Trump’s Gaza Plan Is Ethnic Cleansing for Israel

Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Once more, it’s impossible to tell whether Donald Trump is serious — or, if he is, whether he knows how to make his radical ambitions real.

On Tuesday, with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sitting next to him, Trump proposed an American takeover of the Gaza Strip and the displacement of the 2 million Palestinians who live there. The plan, illegal under international law, is the realization of a long-held dream of the Israelis on the far right: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians who live next to them in abject misery and have been denied a nation of their own. Ultimately, it is completely unworkable. After more than a year of war, which Trump did help temporarily pause, Israel’s darker aim may well be what many on the left feared. It wasn’t that Netanyahu cared so much about defeating Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, or getting the hostages back.

Rather, he wanted to make Gaza so unlivable — and society there so untenable — that the mass of Palestinians would be forced from their homes forever. Netanyahu understood he needed Trump back in office to sanction the possibility of an emptied-out Gaza and the total renunciation of a Palestinian state.

Trump’s proposal was not just rejected by Democrats, who are mostly impotent at the moment. His own party, from the relative moderates to the otherwise frothing hawks, balked at the idea of a U.S. occupation. “We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that. I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. It might be problematic,” said Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and staunch Trump ally. Missouri senator Josh Hawley, another Trump backer, said simply that he didn’t “think it’s the best use of United States resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza.” Beyond declaring that Palestinians must be free from Hamas, Marco Rubio, the new secretary of State, didn’t endorse the proposal, either.

The regional powers aren’t any more enthusiastic. Saudi Arabia rejected the plan, but there’s speculation Trump might be pressuring them to bend eventually. The Saudis back a two-state solution and won’t normalize relations with Israel otherwise. Egypt and Jordan are not open to accepting vast numbers of Palestinian refugees. A more generous read on Trump might be that he is offering an unworkable proposal that could satiate Israel’s far right and maintain the cease-fire. If so, it’s unclear how long such a bluff can hold.

As we’ve already seen with the tariff threat — Canada and Mexico were temporarily spared — words from Trump are suspect until he takes tangible action. How deeply does he think about any of this? Is the new American occupation of the Middle East a trial balloon? A ploy for further negotiations? Trump’s demented bid at a Nobel Peace Prize, since he does dream of some grand, hazy accord that seems to be heading nowhere?

One reality Trump will have to confront — if he is earnest about a massive, American-led reconstruction of Gaza that simultaneously purges millions of Palestinians from their land — is that all of this will be far harder than signing a flurry of executive orders and letting Elon Musk trod around the Treasury. It’s not merely that foreign-policy adventurism of this scale needs congressional approval. It’s that the Middle East itself is a tangle of alliances and contradictions, and multiple regional powers hold great leverage over the future of Gaza. Trump can’t steamroll them. None of it comports with Trump’s isolationist, “America First” vision. It seems, rather, like poorly conceived neoconservatism, not unlike the delusional belief that America could export democracy to Iraq through the barrel of a gun.

Trump is Trump. Today, he longs for Gaza to be the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Many millions of people in America and across the world scramble to understand what that means. Soon, we might be hearing about a Trump casino or hotel for Gaza. For Trump, someone else’s misery can always be a business opportunity. Palestinians, as always, are an afterthought. If Trump cared about them, he could offer them a new nation that includes the occupied West Bank. He could even force Israel, which obliterated their homes, to take on refugees. That would be fair, if Netanyahu would ever agree. Ethnic cleansing is a much more appealing proposition. For Israel, the Palestinians must be out of sight and out of mind.