I guess I spoke too soon. O me of little faith!
It’s been my contention for some time that the main goal of Israel in its response to the 7 October attacks has been, and always was, to displace the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. All of them. For good.
Let’s call it an “ultimate solution” to the Palestinian problem, after 70+ years of hideous, seemingly never-ending rounds of tit for tat that achieve basically nothing.
I was saying this way back in November 2023, within weeks of Israel’s first stunning retaliation. The signs were there. I won’t run over all of them again, but they include the fact that senior Israeli politicians were saying they wanted the Gazans gone—people like hardliner Belal Smotrich, Ram Ben Barak and Danny Danon—and they were using barely coded or even open language to say it. Where Smotrich said early in the conflict, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba”—a reference to the “Calamity” (“Nakba”) for the Palestinian people that was the foundation of Israel—Ben Barak and Danon wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and said, quite plainly, “We need to expel the Gazans and send them to Europe: nothing else will work.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did nothing to reprove these people, either. Instead, he told them to be careful not to give too much away.
The months rolled by and the forced exodus still hadn’t happened, but then, just a few weeks ago, President Trump piped up and said, “You know what, let’s get all the Gazans out of Gaza—maybe send them to Egypt or Jordan or both—and rebuild the whole Strip as a plush Trump resort.” The Israelis agreed, and it seemed like, yes, the Gaza Nakba really was going to happen.
With Trump behind the plan, it would be a fait accompli. The Israelis didn’t need anybody else’s support.
I don’t personally have any stake in the future of the Palestinians—they’re just not my problem—but the Gaza Nakba plan would make them my problem, whether I like it or not. Egypt and Jordan would not take the Gazans, and even if they did, the Gazans wouldn’t want to stay in those countries in tent cities in the desert—so large numbers of them would end up in Europe, of course, which would be a disaster. A foreseeable disaster, and frankly it made me very angry that President Trump either didn’t foresee it or did and simply didn’t care.
In an otherwise grade A (maybe A-) four weeks as President for the second time, Trump’s support for Israeli’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians threatened to drag his score down at least a grade or two.
Now, though, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think the Gaza Nakba is going to happen. It seems Trump’s intervention was exactly what some had been suggesting it was: a characteristically bold intervention, bordering on the reckless, but designed to shock the other parties into meaningful negotiation, in the hope of reaching a more reasonable compromise.
It’s not like he hasn’t done this before. In fact, he’s made an entire career—and a fortune—out of doing this, from Wollman Rink to the White House.
As The New York Times told me on Friday while I sat peeling clementines in my living room, Arab leaders are now “stepping up” to offer alternatives to the frightful proposition of housing the Palestinians in their own countries.
Says The Times: “Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials briefed on the endeavor.”
Envoys from these five countries have already met in Saudi Arabia, and are due to meet again in Egypt at the beginning of March.
Egypt, in particular, is proposing a technocratic government for Gaza, one that is not affiliated in any way with Hamas, but can administer the territory without drawing the ire of Israel or sanctioning attacks against her in any form. Such a government would be drawn from “community leaders” rather than fighters.
Of course, this is far from a done deal—is there even such a thing in the Middle East?—but it represents, for the West, the possibility of a reprieve from yet another round of destabilising mass migration from the Levant. Millions of Palestinians will instead stay in the region, where they belong. Coming up with a plan that satisfies Israel, the Palestinians themselves, Hamas, the various neighbouring Arab countries, and the US will not be easy, but if it happens, we will have Trump and his not-so-crazy art of the deal to thank.