President Donald Trump proved that he’s no peacemaker when it comes to Israel’s genocidal war. He floated the idea of forcible expulsion for Palestinians Saturday, saying that Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab nations should take in refugees to “just clean out” the destroyed Gaza Strip and create a “clean slate.”
He posed the possibility of resettlement less than 48 hours before tens of thousands of Gazans started crossing back into the devastated northern part of the strip for the first time since the war began. They are being allowed by Israel to return under the terms of the ceasefire agreement brokered earlier this month.
Trump’s proposal for ethnically cleansing Gaza threatens to upend the fragile truce and suggests his administration, like that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has alternative plans in the works.
The president’s comments on the weekend continued a line of a thinking he put forward last Monday, on his first day back in office. Just after his inauguration, Trump said he was “not confident” that the truce between Netanyahu’s military and Hamas would hold.
“I looked at a picture of Gaza,” he said, “Gaza is like a massive demolition site.” Trump spoke glowingly, however, of Gaza’s “phenomenal location on the sea, best weather.” He said, “Some beautiful things could be done with it.”
Such musings immediately invited questions about whether the president sees Gaza as a potential real estate investment opportunity. His son-in-law and former Middle East policy advisor, Jared Kushner, is already locking down agreements to build luxury seaside hotel resorts in other countries on the Mediterranean and has talked of Gaza’s potential for similar pursuits.
Trump pitched his Gaza “clean out” scheme during a talk with reporters on Air Force One Saturday. At the same time, he announced he had revoked President Joe Biden’s suspension of deliveries of 2,000-lb. bombs to the Israeli military.
“We released them today, they’ve been waiting for them for a long time,” Trump said, referring to the deadly bombs Israel used to level entire apartment buildings and kill dozens of Palestinians at a time earlier in the war.
Bowing to the pressure of the ceasefire movement in the U.S. and international humanitarian concerns, Biden paused shipment of the munitions last year but allowed the continued flow of other weapons systems.
Asked why he lifted the ban, businessman Trump responded, “Because they bought them.”
Palestinians out—forever
Though Trump is known for going off script, the proposal for pushing the Palestinian people out of Gaza and into neighboring countries was not an off-the-cuff remark. Trump disclosed that he was already in discussion with Jordan’s King Abdullah II about the matter and that he would be bringing it up Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, as well.
According to the Arabic-language Al-Ittihad newspaper, published by the Communist Party of Israel, it is “part of a well-thought-out plan that is being seriously discussed in the White House and the U.S. State Department.”
Previous leaks from sources inside the Trump administration have suggested an Israeli takeover of Gaza—under the cover of a rebuilding scheme—was in the works. Saturday marked the first time that the president himself, however, has publicly disclosed it as a possibility.
Al-Ittihad’s reporters also cited comments made by senior Israeli officials to the media in that country confirming their knowledge of Trump’s ideas. “We are talking about a large-scale plan” that envisions “temporary or permanent transfer [of Gazans] to Jordan, Egypt, and several Islamic countries.”
Trump, too, indicated that the removal of Palestinians could be permanent.
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” he said Saturday. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean that whole thing out and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
Before the current 15-month war, Gaza’s population was 2.3 million. Nearly 50,000 Palestinian dead are listed in the official tally, but researchers say the true toll could be tens of thousands higher. Carrying out Trump’s plan would no doubt send the body count soaring higher still.
For its part, Jordan looks to have no interest in the plan, with Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi saying his country’s opposition to the permanent displacement of Palestinians was “firm and unwavering.” Egypt, too, has repeatedly warned against forced expulsion, saying it would violate the 1979 peace treaty it has with Israel.
Greater Israel
But inside Israel, Trump’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing garnered cheers from far-right leaders. His proposal, if executed, would go a long way toward the fulfillment of their vision of “Greater Israel”—an imperial project undergirded by Zionist ideology.
Former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on X: “One of our demands from…Netanyahu is to promote voluntary emigration. When the president of the world’s greatest superpower, Trump, personally brings up this idea, it is worth the Israeli government implementing it—promoting emigration now.”
Trump’s proposal mirrors policy documents circulated within the Israeli government that appeared shortly after the current war started which detail the logistical and financial requirements for expelling Palestinians and moving them to other countries.
“A Plan for the Resettlement and Final Rehabilitation in Egypt of the Entire Population of Gaza” was the title of a paper distributed internally by the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, a think tank headed by Meir Ben Shabbat. He was previously Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor and is a 30-year veteran of the Shabak, Israel’s secret police agency.
In the opening of the policy paper and in a tweet posted by Misgav, Israeli Knesset Member Amir Weitmann said the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas presented “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” and ship out “the entire Arab population” for good.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 7 National News, Weitmann said at the time, “We are in exceptional circumstances that allow us to empty the Gaza Strip, abolish the Strip, move the residents…and make the Strip a part of Israel.”
Permanent “evacuation” of Palestinians also figured prominently in a leaked Israeli Intelligence Ministry memo from October 2023, which detailed a four-stage plan to achieve that end.
