The Disruptor in Chief is back. Donald Trump’s frenetic issuance of executive orders in the early weeks of his second term has Washington gasping for breath. But it was a press conference—Trump’s February 4 White House joint appearance with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—that may set the world on a new course.
Reading from a piece of paper that was likely penned by a former Middle East adviser from his first term, Trump announced his intent to vacate the embattled Gaza Strip of its inhabitants and then rebuild the Mediterranean coastal enclave, which has been reduced to rubble since the Hamas assault against Israel on October 7, 2023. This would be an American development project, said the real estate president.
The disbelief expressed in many quarters in response to Trump’s plan—which would be better characterized as a notion—centers on its viability. In three ways, it seems dead on arrival.
The first is the viability of a large-scale relocation of Gazans. The second is the viability of any effort to redevelop the Gaza Strip itself. And the third is the viability of Trump’s implicit effort to replace the dream of a “two-state solution” with a long-term and immensely expensive real estate project.
As of now, there is no way Arab states will accept hundreds of thousands of Gazans as refugees, either temporarily or otherwise. The idea is taboo; it is an axiom of Arab thinking that Palestinians are expected to remain in Palestinian areas to serve the interests of Palestinian nationalism and put constant pressure on Israel. Perhaps one could imagine Asian Muslims states like Indonesia or Malaysia stepping up to take in Gazan refugees. Central Asian or sub-Saharan Muslim countries might not be shackled by long-standing ideology in the way Arab nations are. But as of now, the odds of getting Arabs to agree to the relocation of Gazan Palestinians into their lands are abysmally low.
Second, what leader alive today aside from Trump looks at Gaza—a misbegotten piece of land devoid of natural resources, synonymous with terrorism and misery—and sees a golden future? Trump articulated the obvious: This tiny territory, roughly the size of the District of Columbia, must undergo a wholesale transformation. Who is actually interested enough to effect such a transformation? Who will pay for it? Who will keep the territory secure when terrorists have every interest in interfering with its reconstruction?
Third, after the Hamas slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and the predictably harsh Israeli military response, the possibility of a “two-state solution” has lost its salience. No Israeli politician or party of any size will consent to, or even have a concrete discussion about, the creation of a Palestinian state for a very, very long time, and everyone knows it. After the homicides, Israel will not commit suicide. Something must replace this self-defeating delusion if the Arab world, the Israeli peace movement, the American left, and much of the international community are to speak in any reasonable way about the region’s future.
Alas, early indications suggest they have no intention of changing their tune or finding a replacement approach. The reaction to Trump’s notion in the Arab world was predictably immediate and unequivocally negative, given that it challenges the ossified consensus according to which Palestinians must remain in territory earmarked for their national project and fight to liberate it. That also apparently applies to Palestinians who actually want to leave. The Europeans, who rarely encounter an Arab talking point they don’t parrot, dutifully protested Trump’s plan with howls of disapproval. And the anti-Trump coalition in America predictably joined the chorus.
Netanyahu, who was clearly blindsided by the announcement, called Trump’s idea “remarkable”—but did not endorse it. He may yet throw his weight behind Trump’s plan, especially since polls show his people generally support the idea, even if specifics are in short supply. Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right politician who left the Netanyahu government in protest against the latest hostage-for-prisoner deal with Hamas, has signaled his desire to return to the Netanyahu government after Trump’s bombshell announcement.
Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters in America are gloating as they note just how stunningly he has shattered the status quo yet again. What they don’t realize, or know, is that Trump’s proposal is uncomfortably similar to failed American policies of the past he often maligns—namely, the reconstruction of Middle East basket cases through the use of American resources and personnel. Admittedly, such inconsistencies rarely trouble Trump loyalists, which affords the president wide latitude to float ideas such as Gaza-a-Lago without political backlash.
The pro-Israel wing of the MAGA movement is particularly heartened. This cohort views Trump’s moves as driven by purely Zionist motivations. And they may be. But it’s a safe bet that Trump has bigger things in mind. What we do not yet understand is how Trump’s Gaza idea can be reconciled, or become a part of, his vision for Middle East peace and prosperity. The fulfillment of that broader vision requires the participation, cooperation, and enthusiasm of Saudi Arabia.
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In the wake of Trump’s press conference, Saudi Arabia came out swinging. The Kingdom rejected any attempts to displace the Palestinians and added for good measure that its stance on the absolute need for a Palestinian state is not negotiable. This probably played well among the Saudi population and the surrounding Arab states looking to Saudi Arabia for leadership. But the Saudi position must be understood for what it is: an opening gambit in renewed negotiations between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
The negotiations between Trump and MBS were disrupted by the electoral victory of Joe Biden back in 2020. The Saudis were reportedly on the verge of joining the Abraham Accords—Trump’s crowning diplomatic achievement, which saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco signing normalization agreements with Israel. Trump’s defeat at the polls effectively ended this effort. As soon as Biden took office, he embraced policies pushed by the hard-left flank of his party that led to friction with Riyadh. Everything from America’s flaccid policy to combat the Houthi menace in Yemen to the embrace of renewable energy over oil to lingering tensions over the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Turkey made the pursuit of a Saudi-Israel normalization agreement during the Biden presidency untenable.
