You could see heads exploding in the Middle East, the international media, and among Republicans and Democrats during President Trump’s February 4 joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he raised stunning new proposals for the U.S. to take over, “own,” and rebuild the Gaza Strip so it can become “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump also repeated his earlier call to relocate two million Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan.
Predictably, Trump’s critics harshly condemned his proposals, calling them unrealistic, imperialism, ethnic cleansing, morally bankrupt, etc. But just like their rejection of Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, his critics offered no solutions for the hypocrisies Trump raised about the Gaza crisis.
On February 5, Trump’s advisers responded to questions about Trump’s new Gaza ideas. White House Press Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt noted that President Trump has not committed to sending troops to Gaza and will not spend U.S. funds rebuilding it. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz said President Trump’s ideas would “bring the entire region to come with their own solutions.”
Yesterday, the president clarified but also doubled down on his new Gaza proposals. In a February 6 Truth Social post, the president said no U.S. soldiers would be needed for his plan, Israel would turn over Gaza to the U.S. after the fighting ends, and Palestinians would be resettled in a safer area. President Trump added about his Gaza reconstruction proposal:
“The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the world, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”
Trump’s out-of-the-box ideas to solve the Gaza crisis are part of his radical Middle East strategy, which is much broader, more serious, and more ambitious than his predecessor’s confusing and feckless policies, which caused the deterioration of Middle East security.
At the heart of President Trump’s radical Middle East strategy is his belief that the world must face and resolve several hypocrisies about the Palestinians and Gaza.
Even the anti-Trump Wall Street Journal editorial board believes this. Although it unsurprisingly slammed Trump’s new Gaza proposals as “preposterous,” the Journal’s editorial board conceded in a February 5 editorial that the president’s Gaza ideas “have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.”
The hypocrisies President Trump is focused on include:
- “Gaza is a hell hole.” President Trump said this week about war-torn Gaza, “They’ve lived like hell. They lived like you’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.” I would argue that Gaza was a hell hole before the Israel-Hamas War because it was run by the corrupt, dictatorial Hamas terrorist group, which diverted billions of dollars in aid to weapons, military training, and underground tunnels as part of its obsession with destroying Israel and killing as many Israelis as possible. Trump spoke an uncomfortable truth about Gaza today: it has become an unlivable hell hole and a humanitarian catastrophe.
- No one wants to save the Gaza Palestinians. President Trump has been clear that despite the desperate plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, no nation has stepped forward with a plan to save them. Many states have sent humanitarian aid and called for Palestinian rule of Gaza. But no state has offered to rebuild the Strip or allow refugees from Gaza to relocate to their territory, even temporarily. On the other hand, although Trump’s Gaza ideas are controversial, he floated proposals to create a new Gaza that would give its residents better lives and a future. Hopefully, Trump’s ideas will form the framework for an international plan to save the Palestinians in Gaza and, as National Security Adviser Waltz has suggested, encourage other states to offer their own solutions.
- Allowing Gaza to be ruled by Hamas after the war ends so it again becomes a platform to launch terrorist attacks against Israel is unacceptable. Many nations—including the U.S. under the Biden administration—were insistent that Israel end the war and withdraw from Gaza but proposed no guardrails to prevent Hamas from resuming control of the Strip. Israeli leaders will not permit this to happen. Trump’s proposal for “great development teams from all over the world” to rebuild Gaza could become an alternative to a post-war power vacuum in Gaza that Hamas would exploit.
- The two-state solution is dead. The most important conclusion to draw from President Trump’s Gaza ideas is that they represent a complete rejection of the two-state solution. Despite the Biden administration’s insistence on pushing this concept, Israeli officials have been clear that after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre against Israel, there will be no separate and sovereign Palestinian state until the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are deradicalized. This is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Trump’s proposals to remove the Palestinian population from Gaza and an international development effort to build a new Gaza decisively move the United States away from the two-state solution. It also demolishes the argument that the only way to establish a prosperous and stable Gaza is through Palestinian statehood.
The dust still has not settled on President Trump’s new ideas to solve the Gaza crisis. Many states, experts, journalists, politicians, and others oppose his proposals. Some are enraged. The president’s Gaza reconstruction proposals would be a hefty lift to win congressional approval. Egypt and Jordan are still refusing to discuss taking in Gaza refugees. But President Trump succeeded in getting the world talking about decades-old hypocrisies concerning the Palestinians and Gaza that have caused instability in the Middle East to grind on year after year. This may be the actual reason why President Trump floated his out-of-the-box Gaza ideas.
***
Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member.
Ten solid years and the media and the Left still fail to understand Donald Trump. Some people become so stuck in a rut, the sides have grown so high they can no longer see the sky. Such has been the case with US foreign policy. We joke about the Blob, but there are two things true about blobs that cannot be ignored-----they move exceedingly slow and have difficulty changing paths.
