The Provocative Idea
In the hours leading up to President Donald Trump’s prime-time press conference Tuesday, his team knew what was coming. He had been discussing an idea for months — a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip — with advisers, some of whom saw it as a negotiating ploy to give Israeli leaders more leverage over Hamas as they try to turn a fragile cease-fire into a lasting peace.
But even if advisers were aware of the provocation, it was clear Wednesday that they did little to prepare the rest of the world for Trump’s pitch to relocate nearly 2 million Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza so the U.S. could assert ownership of the area and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Controversy and Backlash
Amid strong pushback from Arab allies in the Middle East and skepticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the White House reframed Trump’s proposal Wednesday as a serious attempt to spark real and lasting diplomacy. But they walked back many of the details Trump laid out, casting his “takeover” instead as an opening salvo in what they view as an ongoing negotiation over the fate of Gaza and its residents.
So far, Arab allies have not viewed Trump’s proposal as constructive. They’ve panned it.
International Response
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry issued a statement in the middle of the night reaffirming its “complete rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, annexation of Palestinian lands or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land.”
According to a report from Jordan’s state news agency, Jordanian King Abdullah told Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, that he rejects “any attempts to annex lands and displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank” and stressed “the need to establish the Palestinians on their land.”
Criticism and Concerns
American human rights activists, foreign policy hands, and Arab Americans were also appalled at what they see as an attempt by Trump to market an ethnic cleansing strategy as a redevelopment strategy. Former GOP lawmaker Justin Amash, who is of Palestinian descent, blasted the proposal on social media.
But that backlash did not seem to deter the White House.
Future Implications
Trump’s comments about the U.S. taking over Gaza are hardly an outlier. He has also been demanding to buy Greenland from Denmark and to “take back” the Panama Canal from Panama. In remarks that received little attention, he teased his expansionist aims in his inaugural address that described an America that “will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
If Trump’s plans have been hiding in plain sight, most Republican allies in Congress said on Wednesday that they missed the signals.
