Trump’s Gaza plan has many pitfalls, Hamas among the biggest

President Trump took over the world in his statement that the United States should “own” Gaza and move the Palestinians out to build “Riviera in the Middle East.” So unrealistic and bisarr as it might look like, Trump pointed to a serious challenge: Gaza’s future as a safe, peaceful, even prosperous place.

A former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, set the dilemma nicely. “Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, resistance and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians are in a field of ruins, Full of explosives and corpses? “

It’s a question that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always avoided. He has refused to engage in the question of who will reign Gaza after the conflict, largely because it would undermine his controlling coalition, which depends on right-wing parties who want to resettle Gaza with Israelis.

As foreign and unusable as Mr. Trump’s proposal Tuesday may work, it is “no less than a historic reset of decades of received diplomatic wisdom,” said Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli vice president of the National Security Advisor. No matter how unrealistic, he said, “It can force the pages to reconsider long -term positions, touching things up dramatically and leading to new openings.”

What Mr. Trump described – the forced relocation of two million Palestinians from Gaza to countries such as Egypt and Jordan, who are hard against taking them – will not happen, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.

“Trump is a man who does not want new military obligations, and now he will move two million people who do not want to go to places that do not want them,” he said. “But Trump is picking up a real problem about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to choose the real problems and divert the stupid. “

At his news conference, Mr. Trump to discuss one of the biggest problems with his dream: Hamas, the armed Palestinian group devoted to the destruction of Israel. Hamas put out the war, which has destroyed Gaza and killed nearly 50,000 Palestinian civilians and warring, with on October 7, 2023, attacked it was on Israel. Despite promising to destroy Hamas and dismantle his control over Gaza, Israel has not achieved any goal, which has led the key-right members of Mr. Netanyahus coalition to demand that the war continue after phase 1 of the current truce.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he does not want the matches to begin again, but he also does not seem to have any answers on how to loosen Hamas from Gaza, a prerequisite for getting help from many Arab governments to rebuild The enclave. The idea of ​​American troops fighting and dying in Gaza seems unlikely from a president who has wanted to pull them out of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Keeping the peace to allow reconstruction and resettlement to take place would probably involve tens of thousands of US troops for maybe a decade or more.

Trump -Employees Backtracking on some of his suggestions Wednesday and said any population transfer would be temporary.

But Hamas has made it clear that it is not going anywhere, and presumably it would fight American troops as it fought for Israeli. As Basem Naim, a member of the group’s political agency, said in a statement that condemned the Trump proposal, what Mr. Netanyahu could not do with the support of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. – “To displace the residents of the Gaza Strip” In “Performing genocide against our people” – “No new administration will succeed in implementing.”

Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said that in discussions with Jordanian, Egyptian, Gulf -Arabic and Palestinian colleagues, “No one will once discuss this agreement because there will be no readiness to Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I can’t find an Arab country or leader that is willing to accept the Palestinians. “

Although none of Mr. Trump’s proposal, it just threatens to flow it now Jordan and Egypt, two crucial allies’ stability, thus “strategically incomprehensible,” said “strategically incomprehensible,” said “said” strategically incomprehensible, “said” Tom Phillips, a Former British ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Jordan is already more than half of ethnic Palestinian, and for King Abdullah, who will meet with Mr. Trump next week, to accept more Palestinian refugees “would undermine the kingdom and be the end of the king,” said Mr. Milshtein, a judgment repeated by many. Already, many Jordanians are suspicious that there is “a Zionist conspiracy” to annex the occupied West Bank and create a Palestinian state out of Jordan, he and Mr. Phillips.

Egypt may have more area and has a desperate need for American financial support, but its president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, is a tough opponent of Islamist radicalism, which he has tried to stamp brutally in Sinai and of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is part. The notion that he would allow “hundreds of thousands of people supporting Hamas to Egypt” is not imaginable, Mr. Milshtein.

Even at the height of the matches, Mr. El-Sisi an intricate area near the border with Gaza in the event that Gazan was pressed into Egypt to prevent them from going further. And Egypt, who considers itself the most important Arab country, does not want to be seen as being pushed around by Washington.

Christoph Heusgen, a former German ambassador to the United Nations leading the Munich Security Conference, recalled that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son -in -law, spoke of Gaza as a great property last year, but then suggested resettlement of the Gazans in Israel, in Negev. Arab countries will simply refuse a population transfer, he said, “and the only other way is military strength, and that is genocide.” The Saudis demand a Palestinian state, such as Mr. Netanyahu is against, and Mr. Trump, “says he wants to get out of conflicts,” Not to send American troops into another, Mr. Heusgen.

“It seems to be dead on arrival,” he said.

There has been a serious diplomatic conversation, begun during Mr. Biden, of a kind of international grouping to supervise the weak Palestinian authority of Mahmoud Abbas. It assumes that Hamas will no longer have control.

But Hamas does not intend to give up his control or goals, so much less disarmament. It has expressed a willingness to create an “administrative committee” to rule Gaza with other parties, including Arab countries and the Palestinian authority that expands an Egyptian initiative. Such a committee is believed to be only a cosmetic coverage that allows Hamas to maintain control over security and at the same time reduce its responsibility for civilian governance.

Mr. Trump was silent about the future of an independent Palestinian state, which has become a decisive demand from Saudi Arabia after destruction and death in Gaza. The Saudis were quick to oppose Mr. Trump’s plan in a statement overnight and made it clear that any normalization with Israel, like Mr. Trump wants to promote, depends on concrete steps against a viable independent Palestinian state, including Gaza. This is exactly the result that Mr. Netanyahu has promised to prevent.

Simone Leden, former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary of the Middle East during the first Trump Presidency, said Mr. Trump made up an initial negotiating position. This is “a starting position,” she said. “It’s a negotiation – it’s the Middle East.”

Mr. Trump’s success in helping to create Abraham agreements from 2020 – bilateral agreements that normalize the relationship between Israel and some golf states – “is related to selling the paradigm and acknowledging it is destroyed,” MS Leden said, and now he is trying to reset that conversation. Mr. Trump talked about American troops, she said, but “he has left the door open to other parties to participate or take it over.”

There is still tremendous skepticism in the region of Washington’s ability to build state in the Middle East, after US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about its willingness to remain the course for many years.

The Trump proposal also overshadowed the real and current problem in Gaza: Whether Israel and Hamas will succeed in moving past this first phase of their ceasefire agreement to the much harder second phase that would involve Israeli concessions, such as Mr. Netanyahu has been so far unwilling to make. His coalition partners have promised to reduce the government if he does them, and effectively ends the war with Hamas still standing.

Whether Mr. Trump by his proposal has helped Mr. Netanyahu to use his partners is still to see – as well as about Mr. Trump keeps the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to make this agreement regardless of the political costs.