the region.
We’re longgggg past fair and just. They tried that and they kept killing the Jews so there can be no more mixing.
It’s a good negotiating position, and not unreasonable. Israel, having vanquished Hezbollah and most of Hamas, having silenced Iran, cannot be expected to continue with this psychopathic death cult living on its flanks. Gaza needs an ultimatum: live in peace with Israel or be expelled into the Sinai. I like it. Your move, Hamas.
“Though Israel could, with tremendous bloodshed, drive Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan, it cannot force those governments to accept them“. The idea becomes particularly difficult when you realize that the Egyptians and the Jordanians know exactly what the Palestinians are like.
The premise of this article is absurd. Neither the Israeli nor US public would countenance the forced ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
They can do it but they’ll have to pay for it. Pay Egypt and Jordan of course, but Saudi and Qatar to oil the diplomatic wheels. Most of Gaza is destroyed so that does look like a possibility. If the Palestinians agree then they could have their little state in the West Bank. But they won’t, they just want eternal war.
Nobody else on earth gets to enjoy permanent refugee status with a bottomless pit of UN and other largesse. It is time the donors ensured the cash was spent purely on humanitarian things like medical care and food. Hamas spending it all on rockets and tunnels cannot be allowed to continue.
But it will unless Trump fixes it.
Probably just a ploy by Trump, but it has the merit of demonstrating that none of the Arab states in the region actually want anything to do with the Palestinians, who they just see as trouble.
Although the idea may be tempting, it wouldn’t be the first time that Palestinians have lived in Jordan or Egypt.
They have also been a substantial minority in Kuwait and also lived in Libya.
All these countries were destabilised them and threw them out.
Why would they be willing to do it again? The West will get bored and go on to the next cause, leaving the problem with the host country.
How is the Proposed Ben Gurion Canal Tied to Israel’s Gaza Invasion?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/16/how-is-the-proposed-ben-gurion-canal-tied-to-israels-gaza-invasion/
In the past several years, interest has revived in the Ben Gurion Canal, a proposed alternative to the Suez Canal named after Israel’s founding father running through Israel close to Gaza. Creating an incentive for removal of Palestinians from Gaza, particularly the north end, it has raised suspicions that Israel had foreknowledge of Hamas’ October 7 attacks and let them happen.
…
Supply side reforms of the global transportation network.
This just in: The Middle East is already divided and has been dramatically so for quite some time.
‘ There is enough oil money in the Arab nations to give every refugee a hotel suite with 24 hour room service. Instead far too many have been obliged to stay in refugee camps that are really display cases, so that they can testify with their desperation to Jewish inhumanity’
Quoted from Clive James 20 years ago, but still true.
I interpret Trump’s comments on cleaning out Gaza differently. In the context of what he was saying, the point he was making is that Gaza is destroyed. It is a demolition zone. We need to have a place to re-locate Gazan’s while the place is rebuilt – including all the infrastructure to service a population of 2 million. All we have heard about for over a year is that all the hospitals are destroyed, there is no potable water, no sewer system, a country on the verge of famine. Increasing the number of aid trucks during the cease-fire is not going to solve these problems.
I think the idea of relocating groups of people from their land to another country simply because they share lineage is very interesting. It’s equivalent to saying that Americans should be moved back to England—it doesn’t work. However, Israel and America seem to believe they can relocate Gaza instantly; all they have to do is pick up the people and move them to Egypt or Jordan.
What they fail to foresee—and I have said this before—is that when Palestinians are forced to move to another country, Israel loses control over them. Once they settle elsewhere, nothing stops them from becoming part of that country’s military. In the future, they could even develop nuclear capabilities. Essentially, this relocation doesn’t solve Israel’s problem; it simply shifts the issue beyond Israel’s control to another nation, where it can no longer be managed. These displaced people could form an army and eventually build nuclear weapons. There are already significant Palestinians in Egypt and Jordan; hence their hesitation to increase a new faction.
The reason Egypt and Jordan do not pursue nuclear weapons today is that they are following international nuclear regulations. However, if we start disregarding borders and forcibly relocating populations, those rules could collapse. Without rules, any country could develop nuclear weapons, leading to a situation where, in war, everyone is equal in destruction.
What we don’t often discuss is what happens to these displaced people once they arrive in a new country. For example, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has ancestry from Lebanon. If you calculate how long it took his family to integrate and rise to political leadership, it would take roughly the same amount of time for a Palestinian to become the leader of Egypt or Jordan, potentially with the intent of building an army against Israel.
This is not a viable long-term solution. A much better approach would be to improve the quality of life for Palestinians so they have reasons not to engage in war. The United Nations should step in, take control of Gaza and the West Bank, remove Israeli occupation, and establish a real economic system for Palestinians. That would be a far more effective and sustainable solution.
This is a short term solution.
Trump (and Kushner) don’t want all of Gaza. Just 6-7 km of the north-western coastal strip which they would like to annex into Israel and build hotels and condos etc.
Jared Kushner says Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’ | Jared Kushner | The Guardian
> Firstly, he has no time for the “grown-ups in the room” orthodoxy which laments that some situations are just intractably complicated and that threats of force are unnecessary in global politics.
Oh you mean like when the adults in the room said that Russia wasn’t an aggressive dictatorship and would never attack Ukraine?
Or was it when the adults said the Israelis should have a “proportional response” to the Palestinians going into Israel to massacre and rape civilians, including children?
Seems the grown ups in the room aren’t all that wise.
Move Israel to Texas. Shut the door on the entire middle east and throw away the key.
I think the way these people work is to say extreme things and then compromise at the last minute though even hinting at it is wrong. Maybe the tactic will work. I’m hope is for peace and coexistence.
“… this looks to be a non-starter, given the opposition of the Palestinians themselves, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and pretty much everyone else in the region.
In all the decades of conflict involving Muslims in Europe (e.g. Bosnia) and the Middle East, when has any Muslim nation voluntarily offered large-scale sanctuary to refugees and those of its religious affiliates affected by the ravages of war? Virtually non!
Ask: why have Muslim refugees fled in their tens of millions to Wester European Christian nations, rather than to Muslim nation closer to home?
Quod erat demonstrandum!
The Israelis tried by moving all the Jews out of Gaza in 2005 as a sign of good will. The Palestinians then voted Hamas into power who promptly killed all their political rivals.
There is no future for Palestinians in Gaza. The next time Oct 7th happens, and it will, we will see what genocide really means. It would be far better to move them to the Sinai. All they want is for all the Jews to die. That’s not a sensible political negotiating stance.
They’ve been offered so much including in 1939 the WHOLE of Israel with no Jewish state! The idiots turned it down. Any concession is seen as weakness. Now the Jews have had enough. No one wants a two state solution. Move them!
The babble of ordinary people is well intended, but rarely helps. I suspect one strong person is best suited to make decisions. “It’s easier to find one good man, than many” (Dio Cassius).