When China swooped down in the spring of 2023 and brokered a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia (the details of which are still not public), the Biden administration soon realized that antagonizing Riyadh had been an unforced error. The left’s obsession with demonizing Mohammed Bin Salman had yielded America a loss in the all-important global competition with China. Once a country squarely in the American camp, Saudi Arabia now appeared to be on the bubble.
After that, the Biden administration mounted efforts to restore ties with Riyadh. But Biden’s policy after October 7 undermined those efforts. Biden refused to hold the Islamic Republic of Iran accountable for the multifront proxy battle it waged against Israel and, to a lesser extent, the United States. The war raged from seven fronts—Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran. Biden fiddled while the region burned. What began with a policy of full-throated support for Israel gave way to the withholding of weapons and veiled allegations of Israeli war crimes. For historically skittish Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Arab states, this was a dismal display of weakness on the part of the world’s greatest power, even as regional air defenses coordinated by the United States neutralized the vast majority of ballistic missiles that Iran fired at Israel in April and October of last year.
If anything sparked a renewed interest for Riyadh in an agreement with Israel, it was the Jewish state’s remarkable military display of cunning and skill last year in spite of Biden’s lukewarm support. After getting the wind knocked out of them on October 7 and then sustaining attacks from multiple threat actors across the Middle East, the Israelis picked themselves up and proceeded to crush Hamas in Gaza, cripple Hezbollah in Lebanon, and destroy Iran’s air defenses and ballistic missile production capabilities.
Saudi Arabia, a country that views Iran and its proxies as a threat, sat up and took note. There was no question: Israel was still a regional power. It possessed perhaps an even more capable military than the world had previously imagined. For Saudi Arabia, an alliance with Israel would undeniably be an asset.
But the Saudi position remained murky. Saudi Arabia paid no cost for issuing statements supporting a Palestinian state and slamming Israeli aggression in Gaza while Biden was in charge; after all, Biden himself issued similar statements. For that matter, there may be no cost for similar statements now that Trump is back in the White House.
But the game has changed. The Saudis know that Trump wants a deal. And they do, too. What’s more, there are things the Saudis want beyond normalization with Israel. A mutual security pact has been floated. So has the question of uranium enrichment. Oil sales and weapons deals are always of interest to the Kingdom. So now, it’s a question of terms as the stage is set for negotiations to pick up where they left off in 2020.
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Trump has opened the negotiations by suddenly advocating a plan that looked outrageous to the eyes of the Arabs, including the mass evacuation of Gaza and the rebuilding of the coastal enclave—which, Trump says, they should actually pay for. Whether the Arabs know it or not, Trump ripped a page right out of his own book, The Art of the Deal. His offer is something that the other side could never accept. But now, the onus is on the Arabs to counter if they don’t like it. Should things continue in this vein, maybe then and only then will the terms of a feasible agreement come into focus.
Whether he knew it or not, Trump also took a page out of the Netanyahu playbook. In 2020, the Israeli prime minister threatened to annex significant chunks of the disputed territories in the West Bank—places that the Palestinians saw as vital to their national project. It was Bibi’s threat of annexation of what Israelis call Judea and Samaria that ultimately prompted the Emiratis to offer normalization in exchange for a four-year halt to Netanyahu’s plans. This ultimately yielded the Abraham Accords, which have held up remarkably well, even as war rocked the region.
Prior to the Hamas invasion and slaughter of Israeli innocents, the unofficial policy of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and others was “benign neglect.” These are not my words but the words of officials I met in the region in 2022. The overriding sense in the Middle East was that Palestinian obstinacy was the primary reason for continued war and misery. This was not wrong. And the Arab leaders I met rightly saw Israel as a country that could bring positive change to the region. After the war erupted in 2023, however, those perspectives appeared to shift. Images of death and destruction in Gaza shocked even the most hardened realists in the Arab world. It may take time for the raw emotions associated with the war to subside.
But even during the war, with nationalist fervor riding high, the contacts continued between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Normalization is a process, not an event. And while normalization did lose some momentum, the process was never arrested.
For Donald Trump, who has unfinished business on the brain, the question is how to harness that process and push it in the right direction. His reelection prompted a pause in Iran’s multifront war. This was cheered by the region. His re-initiation of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran also inspires the confidence of the Arab states that fear Iranian aggression. The president has yet to announce his support of the people of Iran, who will be instrumental in toppling their reviled regime. A successful attack on the Iranian nuclear program, should Trump decide to take such a risk, would be a game-changer in this regard, given Arab hostility toward the regime. Indeed, the president has a wide array of options at his disposal as he looks to get back to the business of deal-making in the Middle East—and that’s before trade and other transactional deals come into the picture.
Trump has floated a controversial idea that the Arab states don’t like. But it almost doesn’t matter what he offered. He got their attention. He has re-initiated a wider conversation about the future of the Middle East. Negotiations over the expansion of the Abraham Accords are now underway.
Photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
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