Opinion | Trump’s Gaza Deal: War Crimes in Exchange for Beachfront Property

Trump’s proposition, the pundit Amit Segal said on Israel’s Channel 12, is “not 100 percent what Netanyahu wants — it’s 200 percent.” 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 cease-fire 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 two 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.

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 cease-fire 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.