Be Careful What You Wish For: Gaza Edition

Trump has laid a trap for Israel

About a month ago, I wrote a piece, intended as Swiftian satire, calling for the MAGA folks to think bigger in their dreams of territorial expansion. We shouldn’t just be buying Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and bullying Canada into becoming the 51st state. We should look at the whole world as a real estate investment opportunity.

The idea of taking over an overcrowded war zone never crossed my mind. But of course, it also never occurred to me that even President Donald Trump would propose taking over a territory and simply removing the population already living there.

My initial inclination when Trump announced his Gaza “plan” was not to take it seriously at all. But he hasn’t dropped the subject in the face of global incredulity, so while I still can’t imagine it happening, I can no longer rule out the possibility that he means what he says, and that therefore countries in the region are going to have to figure out how to respond.

And therein lies the trap. Not primarily for America’s Arab allies. They’ll come under some degree of pressure to go along with the scheme, and America does have leverage to bring to bear given Egypt’s massive external debt, Jordan’s dependence on American aid, and the Gulf states dependence on America for security. But these countries fear the political impact of an influx of Palestinian refugees far too much for me to imagine them even tacitly assisting, and what Trump is proposing requires far more than tacit assistance. He’s asking them to welcome in a radicalized population already dominated by terrorist organizations that could threaten their governments directly and also draw Israeli reprisals for cross-border attacks much as Hezbollah has in Lebanon, not to mention incense their own populations by supporting Israeli/American ethnic cleansing. I can’t see how any country has enough leverage to overcome all that.

And if, somehow, America did win promises to take in two million Palestinian refugees, how, precisely would they be removed from Gaza? Some people would undoubtedly go willingly, perhaps many—but Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the other organizations won’t, and they’ll use violence to prevent others from taking any such deal. So executing this scheme requires the extirpation of precisely the organizations that the IDF weren’t able to destroy after over a year of brutal urban warfare. If you purchase a piece of real estate in Florida and plan to demolish the buildings on it to build something new, you can evict the tenants and the police will come to remove them if they refuse to go. But there are no police to call to evict the people of Gaza.

For all of these reasons, I put the odds of any action on Trump’s scheme at close to zero. But that’s precisely why it’s a trap for Israel.

Israel has, for most of the past twenty years, been trying to pretend that Gaza doesn’t exist. In the wake of October 7th, of course, that’s no longer possible—but Trump’s plan makes it seem like it still is. Trump has effectively joined his voice to the most extreme right-wing segments of the Israeli political spectrum, the ones who openly talk about population transfer, and promised to achieve their goals painlessly. True, Gaza might not become Israeli territory, but the model he seems to be following implies a decades-long period of effective investor control of the territory, and those investors will have no reason to invite the expelled Gazans back, even as workers. The UAE is staffed by people from Bangladesh, not from Gaza. A quick rub of the lamp, make a wish, and Gaza will be gone, replaced by something completely benign.

After the trauma of October 7th and the subsequent war, it’s not so surprising that 65% of Israelis in a recent poll (which included Palestinian Israelis) want Trump to rub the lamp, with only 10% rejecting it as immoral because it required the forced displacement of the Gazan population. But what that means is that an overwhelming majority of Israelis are now saying, directly, that they support the physical removal of the Palestinian people. It’s not just Trump that has joined the far right; it’s the Israeli mainstream.

What happens, though, when they discover there is no lamp, no genie, and that, four years from now, with Trump out of office, Gaza is still there?

That’s why I say Trump has laid a trap for Israel. It’s partly a diplomatic trap—support for Trump’s eviction scheme will confirm much of the world’s preexisting opinion of Israel—but that’s not the main dimension. The main dimension is domestic. Trump has helped cement the contours of Israeli opinion in an untenable position. The people have been promised that their wish will be granted, but the liar who made that promise is beyond the reach of the Israeli people to punish when he doesn’t deliver. So they’ll punish whoever they can. And that, rather than an actual reckoning with the state’s pre-October 7th policy, I fear that will be the dynamic driving Israeli politics for years to come.