Trump's fantastical Gaza flip

Beneath the outlandish packaging, Trump has inadvertently surfaced uncomfortable truths about Gaza the international community has been reluctant to confront.

Credit: Marco De Angelis/The Cartoon Movement

Less than a day after Donald Trump dropped his bombshell proposal for U.S. "ownership" of Gaza, the familiar dance began in Washington. White House aides scrambled to explain their boss's latest unorthodox idea while allies and adversaries alike struggled to make sense of a plan that would fundamentally reshape the Middle East's most intractable conflict.

Trump's vision is quintessentially Trumpian: audacious, transactional, and seemingly pulled from a real estate developer's architectural drawings rather than a statesman’s handbook: The U.S. would take control of Gaza, clear its wreckage, and transform the war-ravaged territory into what Trump calls the "Riviera of the Middle East." Meanwhile, its Palestinian inhabitants would be "resettled" in "far safer and more beautiful communities" across the region.

It's the kind of proposal that makes diplomats choke on their coffee and human rights lawyers reach for their legal texts. Yet beneath the outlandish packaging, Trump has inadvertently surfaced some uncomfortable truths about Gaza that the international community has been reluctant to confront.

Let's state the obvious: Gaza is, in fact, currently uninhabitable. After more than 15 months of devastating warfare, nearly 60% of its buildings lie in ruins. The territory is littered with unexploded ordnance, its infrastructure is shattered, and its population faces a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. The traditional playbook of reconstruction and reconciliation – which has failed repeatedly over decades – is woefully inadequate for the scale of destruction.

Trump, in his characteristic bulldozer style, has at least forced a conversation about alternatives, however imperfect. As one administration official put it, "You can't live in Gaza right now. I think we need another location, a location that's going to make people happy."

But here's where Trump's real estate developer instincts crash headlong into Middle Eastern realities. This isn't a distressed property deal where you can simply relocate the tenants and redevelop the land. Gaza's Palestinians, many of whom are descendants of refugees from what is now Israel, have a profound attachment to their homeland that Trump seems either unable or unwilling to comprehend.

The plan's political and logistical hurdles are equally staggering. Egypt and Jordan have adamantly rejected any suggestion of absorbing Gaza's population. Saudi Arabia issued a rare overnight statement reaffirming that Palestinian statehood remains non-negotiable. Even America's closest Arab allies view the proposal as a non-starter that could destabilize their own societies and bury any hope of a broader peace. The United Nations Secretary General said Trump’s plan was akin to “ethnic cleansing,” and European nations have warned it would be unacceptable and fly in the face of international law. “Gaza’s future must lie not in the prospect of control by a third State,” the French foreign minister wrote in a statement, “but in the framework of a future Palestinian State.”

Trump's response to this wall of opposition? A characteristic mix of transactional thinking and diplomatic strong-arming. He's betting that American leverage – particularly with aid-dependent countries like Egypt and Jordan – can overcome their resistance. It's a massive miscalculation that reflects a profound misunderstanding of the region's politics and history.

Inside Israel, the reaction has been more welcoming, particularly from the far right. Netanyahu, ever the political survivor, praised Trump's "creative, original and intriguing thinking." He even took a step further into fantasy Friday when he said that “the Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia.” Even centrist figures like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid have expressed cautious interest, though they emphasize that returning the hostages remains the immediate priority.

But the elephant in the room remains conspicuously unaddressed: Has anyone actually asked the Palestinians what they want? Trump's plan treats them as pieces on a chessboard to be moved at will, rather than as people with deep roots, aspirations, and rights under international law. The mass return of Palestinians to northern Gaza despite its near-total destruction speaks volumes about their determination to remain on their land.

The charitable view is that Trump is using his deal-maker's instincts to shake up a frozen conflict and force creative thinking about solutions. There's value in challenging conventional wisdom, particularly when the status quo has delivered nothing but repeated cycles of violence. His proposal has certainly gotten people talking.

But the less charitable – and more realistic – assessment is that this plan reflects Trump's megalomaniacal belief that his real estate acumen can solve one of the world's most complex conflicts through sheer force of will. He's essentially asking the world to eat his geopolitical bullshit and call it caviar.

Then there are the practical questions that Trump's grand vision conveniently sidesteps. Who exactly would pay for this massive relocation and reconstruction? Under what authority would it be carried out? And most puzzlingly, who would provide security in this American-owned Mediterranean Riviera? Trump assures us "no soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!" – a statement that raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps he envisions former Hamas police officers manning the beach clubs?

The plan also presents Netanyahu with an exquisite dilemma. As one Arab diplomat put it to me with barely concealed exasperation, "Israelis can try to end the war and work toward a Saudi deal which includes a political horizon for the Palestinians, or they can choose a path where they enable Netanyahu to go nuts and kiss the Saudi deal goodbye." It's a stark choice between Trump's real estate fantasy and the actual diplomatic progress that's been years in the making.

The cruel irony is that while Trump claims to be offering Palestinians a better life, he's effectively asking them to trade their homeland for a promise of luxury condos in someone else's country – countries that, incidentally, have adamantly refused to play along. It's like trying to solve homelessness by suggesting people just move into houses that aren’t for sale.

Perhaps the plan's greatest value lies not in its substance but in what it reveals: the bankruptcy of treating one of the world's most complex conflicts as if it were merely a distressed property deal waiting for the right developer to come along. The Palestinians' future can't be decided at a press conference or through presidential social media posts, no matter how many exclamation points are added.