Goldberg: Trump’s Gaza deal offers war crimes for beachfront property

When Donald Trump, speaking beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, announced last week that the United States would be taking over the Gaza Strip and “permanently” resettling its population elsewhere, few in American politics took him seriously.

Trump, after all, has already made trollish imperialistic threats against Greenland, Canada and Panama, but so far, he doesn’t seem ready to back up his bluster with military force. And while some parts of his base are tingling with excitement at the prospect of national renewal through conquest, in the country at large, there’s little appetite for new nation-building campaigns.

In the days following the president’s ludicrous proposal, his aides and allies, in a familiar pattern, tried to retcon it into something sane. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, pretended that Trump had merely made a generous offer to help Gaza rebuild. Israel, however, understood the earthshaking significance of Trump’s words. The United States is not, obviously, going to build a Middle Eastern Riviera on Israel’s border. What it has done, however, is grant Israel extraordinary new license to crush Palestinians in Gaza, and maybe in the West Bank as well.

A once-taboo idea

Parts of the Israeli right have long dreamed of expelling Palestinians from their land, a mad ambition that has only grown more intense and widespread since Oct. 7. Now Trump has taken this once-taboo idea and rendered it kosher. “I welcome the bold initiative of U.S. president Trump, which could allow a large portion of Gaza’s population to relocate to various destinations worldwide,” Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said a statement on Thursday. He ordered the military to begin preparing “exit options” for the Palestinians.

Trump’s proposition, the pundit Amit Segal said on Israel’s Channel 12, is “not 100% what Netanyahu wants — it’s 200%.” Until now, Israeli politicians who publicly discussed such ideas risked American blowback. Joe Biden’s administration was shamefully unwilling to restrain Netanyahu, but it did rebuke far-right Israeli ministers when they fantasized about building Jewish settlements in Gaza. The Palestinians, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last year, “cannot, and they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.” Netanyahu had to at least pretend to agree, insisting that it wasn’t “realistic” to talk about settling Gaza.

It might seem more realistic to him now. On Thursday, Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” after Palestinians had “already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” Never mind that under the terms of the ceasefire he takes credit for, fighting is supposed to be over now. Trump seems to be offering Israel a deal: The U.S. will countenance the ethnic cleansing of Gaza so long as America gets a prime piece of oceanfront property at the end of it.

So far, of course, both Israel and the United States have spoken of the removal of Palestinians from Gaza as if it would be voluntary. No doubt some Palestinians would choose to leave the land that Israel has made uninhabitable if they had a decent alternative, which they don’t. (One Israeli news site reported that among the destinations being considered for Palestinians are Puntland and Somaliland, two regions of Somalia.) But many of the enclave’s nearly more than 2 million people, seared by a history of dispossession, are determined to stay put. Driving them out would be a war crime. It could not be accomplished without atrocity.

Breaking the rules

Republicans may brush off Trump’s words as nothing but audacious spitballing, but by opening the door to a Gaza without Palestinians, Trump has already made the world more brutal and unstable. Right now, Israel and Hamas are supposed to be negotiating Phase 2 of their ceasefire agreement, which is meant to lead to a permanent cessation of fighting, the release of the remaining live hostages, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces. But the Israeli delegation has yet to leave for Qatar to participate in talks, and now Trump has removed an important incentive for Hamas to set the hostages free. Why would Hamas release them, asked Samuel Heilman in The Times of Israel, “when at the end of the process they will neither have control of Gaza back nor any hope of a Palestinian sovereign state?”

There’s an idea floating around that even if Trump’s plan is unworkable, he deserves credit for recognizing that the status quo is untenable. “Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza,” the British academic Lawrence Freedman told The New York Times. But there’s nothing admirable about tossing off absurd and impossible solutions to intractable dilemmas. If smart people are convincing themselves otherwise, it suggests to me a desperation to find rationality where there is none.

Even before Trump took office, the “rules-based international order” was deeply decayed, in no small part because of Biden’s complicity in Gaza’s annihilation. Now that order is dead, along with other imperfect remnants of a less chaotic time, like the soft power America built with foreign aid and democratic ideals. Maybe Trump’s menacing of Canada and Denmark and his scheme for a new colony on the Mediterranean will come to nothing. But with his renewed rhetoric of American empire, he’s removed any pretense that other countries should be limited by anything except their own might. He has created a de facto justification not only for Israeli expansionism, but for Chinese and Russian expansionism as well.

The old rules never worked as well as they were supposed to. That doesn’t mean we won’t soon long for them.

Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.