Trump’s Gaza takeover plan may sound Death Knock to the two-state solution

For decades, successive presidents in Washington have favored a version of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What no one imagined so far was that the other state would be American, not Palestinian.

President Trump’s amazing plan to displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and get the United States taking over has not only cramped the Middle East. It may also have anything but written the obituary for the long -sought, but insanely evasive goal of establishing a Palestinian state with Israel in peaceful coexistence.

Any vision of a Palestinian state has included Gaza as an integral part of it with the West Bank. In Mr. However, Trump’s vision Gaza would become an American territory transformed into a “Riviera in the Middle East.” It would not belong to the Palestinians anymore, but would be open to everyone who would live there. And for that matter, he signaled openness to Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank and promised to reveal his position within four weeks.

The prospects of a Palestinian state had already subsided in recent years, especially after the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people and led to the Israeli retaliatory war in Gaza, which has killed 47,000 conflicting and civilians, for Gaza Health authorities. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian populations see the two-state scenario as a viable plan anymore, according to polls.

But the rest of the world, so far, led by the United States, has continued to cling to the idea as official politics if for no reason other than a lack of alternatives. And Saudi Arabia has insisted that a Palestinian state should be part of any agreement to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a goal eagerly pursued by both Mr. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“If Trump thinks the American who owns Gaza and allows Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, facilitates an agreement, he has completely wrong about it,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal, pro-Israel , Washington -based organization that promotes a negotiated peace in the Middle East. “There’s no way forward to an appointment.”

But opponents of a Palestinian state feel characterized at this time. While few took Mr. Biden’s continued insistence on the two-state solution so seriously, they feel confident that Mr. Trump’s return to power means there will never be a Palestinian state.

“It’s a dead question,” said Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist organization in America, which is against the solution of the two-state. “I think most people think it’s a dead topic.” He added: “They had a state in Gaza. How did it work? “

Mr. Trump has long thrown himself as the person who could bring peace to the Middle East – just Thursday he told an audience at the National Prayer Breakfast that he would be remembered as “a peace champion” – but he has never achieved his own ambition. When he joined in 2017, he undertook the mission of finally resolving the generations of old conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and predicted boldly that it would be “not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”

But it turned out to be as difficult as people have thought over the years. He awarded his son -in -law Jared Kushner to develop a plan released by 2020, which imagined a Palestinian kind, but such a shortened that the proposal was seen largely as tilted against Israel. According to the plan, Israel would have been allowed to keep his settlements in the West Bank and full control over a unified Jerusalem as the capital, while the Palestinians would have been offered $ 50 billion in international investment.

The plan went nowhere, but Mr. Trump was able to score a consolation award by presenting the creation of diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, in what was called the Abraham Agreements.

Saudi -Arabia refused to participate at the time, but Mr. The bite came close to securing an agreement until the attack on October 7 broke the negotiations. Now back in office, Trump hopes to end such an agreement that would help transform the region.

But he has not made any resumption into a two-state solution since returning to power, and his recently appointed ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, it all excluded. “I would be very surprised if he comes and says, ‘Let’s go out there and get a two-state solution,'” Mr. Huckabee said last month in an interview with the AMI magazine, A Jewish magazine based in New York.

Mr. Trump remained ambiguous about this week. When he announced his plan to take “ownership” over Gaza at a news conference in the White House with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he was asked if it meant he no longer supported the two-state solution. “It doesn’t matter about a two-state or one state or any other state,” he replied. “It means we want – we want to give people a chance for life.”

Asked about the next day on CBS NewsMr. Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz said, “I certainly didn’t hear the president say it was the end of the two-state solution.” But neither he nor other administrative officials have explained how to take Gaza away from the Palestinians could be united to establish a state that would be acceptable to them.

The reaction to Mr. Trump’s Gaza plan was largely negative outside Israel. In the past few days, António GuterresThe United Nations Secretary General as well as leaders from Saudi -Arabia, EgyptAt JordanAt BritainAt FranceAt GermanyAt AustraliaAt TurkeyAt CanadaAt JapanThe The European Union And others changed all support for the two-state solution. “There is only one solution and it is a two-state solution,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen from Denmark told Danish media.

But at one point it came more like a diplomatic ritual with voice points than a realistic agenda. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, the notion of two states living side by side in peace has lost the broad support it once had.

In Israel, only 27 percent of people still supported a two-state solution In Gallup voting last summerWhile 64 percent opposed it. It was a turnaround from 2012 when 61 percent supported it and only 30 percent opposed it.

And it was almost identical to the Palestinians’ views in the West Bank and East -Jerusalem, where only 28 percent of those interviewed last summer supported such a plan, while 64 percent opposed it. It also represented a radical decline in enthusiasm from 2012, with 66 percent in these areas supporting it compared to 32 percent who did not.

Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser for Mr. Netanyahu, said that the two-state solution as long -feited had died.

“There is no way to rebuild Gaza,” he told Al Arabiya Television. “The West Bank is another political issue to be discussed. But in Gaza, I do not see two million Palestinians living on less than 400 square kilometers, with 80 percent of the buildings being destroyed. “

Elliott Abrams, who has advised several Republican presidents in the Middle East, including Mr. Trump during his first period said the reality is that a two-state solution has not been viable for a long time, even though world leaders refuse to accept it. While the president’s Gaza takeover plan itself can be unsustainable, Mr. Abrams that it focused on the situation of the Palestinians living in an area destroyed by war rather than lines on a map.

“Trump’s plan changed the subject from politics to what is happening to the people,” Mr. Abrams. “He talked about how Gazans are living now, and could live so much better in the future, and he did not demonize Gazan. So his plan is a reminder that the two-state solution is just foreign ministers shouting at each other, and that is no solution at all. “

From the other side of the debate was Mr. Ben-Ami agreed that Mr. Trump had a point. “There is an element of truth during all this, which is that it is really hard to imagine how you would rebuild with two million people who are still there,” he said.

He also agreed that “the concept of an old-fashioned two-state solution has actually been gone for a while.” But he held hope that it would still be part of a broader regional change driven by Arabic approach to Israel, led by Saudi Arabia. “It will have to be part of this normalization agreement,” said Mr. Ben-Ami. “We have referred to it as a 23-state solution.”