“Sorting out Gaza will be a test for the master dealmaker, Donald Trump.”
Several pro-Israel experts who focus on the Middle East believe President Donald Trump’s plan for the U.S. to take over the Gaza Strip will be challenging, yet beneficial.
During a Tuesday press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump announced his plans to relocate all Gazans out of the area and to rebuild the strip into a U.S.-owned-development zone, sparking varied reactions.
Jonathan Schanzer, the Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Americans would not be embraced in Gaza without the help of Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“A plan that would include the Saudis and Emiratis would be more welcome by the rest of the region, but there is no Arab participation,” he said. “So, Trump has now forced their hands. Now we wait to see the Arab reaction.”
He added that the main challenge would be removing Gazans from the war-torn strip, which Trump has described as a “demolition site.”
“This would be better handled by the Arab states, but they have failed to propose a feasible plan,” Schanzer said. “Trump has forced their hand.”
Ran Bar-Yoshafat, an attorney and public diplomacy expert who has served in the Israeli Defence Forces reserve in Gaza after October 7, is a fan of Trump’s idea.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Bar-Yoshafat said. “Trump is saying what everyone is thinking. Better for them, better for us.”
He added that Trump’s plan — which the president called making Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” — would make life safer.
“Israel left Gaza but Gaza did not leave Israel,” Bar-Yoshafat said.
Luke Moon, the director of the Christian pro-Israel group, the Philos Project, said he’s worried Gazans will be violent wherever they live.
“Sorting out Gaza will be a test for the master dealmaker, Donald Trump,” Moon said. “On one hand, many want Gazans to remain in the strip as a perpetual thorn in Israel’s side. On the other hand, whenever I think about the Gazans scattered around the world, I’m reminded of the recent event in Malaysia where 40 Gazans were sent for medical treatment.”
Moon was referring to dozens of Palestinians who rioted after not being allowed to leave the guest house they were staying at in Malaysia while receiving medical treatment. Gazans were seen setting fires, climbing gates, and destroying furniture, Jewish News Syndicate reported.
“It’s an easy thing to say the U.S. will control, it’s a hard thing to do,” Moon added. “However, Trump is correct that things cannot return to how it was for the last 20 years or more. We can’t just reset the clock for the next war.”
Elie Pieprz, the Director of International Affairs for the Israeli Defense and Security Forum, said Trump’s move puts pressure on the Arab world to help solve the conflict.
So my 4D-chess hypothesis may be right. This is less about involving America directly—which would be anathema to many parties in the Middle East—and more about forcing Middle Easterners to finally get off their asses and constructively clean up their own mess. There's risk in doing this: think about the lazy kid who gets guilted by his dad into finally cleaning his room. Because his basic nature is lazy, there's really no guarantee he'll make more than a token effort to clean his room. So the question shifts to motivation: how do you get a lazy kid to clean his room well? Do you threaten him with punishment? Do you offer him something he truly desires as a reward for cleaning well? Do you do both? As Luke Moon suggests above, if the US comes in as a controlling force, the rebuild will be a "hard thing" to control. Risk to US personnel will be high—snipers, IEDs, mission creep, i.e., everything I'd briefly mentioned in a previous post. And would the US still have some sort of supervisory role, watching and judging the rebuild? Why would Middle Eastern nations even accept US standards of judgment? I see a million ways that this project could go wrong, 4D chess or not. My advice: just stay out of the Middle East. Its problems go back centuries, and temporary fixes are easily undone by idiots who appear later. Look at Giuliani's New York City.
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