The chorus of disapproval greeting Donald Trump’s suggestion that the USA take over the reconstruction of Gaza and move Palestinians away from their ruined homes was almost unanimous.
‘I’m speechless. That’s insane,’ said the Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, after Trump proposed temporarily displacing two million refugees from the smoldering wreckage of the Gaza strip to allow for redevelopment.
But like most international consensus, Coons’ indignation shows the typical knee-jerk snobbishness of the elite towards any idea that doesn’t come from inside their charmed circle.
For more than 50 years, the world – and that means everyone from US Presidents to Secretaries General of the United Nations – has paid lip-service to the so-called ‘two state solution’ to the Arab-Israel dispute.
Few seemed to notice that the Arab world was reluctant to recognize Israel or that the Palestinians themselves had effectively split into ‘two states’: a Hamas-run Gaza and a West Bank under the sway of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Each of these statelets abandoned elections a full 18 years ago and their rulers have remained in office thanks to the power of bullets not ballots.
It is Donald Trump’s great political virtue to blurt out the unthinkable with previously unsayable clarity. It upsets people but unlocks their minds from the dead end of so much conventional thought.
Of course, 1001 things can go wrong with any attempt to solve the Palestinian issue. That much is obvious.
On past form, Hamas will try to frustrate any progress. After all, one of their motives in staging the October 7 slaughter was to kill the growing rapprochement between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The chorus of disapproval greeting Donald Trump’s suggestion that the USA take over the reconstruction of Gaza and move Palestinians away from their ruined homes was almost unanimous.
Of course, 1001 things can go wrong with any attempt to solve the Palestinian issue. That much is obvious. (Pictured: Gaza Strip).
There will be huge reluctance on the part of Jordan or Egypt, two neighboring countries, to take Palestinian refugees – let alone Hamas-supporting Islamists. The last time Jordan played host to the Palestinians, in the early 1970s, the PLO tried to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy.
As the sinister pictures of armed men releasing Israeli hostages have made all too clear, it might never be possible to root out Hamas altogether or dispel the threat of terrorism.
Then, someone has to pay the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction bill. Can the moneybags UAE or Qatar be persuaded to step forward?
The only certain thing is this: it will take all Trump’s famed ability to knock heads together to bring about the major breakthroughs required.
Yet his vision is attractive, all the same:
‘You build really good-quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,’ Trump told reporters during news conference with Israel’s President Netanyahu on Tuesday.
Trump, remember, had wins in the region in his first term. So why not now? There was no new war between Israel and its enemies, Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah. Fear of his unpredictability seems to have kept things calm.
The first Trump term saw the UAE and Bahrain plus more distant Arab states like Sudan and Morocco sign up to the Abraham Accords, recognizing Israel.
The result was America’s biggest diplomatic achievement in the Middle East since Jimmy Carter brought Israel and Egypt to the peace table.
Even before he re-entered the White House, apprehension about what Trump’s threats to resolve the hostage issue by making life hell for Hamas had calmed things there and helped bring about a ceasefire.
Besides, why should we stick to the tramlines of the failed consensus?
Note how the new Syrian leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa has reached out to Western investors when it comes to rebuilding his shattered state.
Al-Sharaa has wisely played down anti-Israeli attitudes, even though he comes from the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War.
For all the difficulties it faces, the new Syria might well prove a model for a post-war Gaza.
The Gulf states of the United Arab Emirates offer another positive way through.
Donald Trump’s Talk of exploiting Gaza’s coastline as the basis of a ‘riviera’-style tourist economy may sound grotesque in today’s traumatic circumstances.
Yet how many visitors to dusty Dubai in the early 1970s – and there were only a few – could have imagined it as it is now.
Today’s Dubai is a glittering metropolis with excellent facilities for tourists and foreign entrepreneurs. It also has excellent security arrangements to protect visitors and investors as well as its own citizens.
For its own part, Gaza once had many natural advantages and might enjoy them once again in time.
Gaza is the name of an ancient city as well as a region. Its monuments range from ancient archaeology from the age of the Maccabees. Magnificent mosques have been badly damaged by the war but their restoration, as with war damaged-historic sites in Bosnia or Kosovo in the 1990s, could foster local skills and foreign tourism.
But it is Gaza’s status as a stop on trade routes from ancient times into the 20th century that could make it a strategic location for renewed trade from India and Asia to the Mediterranean and back. Grand schemes to build a Med-to-Red Sea Canal to supplement the Suez Canal could bring valuable revenue.
Gaza’s long tradition of market gardening should be revived and a de-salination plant using its coastal position could provide it with revenue from feeding Israelis as well as Gazans.
Trump’s Talk of exploiting Gaza’s coastline as the basis of a ‘Riviera’-style tourist economy may sound grotesque in today’s traumatic circumstances. (Pictured: An AI-generated image of Trump’s Gaza ‘Riviera’).
For its own part, Gaza once had many natural advantages and might enjoy them once again in time. (Pictured: An AI-generated image of Trump’s Gaza ‘Riviera’).
If Hamas had built on Gaza’s assets and traditions rather than literally undermining it with tunnels to store weapons, they could have run a model state on the Mediterranean. Israel has done it, after all, building one of the world’s most successful democracies from sand.
In their hearts many ordinary Palestinians recognize the dead end which their self-appointed leaders have now led them into.
And if Trump can make life better for Gazans – with security for them if they dissent from a bruised but vengeful Hamas – then his bold vision for Gaza’s future might just be realized.
The idea of ‘winning hearts and minds’ has been ridiculed since its failure in Vietnam, but people too easily forget how quickly American economic reconstruction won over the Germans and Japanese who had been loyal to Hitler or Hirohito’s regime until the arrival Allied troops in 1945.
Because Trump’s style upsets ‘right-thinking’ folk, they fail to see that, more often than not, his rhetoric masks a very practical approach to problem solving.
He’s not tangled up by Ivy League international relations theory. Nor is he hamstrung by deference to ‘international law’ which paralyzes so many of America’s European allies – while our opponents ignore it with gusto.
True, the odds are against Trump succeeding – but that’s nothing new. And no reason not to hope.
