WASHINGTON-President Donald Trump was delighted while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu de Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it was the Gaza Strip, Trump’s thought on Tuesday was so far from the box that it was not clear if he knew there was a box.
Trump’s statement that, moving the Palestinian population and turning the coastal enclave into the “Middle East Riviera” was the kind of thing he could have said to provoke a reaction to “The Howard Stern Show” a decades ago. Provocative, intriguing, extravagant, scandalous – and not presidential.
But now, in his second term in the White House, Trump is advancing with increasingly bold ideas about redesign the world map in the tradition of 19th century imperialism. First, there was, then, AEA. And now he imagines taking on a devastated war zone in the Middle East that no other American president would want.
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It does not matter that he could not appoint any legal authority that would allow the United States to unilaterally affirm control over another person’s territory or that forced removal from an entire population would be a violation of international law. It doesn’t matter that resetting 2 million Palestinians would be a gigantic logistics and financial challenge, not to mention politically explosive. It doesn’t matter that this would certainly require many thousands of American troops and possibly trigger more violent conflicts.
Trump’s idea would be the most expansive commitment of the Middle East power and the American Treasury since Iraq’s invasion and reconstruction for two decades. And it would be a surprising turnaround for a president who applied for office in 2016 condemning the construction of nations and promising to remove the United States from the Middle East.
“This is literally the most incomprehensible policy proposal I’ve ever heard of an American president,” said Andrew Miller, a former Middle Eastern policy counselor under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and now a senior member of the Center for American Progress .
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Trump insisted that he was serious, even while many wondered if that was possible. “This was not a light decision,” he said. However, it seemed so fanciful, so devoid of detail, so in conflict with the story that it was difficult to judge it at first glance.
In fact, it seemed to be an idea that grew every hour throughout the day. In the morning, before meeting Trump, the president’s advisers told reporters that he would take 15 or older to rebuild Gaza after the destructive war between Israel and Hamas and that it would be necessary to work with partners in the region to find a temporary place for Palestinians live.
In the afternoon, while signing some executive orders, Trump told reporters that it was just “a place of demolition.” A little later, he received Netanyahu in the Oval Hall and went even further, saying that he wanted “all of them” to leave and that the Palestinians should be “happy” to live somewhere better that he expected Egypt and Jordan provide.
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Then, at a formal press conference with Netanyahu in the East Room on Tuesday night, he took the final step, declaring not only that Palestinians should leave, but “the US will take control of the Gaza Strip” and will rebuild in a prosperous economic destination.
This was not a temporary outlet, but “a long -term property position” and he made it clear that he had no intention of returning Gaza to the Palestinians, but would make her a place “not to a specific group of people, but for everyone” .
What that meant exactly, he didn’t say. Nor did I say how this would be done. Even he seemed to understand how wild the whole idea sounded. “I don’t want to be funny, I don’t want to be a Sabichão,” he said in a moment. “But the Middle East Riviera!”
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Others saw nothing funny or wise in the “ethnic cleaning by another name,” as Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen said.
“The notion that the United States will take over Gaza, including the displacement of American troops, is not just extreme, is completely disconnected from reality,” said Halie Soifer, executive director of Jewish Democratic Council of America. “What world is this happening in?”
Khaled Elgindy, a visiting professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, said Trump’s comments were “truly bizarre and incoherent,” raising more questions than answers.
“Is he speaking in geopolitical terms or just sees Gaza as a huge seaside development project?” Elgindy asked. “And for the benefit of whom? Certainly not from the Palestinians, who must be ‘relocated’. Will the US be the new occupant in Gaza, replacing the Israelis? What interest in the US could serve? ”
In Trump’s narrative, the whole idea of removing a population of people and assuming foreign territory sounded as much as a real estate business as he has pursued throughout his life as a developer.
He seemed to be taking an idea raised last year by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who observed in an interview that “the property by Gaza could be very valuable” and suggested that Israel “shifted people and then cleaned the place ”. But Kushner didn’t seem to imagine forcing the Palestinians to leave permanently or an American outlet.
The notion of assuming Gaza would put the United States in the midst of Israelo-Palestine conflict in a way that presidents since Harry S. Truman tried to avoid. The United States has long provided weapons to Israel, support him diplomatically and try to intermediate peace agreements. Several hundred American troops have served as Peace forces in Sinai for more than four decades and Biden twice ordered US air and naval forces to defend Israel last year against attacks by Iranian missiles.
But US presidents avoided the kind of great US ground troops in Israel or Palestinian territories that would presumably be needed to take and maintain Gaza. Even last year, when the US army raised a temporary floating pier to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza, Biden administration ensured that US troops would not land.
Miller pointed out that the cost of what Trump seemed to imagine “would make the $ 40 billion external assistance budget that Trump and Elon Musk call waste seem a small amount.”
Aaron David Miller, a former Middle Eastern peacekeepers now in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Gaza de Trump’s proposal fundamentally contradicted her own aversion to the construction of nations and could undermine her desire to mediate an agreement with Arabia Saudi establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. It would also give Russia and China “green light to assume territory as they think better,” he said.
But he added that “it is safe to say that this cannot happen,” at least as Trump described his plan. Instead, Miller said it was a distraction from the rest of the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu, which is known by the nickname Bibi, and that it did not face royal public pressure to extend the ceasefire agreement that came into force last month, leaving it with great freedom on how to proceed.
“Every buzz on the US assuming Gaza made us lose the real history of the meeting,” Miller said. “Bibi leaves the White House among the happiest humans on the planet. If there was any demonstration that there is no difference between Israel and the US, it was. ”
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