The lasting significance of Donald Trump’s stunning plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip and “permanently” resettle the roughly 2 million Palestinians who live there may be that it legitimized one option that, as a possible solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, had been widely considered beyond the pale.
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Trump’s plan would “solve” the Palestinian problem by physically removing Palestinians. It is one way to understand the devastation that Israel has caused in Gaza—to render it uninhabitable so that Palestinians would leave “voluntarily,” as the far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, put it. But it would also be a war crime and a crime against humanity, and surely invite further charges by the International Criminal Court, as well as global condemnation. A week ago, the idea was considered anathema.
That’s where Trump stepped in, at his Feb. 4 news conference beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later tried to walk back the President’s comments, suggesting that Trump meant the displacement to be only temporary while Gaza is rebuilt. But that is not what Trump said, which is why a smiling Netanyahu responded, “it’s worth paying attention to.” Since its founding in 1948, Israel has treated the forced deportation of Palestinians as permanent—which is why they refer to their expulsion from the land that became the Jewish state as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
If Trump seems either oblivious or unbothered by the implications of his plan, the world was not. Outrage at the proposal has been widespread, and the two governments that Trump envisions accepting the Palestinian refugees, Egypt and Jordan, want nothing to do with it. Indeed, it quickly became clear that Trump was largely speaking off the top of his head without any serious planning. Still, the damage had been done. Trump seemed to be embracing a blatantly illegal scheme.
Yet he could make amends by pushing the Israeli government toward a more just and sustainable peace. Palestinians must hope that Trump is willing to change course.
There have long been four options for ending the century-old conflict. The first would be to recognize the “one-state reality” that Israel and Palestine have become because of extensive Jewish settlements. An occupying power’s transfer of its population to occupied territory is a war crime, in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, but successive Israeli governments have ignored that prohibition, and the U.S. government has kept billions of dollars of aid flowing anyway. The settlement project was pursued in part to render a Palestinian state impossible.
The view from a West Bank hilltop is illustrative. The proliferation of Israeli settlements, outposts, and bypass roads have left the West Bank a Swiss cheese of Palestinian enclaves. In 2017 B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights group, counted 165 disconnected “islands,” leaving no prospect of a viable contiguous state.
The option of a single state would recognize that reality. It would abandon the goal of a Palestinian state but insist that all residents between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River be given equal rights in the overarching state. But Israeli governments of all stripes have opposed a single state because roughly the same number of Jews and Palestinians live in these lands, and the government wants to maintain a substantial Jewish majority.
Netanyahu prefers the status quo, which is the second option. Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, each Israeli government has claimed to be open to negotiating about a Palestinian state. But that is a fiction, an excuse to stall, as settlements continue to expand. After more than five decades of occupation and three decades of a supposed “peace process,” it is no longer tenable to regard Israel’s occupation as merely temporary. The “peace process” is moribund.
Every serious human rights organization that has examined that occupation has determined it is apartheid—a regime for the Jewish population to dominate and repress the Palestinian one. The situation might have been defended for a short time pending the establishment of a Palestinian state, but there is no state on the horizon. That is why there is growing recognition that the status quo is intolerable.
Forced mass expulsion is the third option, promoted by the Israeli far-right. It would avoid the obligation of granting everyone equal rights in a single state and the opprobrium of the current apartheid. It is the option that Trump shamefully embraced at the news conference, but the President could redeem himself by moving on to the fourth option—a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state sitting side by side. Netanyahu has devoted his political life to avoiding that option. So long as he had the backing of the Republican Party, he felt secure in his intransigence. But if Trump were to endorse it, Netanyahu would suddenly find himself isolated.
Why would Trump do that? Because he sees himself as a master dealmaker and wants to negotiate a separate deal, between Israel and Saudi Arabia, one that would cement a regional alliance against Iran. The Saudi government has made clear that the price of normalizing relations with Israel is a Palestinian state.
Trump prides himself as a disruptor, a leader who doesn’t accept things just because they have long been that way. Rather than urge a reprehensible war crime as the solution to the Gaza conflict, he could be a more constructive disruptor if he were to pivot and insist, despite Netanyahu’s protests, on a Palestinian state.
We know Trump is capable of pressuring Netanyahu. He was instrumental in making the current ceasefire in Gaza come about. Far more intense pressure will be needed to secure a Palestinian state, but the reward would be far greater as well. And Trump would indeed enshrine himself in history as a deal maker par excellence.
