Of all the pronouncements President Donald Trump has made in the past few months—from nominating Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general to coveting the land of American allies such as Greenland, Panama, and Canada—none has landed with as ham-fisted a thud as the declaration that the United States of America would be an ideal steward for the administration and “long-term ownership” of Gaza.
Ownership by whose sanction? On whose terms? And on what planet?
Put aside the colonialist audacity of the idea. Or the prioritization of property over people. (Where to place 2 million civilians, many of them already displaced?) Or the purported desire to Make Gaza Beautiful Again—for “the world’s people.” Or the tone-deaf messaging to the Palestinian people and their supporters across the globe. (When the president insisted that most Gazans “would be thrilled” with living elsewhere, I was reminded of former first lady Barbara Bush speaking about New Orleans evacuees after Hurricane Katrina: “They all want to stay in Texas…. So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this…this is working very well for them.”)
The main takeaway is that Trump’s assertion yesterday in the White House East Room projects an administration with an unserious foreign policy. The Americanization of Gaza—for all the talk of its being an “out of the box” idea—is a cockamamie, dead-on-arrival, diplomatically disastrous notion. It is a children’s fable from the hungry wolf’s perspective.
President Donald Trump, US First lady Melania Trump , Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi put their hands on an illuminated globe during the inauguration ceremony of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 21, 2017.by Bandar Algaloud / Saudi Royal Council/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
The consequences are already reverberating in every world capital. And it is not hard to imagine the continued fallout. Let me list just a few of the possibilities…
- Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, ISIS and al-Qaida, largely on their heels over the past year, may be newly emboldened.
- There are very real risks of spikes in antisemitism (already at levels unseen since World War II) and anti-Americanism (at home and abroad).
- China could perceive US designs on overseas territory as sending a signal that America might turn a blind eye to Beijing’s own regional designs on Taiwan. Ditto for Russia, with regard to Eastern Europe.
- The dreams of revived talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be dashed for the foreseeable future. (The Saudis were quick to state that relations with Israel would not be possible without a two-state solution.) American and Israeli ties to Egypt and Jordan would be tested, to say the least.
- During Trump’s first term, his first foreign visit was to Saudi Arabia, where he posed with his hosts beside a glowing orb. That fading image has been replaced with one of Trump standing shoulder to shoulder in the Oval with a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu. What might the world make of this lockstep American–Middle Eastern bro-hood, already exemplified by Joe Biden’s embrace of Bibi on an airport tarmac?
- The notion that the executive branch already sanctions lawlessness at home could be reinforced by a plan that, on its face, violates international humanitarian law.
- The reputation of America, a country often lauded as a beacon of democracy, could be further eroded (whither USAID, anyone?) so that an old trope reemerges, tried and true as it may be: that a land of freedom was built, from its inception, on systemic land grabs from Indigenous peoples.
And that’s just for starters.
In fact, we should have seen this coming. Trump telegraphed the idea last year in an interview with Hugh Hewitt: “They never took advantage of it, you know, as a developer. It could be the most beautiful place—the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East.”