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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
U.S. President Donald Trump wants to take over Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” where “the world’s people” can live.
Everyone but Palestinians, that is.
According to Trump’s plan, Palestinians would be displaced, most likely by force, to neighboring countries. And his real-estate deal of the century — treating Gaza like it’s Atlantic City — risks propelling the U.S. into yet another forever war.
This would not be a war triggered by any high-minded ambitions of bringing democracy to the Middle East — it would be a conflict fueled by the fantasies of a property tycoon. It would make the U.S. arguably an even bigger target for every aspiring jihadi group and throw the entire region into greater turbulence, destabilizing allies from Cairo to Riyadh. It could draw U.S. troops on the ground — something Trump hasn’t ruled out — into prolonged urban battles, inviting worldwide condemnation and possibly prosecution, as they clear out Palestinians in a forcible transfer of population.
But as any real-estate developer should know, before you turf out residents and start building, there are NIMBYs to contend with — in this case Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf Arabs. Unsurprisingly, they’re not impressed.
In an overnight statement, Saudi Arabia totally rejected displacing Palestinians from their ancestral land, and warned it wouldn’t normalize relations with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state. It’s a move that would wreck the completion of the Abraham Accords — the Arab-Israeli normalization process Trump kick-started during his first term in office and has moved apace since 2020.
In Trump’s extraordinary press conference on Gaza that triggered the backlash, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat beaming by his side, and the U.S. president argued that the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza should simply move to neighboring countries with “humanitarian hearts” and “great wealth.”
As far as he and Netanyahu see it, they’re finally changing the Middle East paradigm. They’re giving up on what every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has attempted to achieve — a negotiated settlement to a two-state solution — and replacing it with what Israeli hard-right politicians have wanted for years: Getting rid of the “Palestinian problem” by getting rid of the Palestinians.
But can any Gulf leader risk facilitating what, to all intents and purposes, would amount to ethnic cleansing and a violation of international law — not to mention the fury it would whip up on their own streets, possibly imperiling their regimes?
The Salafi-Jihadist enemies of the Gulf’s royal families would make massive political capital with the uprooting of Gazans and all its echoes of past displacements, including the nakba (catastrophe) — the flight and expulsion of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.
In his speech, Trump also name-checked Egypt and Jordan as possible destinations for displaced Palestinians. However, both Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah have repeatedly opposed Trump’s plan to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in their respective countries. They’ve also been warning him since his first week in office, when the newly inaugurated president breezily told reporters : “I have helped [Sisi] a lot, and I hope he will help us. I think he will take in Palestinians from Gaza, and I believe the King of Jordan will do the same.”
The Trump administration is gambling on being able to strong-arm Cairo and Amman by threatening to cut U.S. aid, as both countries are directly dependent on it. Without aid they would be forced to introduce austerity measures, risking political and economic turmoil. Just last week, Trump hinted at the leverage he feels he has: “They will do it. They will do it… We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it,” he said.
But so far, the hints of financial blackmail have not been working. The Egyptian leader repeated his rejection of resettling any Palestinians in his country last week, saying: “The displacement and removal of the Palestinian people from their lands is an injustice that we will never participate in.” And Abdullah told European officials in Brussels that Jordan remains unwavering “on the necessity of establishing Palestinians on their land and gaining their legitimate rights, in accordance with the two-state solution.”
Moreover, as these messages didn’t seem to be getting through, top diplomats from Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all flatly rejected any forcible displacement of Palestinians during a meeting in Cairo on Saturday: “We affirm our rejection of [any attempts] to compromise Palestinians’ unalienable rights, whether through settlement activities, or evictions or annex of land or through vacating the land from its owners … in any form or under any circumstances or justifications,” they said in a joint communiqué.
So, it seems U.S. financial coercion may well have its limits. Both leaders are trapped between a rock and a hard place, but while a halt of American aid would cause them considerable political problems, the risks to their own survival are likely even greater if they agreed to resettle 1.8 million resentful and angry Gazans — along with Hamas.
The Jordanian monarch was just eight years old when his country was plunged into a civil war in 1970, which saw his father King Hussein battle with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for control of the country. The Jordanian monarch attacked the PLO to preserve Hashemite rule after several failed assassination attempts and three hijacked flights. His son would likely have little desire to expose himself, or his heirs, to the risk of an interloper endangering the monarchy once more.
Meanwhile, Sisi’s security forces are already engaged in a long-standing counterinsurgency against Islamist militant groups in the Sinai, where the displaced Gazans would likely have to be accommodated.
Regional leaders can therefore only hope Trump isn’t serious; that this is just an opening gambit.
And they may well play for time, hoping to distract him with other deals and transactions, such as improving on the Abraham Accords. The Saudis, for example, could agree to normalize relations as long as Trump’s Gaza plan doesn’t proceed.
Some regional analysts also question whether Trump is serious. “President Trump is perhaps trying to achieve a few objectives in his provocative comments on Gaza displacement. Firstly, he could be trying to disrupt conventional thinking on a longstanding conflict that has yet to be resolved or produce viable solutions,” said Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil.
Moreover, he may be seeking “to placate supporters and high-level donors in the United States, and shore up Netanyahu’s fragile political balance of power.” Nonetheless, Vakil added, “this will likely lead to greater multilateral unity” between the region’s Arab leaders. And the rich Gulf nations could step forward to fill the gap left once the U.S. cuts foreign aid to Egypt and Jordan.
But the hope that Trump and Netanyahu will back away from the idea of displacement may well be misplaced. This was no off-the-cuff thinking or improvisation — and they are banking on Arabs states finally being accommodating.
This is a region, however, that has had a way of wrecking even the best laid plans. This plan is far from that.
