- Donald Trump’s plan could put tens of thousands of American soldiers on the ground in Gaza defending Israel’s security—with no end of an occupation in sight.
President Donald Trump’s vision of transforming the bombed-out Gaza Strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East” drew widespread condemnation after calling for the eviction of the nearly 2 million Palestinians living there.
Trump wants Jordan and Egypt, two Arab allies of the U.S. that neighbor Israel, to accept the refugees while the United States assumes “long-term ownership” over the area and leads the reconstruction effort.
The President made no explicit promise that Gazans would ever be allowed to return to their land once rebuilt.
“That is ethnic cleansing by another name,” said Chris van Hollen, a Democrat senator from Maryland. “What the President is doing here is really throwing a match on an already very volatile region.
Trump furthermore signaled he would formulate a new position over the next four weeks on whether to soon recognize Israel’s sovereignty over all the biblical land encompassing Judea and Samaria—including the entirety of the West Bank—violating decades of established U.S. foreign doctrine.
Van Hollen: "He just said that it will be US policy to forcibly displace 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. That is ethnic cleansing by another name. He said the US would then own the Gaza Strip and we would develop it and other countries would take these Palestinians." pic.twitter.com/HOUfG2bWAJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2025
Together, the two new proposals form a landmark shift in U.S. policy in the region. It would redraw the map and erase any aspiration of a Palestinian state.
It would enshrine Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in history next to state founder David Ben-Gurion as the country’s most influential leader.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas blasted the idea of displacing Gazans from their land: “These calls represent a serious violation of international law, and peace and stability in the region will not be achieved without the establishment of the Palestinian state.”
Who supports the idea—and who doesn’t?
The President’s remarks about a “Riviera of the Middle East” closely follow comments made by his son-in-law Jared Kushner last March when he said Israel should kick out the Palestinians so it can develop Gaza’s great beachfront property.
But Republican senator Lindsay Graham, otherwise a stalwart ally of Trump’s, balked at the notion of risking American blood to guarantee Israel’s security amid another land grab—especially since Trump ran on a platform of ending forever wars conducted overseas at great cost to the taxpayer.
Afghanistan and Iraq cost at least $2 trillion between them, and the federal government is already $36 trillion in the hole.
“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. It might be problematic,” Graham said, adding: “We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that.”
Former NATO supreme allied commander retired General Wesley Clark warned on Wednesday that such an undertaking would be a “very, very difficult proposition” given how extended the armed forces are already. A peacekeeping mission likely requires three groups of 20,000 to 40,000 men each to cycle through on a rotating basis.
Far-right populists love the idea of expelling Palestinians
Trump’s proposal aims to solve the issue of what to do with the strip now that the more than 14 months of continuous Israeli bombardment ceased.
Rebuilding the territory at the cost of tens of billions of dollars only for it to remain in the control of Hamas would only risk its renewed destruction, while Israel has opposed Hamas rival Fatah from extending the Palestinian Authority’s reach in the West Bank to encompass the nearby Strip.
Instead, Trump said the U.S. would assume long-term control over the area and, if necessary, would deploy American soldiers to protect neighboring Israel and serve as guarantors of the peace.
“This was not a decision made lightly, everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” Trump told reporters, as some of the president’s supporters on social media began to rename the area the “MAGA Strip” or “MAGAza.”
Trump’s plan hinges heavily on an argument that a Palestinian “nation” as such doesn’t exist and Gazans are essentially no different than any other Arabs that settled in the region; therefore, removing them from their land is not a crime.
Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders was one who welcomed the idea.
“As I always said: Jordan = Palestine,” he posted. “Let Palestinians move to Jordan. Gaza problem solved.”
Saudi Arabia says no deal with Israel without a Palestinian state
The decision risks further destabilizing an already volatile region that recently saw the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria after over 50 years of rule, and continued anarchy in Lebanon amid the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership by Israel.
Authoritarian Arab states remember well how a mass influx of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon disrupted the delicate balance of ethnic and religious harmony, triggering the gruesome civil war in the 1980s.
As such, both Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi already rejected Trump’s initial proposal last week to evict Palestinians from Gaza and resettle them in other Arab nations.
It also puts Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the U.S. government’s top Arab ally in the region, in a difficult position.
On the one hand, the Kingdom would like to recognize formal relations with Israel due to their shared interest in keeping the hostile Shi’ite mullah regime of Iran in check.
On the other hand, the monarch’s official title as custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites means the King also serves as the de facto political leader of the Islamic community worldwide.
In a statement, his son the crown prince, said their family’s support for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital remained “firm and unwavering” and formed a precondition of normalizing diplomatic ties with Israel.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also reaffirms its unequivocal rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, land annexation, or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land,” he wrote, without formally rejecting the proposal.