First, it envisioned the Israeli military pushing Gazans out of the northern part of the strip by force. Second, demolition of all housing and infrastructure would make Gaza unliveable and literally bulldoze the people off their land. Third, all routes into and out of Gaza would be sealed, leaving only the Rafah crossing to Egypt as a possible escape route and reducing humanitarian aid to a trickle.
Those three phases have essentially been pursued over the past 15 months; the fourth phase was basically what Trump proposed this weekend: Permanently resettling the Gazans still alive to the deserts of Egypt or to any other countries the U.S. can pressure to cooperate.
Policy and profit
Given the Trump and Kushner families’ proclivity for mixing policymaking and profitmaking, the possible synthesis of U.S.-Israeli imperial aims with property investment opportunities can’t be ignored.
Trump’s suggestion that something “really beautiful could be done with Gaza” echoes comments made by Kushner in March 2024 that Israel could “clean up” Gaza and make the most of the “very valuable” potential of the strip’s “waterfront property.”
Like his father-in-law, Kushner is a former real estate developer and was tasked with preparing the first Trump administration’s Middle East “peace” plan, the so-called “Abraham Accords.” The latter involved Israel and four Gulf states normalizing diplomatic relations while leaving aside the question about Palestine’s future, traditionally the biggest flash point in Israel’s relations with its neighbors.
The Accords were seen as taking Palestine off the table and cracking the door open for Israel to eventually deal with the West Bank and Gaza as it wishes without the interference of the Arab states.
“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said last year.
He has concluded lucrative real estate deals in other Mediterranean locales previously. On Jan. 17, the government of Albania approved his proposal to build a $1.4 billion luxury hotel complex and resort at an abandoned 1,400-acre military base on the country’s coast. Serbia has approved a similar hotel agreement with Affinity, turning over a former military building that has been empty since it was bombed by NATO in 1999.
The new vacation destinations for the wealthy are to be built by Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity company. It is backed by an estimated $4.6 billion USD, with most of the money coming from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern governments’ sovereign wealth investment funds.
Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife and the president’s daughter, is helping oversee the Albania project, saying on a podcast last year, “We will execute it.”
If they have similar seaside resorts in mind for Gaza, though, the Trumps and Kushners will face competition for the best plots of sand. Just weeks after the war started, Harey Zahav—a company notorious for building settlements for Israelis in the occupied West Bank—was already advertising future Gaza beachfront homes for Israeli colonists.
Nakba again?
Palestinians, peace advocates, and Middle East experts, meanwhile, are all rejecting Trump’s scheme and predict it will never come to fruition.
The State of Palestine issued an official statement declaring, “The Palestinian people will never abandon their land…and will not allow the repetition of the Nakba of 1948.” The statement told Trump that his job is to work to sustain the ceasefire, ensure the full withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces, restore the Palestinian Authority’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, and “advance toward peace and the independence of the Palestinian state.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the U.S. president’s plan “delusional and dangerous nonsense” and said the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace is to “force the Israeli government to end its occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.”
Middle East analysis Mouin Rabbani, who formerly headed the Palestine American Research Center, told Al Jazeera on Monday that the idea is “ethnic cleansing” and a non-starter with other countries.
“Even if he applies pressure on Jordan and Egypt,” Rabbani said, “their leaderships will recognize the price of going along with Trump is going to be much greater than the price of resisting him—in terms of the survival of their leaderships for participating in something like this.”
Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, already went on a tour of the Middle East last year pushing essentially the same thing Trump is now proposing. He was met with “blanket refusal.”
Israel appears to be working overtime, however, to undermine the current ceasefire and set the stage for a resumption of hostilities that might make the “clean out” plot feasible. It is already violating the terms of agreements in Gaza and Lebanon, provoking condemnation.
Israeli forces fired on crowds on several occasions over the weekend, killing people in several locations across Gaza and southern Lebanon, including at a hospital. It also continues to carry out a brutal assault on Jenin in the Occupied West Bank, blowing up and burning down homes and razing whole neighborhoods.
While U.S. imperialism maintains the upper hand in its dealings with Gaza, few expect the Trump administration to take a firm hand with Netanyahu to sustain and consolidate the ceasefire.
Several reports have emerged that the Netanyahu government may have struck a bargain with the incoming Trump administration. The Uncommitted National Movement, the pro-Palestine group that sought to pressure the Biden administration and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over their Gaza policy, has alleged that Trump promised to support “settlement expansion, the curtailment of humanitarian aid, and an eventual return to Gaza military operations” in exchange for “boosting Trump’s image ahead of his inauguration” with a ceasefire deal.
A number of subsequent events substantiate the claim of a possible quid pro quo. Israeli media coverage of the ceasefire has focused almost solely on the supposedly essential role played by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in winning an agreement, while Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Mike Walz publicly pledged just before the inauguration that “if the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is required to enter Gaza again, we are with them.”
New Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed the same message Monday in his first phone call with Netanyahu, promising that “under President Trump’s leadership,” he would “ensure that Israel has the capabilities it needs to defend itself.”
Trump’s words this weekend put to rest any notion that things will necessarily get better for Palestinians now that he’s in the White House. He’s no better than Biden and may in fact prove to be far worse.
As with all news analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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