A few days ago, a European-Israeli real estate developer had a surprise call from an old friend, now at the White House. The friend wanted to ask him some informal but detailed questions: about banking regulations involving investments in the Palestinian territories, access to the energy grid and possible tie-ups with major Gulf construction giants.
To the developer, who asked not to be named discussing private conversations, it felt like “déjà vu”: a repeat of discussions held five and a half years ago, when Donald Trump was last in power and was formulating his ill-fated “peace to prosperity” plan for Israel and the Palestinians.
That 2020 plan — which proposed a massive land grab for Israel, a $50bn reconstruction fund for Gaza and a capital for Palestinians in a dusty, poor suburb separated from East Jerusalem by a hulking wall — fizzled after a complete boycott from Palestinians.
This time around, the US president’s plans are even more brazen. Unveiled on Tuesday at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who could barely suppress his glee, the most powerful man in the world voiced a long-held ambition of the Israeli far-right: the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their land.
“We’re going to take over that place, we’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands of thousands of jobs and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of,” Trump said.
As for the Palestinians who call Gaza home, he added, “we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts . . . and build various domains” for Gazans to live in.
The previously fringe idea, that the impoverished and blockaded enclave could become a “Dubai on the Mediterranean” if not for Hamas, appears to have found an audience in Trump’s inner circle.
Last year Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on the Middle East during his first administration, told students at Harvard University that moving Palestinians out of Gaza to either Egypt (“with the right diplomacy”) or temporarily into Israel’s Negev desert would help Israel win its war with Hamas.
That, in turn, would help free up Gaza’s coastal land, he argued. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,” he said, adding that Hamas’s rule had made investments in education and innovation impossible. “From Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and clean it up.”
In the history of Trump’s interventions in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which spanned a comparatively peaceful four years during his first term, and are now resurfacing during a shaky ceasefire, a clear pattern emerged.
Where Trump could overturn long-standing US positions by edict alone, that was done quickly. In 2017, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and in 2019 accepted Israeli claims to the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied since 1967. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — long admonished as obstacles to peace, and violations of international law — were suddenly rendered legal under US law.
But ideas that required working with Palestinians to build consensus, and forcing Israelis to make concessions, died on the vine. It was this genre of grandiose proposals, like the “peace to prosperity” plan, that Trump appears to have fallen back on this week.
This time, however, it comes after 16 months of the most devastating war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel’s ferocious offensive on Gaza, which followed Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, has left much of the strip in ruins and triggered a humanitarian crisis that is far from over, even as the first phase of a ceasefire went into effect last month.
Trump’s idea, which builds on his calls last month to “clean out” Gaza, threatens a repeat of what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes during the 1948 war that birthed Israel. It is an outcome that war-weary Gazans are determined to avoid repeating.
“In the end, the biggest strength of Palestinians is the right to say no [to a bad peace deal],” said a person close to the Palestinian leadership, who had spoken to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about Trump’s surprise announcement this week. “We said no to Trump before. We will say it again.”
That did not prevent Trump from outmanoeuvring the ageing and unpopular Palestinian leadership before. During his first term, he cut aid to Palestinians and closed their Washington mission, punishing them for refusing to enter negotiations.
And after he revealed his map in January 2020, the threat that Israel would unilaterally annex vast swaths of the West Bank helped prompt the United Arab Emirates to abandon decades of official enmity with Israel and sign the Abraham Accords six months later. (It later emerged that Trump had also agreed to fast-track the sale of F-35 jets to the UAE as a sweetener.)
That cracked open the prospect that Israel could make peace with its Arab and Gulf neighbours without making peace with the Palestinians, ending a decades-long taboo and undermining a cornerstone of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative”.
Trump is now determined to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which considers itself a leader of the Sunni Muslim world. In Tuesday’s press conference he said the US takeover of Gaza would ease that goal, which eluded him in his first term.
Saudi Arabia immediately disagreed, saying in a statement hours later that it rejected any attempts to “displace the Palestinian people from their land”.
The real estate developer who spoke to the person at the White House said the questions he was asked appeared to bypass the immediate issues in Gaza and seemed theoretical. “Let’s see,” he said. “It was a serious discussion. But it was serious [five years ago] too.”
But he said he was surprised to see the discussions jump from possible future development in Gaza by foreign firms to Trump proposing the expulsion of Palestinians. “All of that is politics, I am not involved,” he said, distancing himself. “But this is Trump, everything is negotiations, high level.”
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who worked with Abbas during a failed round of negotiations in the early-2000s, suggested the same — that the threat of the hugely destabilising displacement of 2.3mn Palestinians into neighbouring countries was a precursor to talks over other, perhaps equally unpalatable, options for the future of the strip.
“I think that this is directed at the Arab states and saying to the Arab states: ‘Put pressure on Hamas to accept whatever it is that we want to see done’,” she said. “If you don’t accept our terms for what is coming next, then the alternative is that you’re going to be kicked out and sent to the Sinai [in Egypt] and into Jordan.”
Indeed, Trump made clear his expectations for Hamas in the immediate future — the successful completion of the staggered Israeli hostage-for-Palestinian prisoner releases, now in its third week.
“We’d like to get all of the hostages out, and if we don’t, it will just make us somewhat more violent,” he said.
Additional reporting by Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut
