JERUSALEM—President Donald Trump declared on Saturday that he wants to resettle residents of the Gaza Strip in Arab countries, shaking up Middle East diplomacy in signature style.
The president told reporters on Air Force One that he had asked King Abdullah II of Jordan in a phone call earlier in the day to “take people” from war-torn Gaza and that he planned to make a similar request of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in a phone call on Sunday. Trump suggested that mass emigration from the strip, whether “temporarily” or “long term,” could help resolve “centuries” of conflict.
“You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. You know over the centuries it has had many, many conflicts, and I don’t know, something has to happen,” Trump said. “But it’s literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there. So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where [Gazans] can maybe live in peace for a change.”
The response from Israel was notably muted, and even politicians who have advocated Gazan emigration told the Washington Free Beacon that Egypt and Jordan were unlikely to agree to Trump’s requests. But some right-wing politicians hailed his proposal as an opportunity to break with decades of U.S. insistence on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“For years, politicians have proposed impractical solutions like dividing the land and establishing a Palestinian state, which endangered the existence and security of the world’s only Jewish state, leading only to bloodshed and suffering for many. Only out-of-the-box thinking and new solutions will bring about peace and security,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement. “I will work closely with the prime minister and the cabinet to ensure that there is an operational plan to implement this as soon as possible.”
Ohad Tal, a member of Israel’s parliamentary defense committee from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, told the Free Beacon that Trump had given a major boost to the “only logical and just solution” to the conflict.
“It will allow the Palestinians who leave to build a better future for themselves somewhere else, and it will minimize the conflict here, which is good for everyone,” said Tal, who has advocated Gazan emigration to Trump associates. “It’s good for Israel, it’s good for the region, and it’s good for the Americans, who don’t want to have to be bothered by the Palestinians starting a war every couple years.”
But Palestinian, Jordanian, and Egyptian leaders on Sunday reaffirmed their opposition to any large-scale resettlement of Palestinians.
“We call on the U.S. administration to cease these proposals, which align with Israeli plans and directly contradict the rights and free will of our people,” Hamas, the dominant Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza, said in a statement. “We also call on Arab and Islamic countries, especially our brothers in Egypt and Jordan, to reaffirm their steadfast positions in rejecting displacement and expulsion.”
President Mahmoud Abbas of the West Bank Palestinian Authority “strongly rejects and condemns any projects aimed at displacing our people from the Gaza Strip,” according to a statement from his office that did not specifically refer to Trump.
Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said in a statement, “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
While Egypt did not publicly comment, Saudi news station Al Hadath reported on Sunday that Sisi remained firmly opposed to accepting any Gazans into his country.
Despite the Arab rejectionism, Tal expressed confidence that ordinary Gazan would be ready to relocate and that Trump could find countries willing to cooperate with his proposal.
“It takes courage to execute new ideas,” Tal added. “But I think Trump is someone who has proven he can implement these kinds of ideas.”
Amit Halevi, a fellow member of the defense committee from the ruling Likud party, told the Free Beacon that Trump should lead an international effort to enable and encourage hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave Gaza, particularly young adults.
“They have no future under the Hamas regime,” he said. “They want to get out. Let them get out.”
Once relegated largely to Israel’s far right, talk of facilitating Gazan emigration went mainstream after Oct. 7, 2023, when several thousand Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians carried out a massacre and mass abduction in southern Israel, starting the war in the strip.
That November, Ram Ben Barack, a member of the centrist Yesh Atid party, and Danny Danon, then a Likud lawmaker and now Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling on “countries around the world to accept limited numbers of Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate.”
The following month, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting, “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”
But in January, a number of Israeli officials, chastened by international criticism, came out against their colleagues’ calls for Gazan immigration, saying the idea was unrealistic and harmful to Israel’s international standing.
“It’s clear that there is nobody in Israel who wouldn’t be happy if Gazans decided to emigrate voluntarily if they were happy to leave,” but that is not going to happen and public discussion of the issue is unhelpful, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar told Israel’s Ynet news site at the time. “We see the repercussions, we see what happened with the Americans.”
Gilad Kariv, a member of the left-wing Democrats party, was one of the few Israeli lawmakers to publicly oppose Trump’s proposal on Sunday.
“Israel has no interest in this happening,” Kariv told Israel’s 103FM radio, “certainly not in relation to Jordan because the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom is a clear security interest of Israel.”
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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