Not a single person in the media, in politics, or in the diplomatic services has come up with even the beginnings of a plan of what to do about the situation in Gaza or the continued plight of the Palestinians. Imagine being the people no one wants. No one, not the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudis, wants anything to do with these people. There are many reasons why, but world leaders refuse to say the reasons out loud.
The Angel of the Lord told Hagar that her son, Ishmael, would be a wild donkey of a man, as would be his offspring. What is a wild donkey? It is stubborn. It is vicious. It is difficult to tame. And they like to bite.
Is there any better description of the Palestinians out there? Hezbollah and Hamas have been offered numerous Two State Solutions only to reject, out of hand, every one of them. Any proposal that does not include the destruction of Israel is immediately off the table. It is more than difficult to find peace when no one wants peace.
So, along comes Donald Trump. Like Alexander, he realizes the ball of knots that is the Palestine issue cannot be untangled. Lifetimes have been lost trying to do it. Instead, he solves the problem by cutting the knotted balls. The world is immediately aghast. Who is this man who thinks he can solve this problem in one fell swoop? We, who are steeped in the arcane knowledge of diplomacy, refuse to believe anything that could be so simple could possibly work. The issue is too complex. The barriers are too thorny. And besides----it would put us out of a job.
I seem to recall Solomon was faced with a similar problem of a baby claimed by two mothers. The world was aghast at his proposed solution. Most missed the point that the problem was solved almost immediately. Instead of rejoicing that the real mother quickly solved the problem was missed by the throng that said while walking away, “Can you believe it? He was really going to cut that baby in half. The very nerve of the man.”
Edit: So I had to wait until 6:30 CST to see what competing articles on this subject would show up at Real Clear Politics. My patience was rewarded. Check out this article from Josh Hammer at the LA Times------(I would add, Hammer “gets it”)
Trump’s Gaza Gambit and the Art of the Ultimate Deal | RealClearPolitics
No one wants them for a simple reason. They are risky to deal with. They have gone native. They are radicalized.
As a veterinarian I can relate to this with a simple example that most people easily understand but would never dare imagine, let alone concede, as an applicable analogy.
JD Vance speaks of cat ladies. So do I. It is not the cats that live in their homes and apartments that the ladies are most concerned with. Those are pets. They are family members which are friendly and affectionate. The cats that they worry about most are the colonies of feral cats which live on the streets. They feed these cats, provide make shift shelters and try to arrange for veterinary care when possible. But they don’t often take them in. Why? Because they are feral, wild, unfriendly and very difficult to manage.
If Gaza was populated with feral cats, cat ladies throughout the world would lament. They would do whatever they could to support and care for them but they would not take them into their own homes. They would also attempt to have others adopt them only to experience limited success because, like them, others may care and sympathize but the work involved, along with other difficulties, which often persist forever, makes it too uncomfortable.
From a personal perspective I have done what cat ladies try to do all my life. In the long run I am successful but I have an advantage. I have others help me and I am also a veterinarian who runs a sort of feline prison very humanely. The world may be willing in a limited way, to do similarly with the residents of Gaza, but few are as equipped and as dedicated as I am to deal with the animal metaphor. Far better to take children who can be educated early on. It is far easier to deal with “all creatures great and small” when they are young to insure the likelihood of a comfortable and predictable civil relationship. It is far easier (and less dangerous) to start right, from the beginning, than to try to fix what is wrong later.
This is off topic, but you may appreciate it.
About 25 years ago, a person in our office brought in 3 kittens that had been abandoned. I adopted the female. The next day was Saturday, and I took her to my vet for vaccines, flea bath (they were eating her alive!), etc. (This vet was also avian qualified, and as I had raised baby African Greys, and used his services often, we were well acquainted.) Much later he told me, “She was about two weeks away from being permanently feral, and then even you couldn’t have pulled her back. And I can’t think of many others who could have done what you did.” The point is, I well understand the extreme patience and the length of time it takes to do what you do. (In her old age, I had to have her euthanized, as she had always had kidney problems, and was approaching what would have been a very nasty death. But, she had become a very sweet cat, and had a happy life with us for 15 years.)
Oops. My reply to you went into the general section.
I read your comment with delight. You got it. Oftentimes, in fact most of the time, people don’t realize we are creatures, created by the God that created Nature, who share a common heritage. There is a saying often used by embryologists: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. During gestation an embryo morphs through its evolutionary anatomy. And, of course, that is true of humans as well as all other mammals. But what is not emphasized is how we become hard-wired – that cannot be measured visually. It can only be thought about. If anything DEI and CRT ignores it and actually goes out of the way to obscure it. Family life and early education determine what we call character. I believe it was Kipling who stated “when one has drunk deep from the bitter waters of hate suspicion and fear all the love in the world will not take away that knowledge”.
Now I can also site exceptions and some of them would blow most minds. Those exceptions are infrequent and took a lot of work and patience to create. I may post a stunning story in the next few days to illustrate a profound example.