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

Berlin: President Donald Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to "own" the Gaza Strip and move out the Palestinians there to build "the Riviera of the Middle East." As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.

A former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, put the dilemma neatly. "Trump's proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when 2 million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?"

That is an issue Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always dodged. He has refused to engage on the question of who will rule Gaza after the conflict, largely because it would undermine his governing coalition, which depends on far-right parties that want to resettle Gaza with Israelis.

As outlandish and unworkable as Trump's proposal Tuesday may seem, it is "no less than an historic resetting of decades of received diplomatic wisdom," said Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. However unrealistic, he said, "it may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings."

What Trump described -- the forced relocation of 2 million Palestinians from Gaza to countries like Egypt and Jordan that are fiercely opposed to taking them -- is not going to happen, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London.

"Trump is a man who doesn't want new military commitments, and now he wants to move 2 million people who don't want to go to places that don't want them," he said. "But Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to pick out the real issues and deflect the stupid ones."

In his news conference, Trump failed to discuss one of the biggest problems with his dream: Hamas, the armed Palestinian group devoted to the destruction of Israel. Hamas set off the war that has devastated Gaza and killed nearly 50,000 Palestinian civilians and combatants, with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack it led on Israel. Despite vowing to destroy Hamas and dismantle its control over Gaza, Israel has not achieved either goal, leading key far-right members of Netanyahu's coalition to demand that the war continue after Phase 1 of the current ceasefire.

Trump has made it clear he does not want the fighting to begin again, but he also seems to have no answer to how to dislodge Hamas from Gaza, a precondition for getting help from many Arab governments to rebuild the enclave. The idea of U.S. troops fighting and dying in Gaza seems implausible 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 U.S. troops for perhaps a decade or more.

Trump officials were backtracking on some of his proposals Wednesday, saying that any population transfer would be temporary.

But Hamas has made it clear it is going nowhere, and presumably it would fight U.S. troops as it fought Israeli ones. As Basem Naim, a member of the group's political bureau, said in a statement denouncing the Trump proposal, what Netanyahu failed to do with the support of President Joe Biden -- "to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip" in "carrying out 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 Arab and Palestinian colleagues, "no one even wants to discuss this deal, because there will be no readiness of Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I cannot find one Arab country or leader willing to accept the Palestinians."

Even if nothing comes of Trump's proposal, just floating it now is threatening the stability of Jordan and Egypt, two crucial allies in the Middle East with the longest history of diplomatic relations with Israel and, thus, is "strategically incomprehensible," said Tom Phillips, a former British ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Jordan already is more than half ethnic Palestinian, and for King Abdullah, who will meet with Trump next week, to accept more Palestinian refugees "would undermine the kingdom and be the end of the king," Milshtein said, a judgment echoed 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 Phillips said.

Egypt may have more acreage and is in desperate need of U.S. financial aid, but its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, is a fierce opponent of Islamist radicalism, which he has tried to stamp out brutally in Sinai, and of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. The notion that he would allow "hundreds of thousands of people supporting Hamas into Egypt" is unthinkable, Milshtein said.

Even at the height of the fighting, el-Sissi created a walled-off area near the border with Gaza in case Palestinians there were pressed into Egypt, to prevent them from going any farther. And Egypt, which considers itself the most important Arab country, would not want to be seen as being pushed around by Washington.

Christoph Heusgen, a former German ambassador to the United Nations who leads the Munich Security Conference, recalled that Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, talked of Gaza as great real estate last year, but then suggested resettling Palestinians in Israel, in the Negev. Arab countries will simply refuse a population transfer, he said, "and the only other way is military force, and that's genocide." The Saudis are demanding a Palestinian state that Netanyahu opposes, and Trump "says he wants out of conflicts," not to send U.S. troops into another one, Heusgen said.

"It seems dead on arrival," he said.

There has been serious diplomatic conversation, begun under Biden, of some sort of international grouping to oversee Gaza and its reconstruction that would involve officials from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and other countries under the aegis, at least, of the weak Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. That presumes that Hamas will no longer be in control.

But Hamas has no intention of giving up its control or its aims, let alone disarming. It has expressed willingness to create an "administrative committee" to rule Gaza with other parties, including Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority, expanding on an Egyptian initiative. Such a committee is thought to be only a cosmetic cover that allows Hamas to retain control of security while reducing its responsibility for civilian governance.

Trump was silent on the future of an independent Palestinian state, which has become a crucial demand of Saudi Arabia after the destruction and death in Gaza. The Saudis were quick to oppose Trump's plan in a statement overnight, and made it clear that any normalization with Israel, as Trump wants to promote, is dependent on concrete steps toward a viable independent Palestinian state, including Gaza. That is exactly the outcome Netanyahu has vowed to prevent.

Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the first Trump presidency, said Trump was setting out an initial negotiating stance. This is "a starting position," she said. "It's a negotiation -- it's the Middle East."

Trump's success in helping forge the 2020 Abraham Accords -- bilateral agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some Persian Gulf States -- "hinged on setting aside the paradigm and recognizing that it's broken," Ledeen said, and now he is trying to reset the conversation. Trump spoke of U.S. troops, she said, but "he's left the door open for other parties to participate or take it over."

Still, there remains enormous skepticism in the region about Washington's ability to build statehood in the Middle East, after U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about its willingness to stay the course over many years.

The Trump proposal also overshadowed the real and present problem in Gaza: whether Israel and Hamas will succeed in moving past this first phase of their ceasefire agreement to the much tougher second phase, which would involve Israeli concessions that Netanyahu has been so far unwilling to make. His coalition partners have vowed to bring down the government if he makes them and effectively ends the war with Hamas still standing.

Whether Trump, by his proposal, has helped Netanyahu assuage his partners remains to be seen -- as well as whether Trump keeps the pressure on Netanyahu to make that deal regardless of the political cost.