Wrecking Ball to the Middle East Status Quo

By Michael Oren

A diplomatic coup de main or more Trumpian madness? A strategic move like Trump’s threatened tariffs for Canada and Mexico—or a sincere proposal to take over a strip in the Middle East? Depending on who you ask, President Trump’s pronouncements on the Middle East, made in the presence of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could be described either way.

To review his breathtaking remarks: the President of the United States said that his country “will take over the Gaza Strip,” clear rubble and unexploded ordnance, and “develop it” into an Eastern Mediterranean Riviera.

Meanwhile, Gaza’s Palestinians could move to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land,” possibly in an Arab country such as Jordan or Egypt. He announced that Saudi Arabia would make peace with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state, essentially as the United Arab Emirates and three others did under the Abraham Accords of Trump’s first term. And, for good measure, he pledged to reimpose sanctions on Iran, and reduce its oil exports to zero.

“I’m hopeful that this. . . will end the bloodshed and killing once and for all,” Trump declared, and “rebuild American strength throughout the region.”

Bibi beamed. Others around the world recoiled, denouncing what they considered a U.S.-Israel plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, resettle it with Israelis—and maybe enrich Trump or his family—while dispatching U.S. troops into yet another Middle Eastern quagmire.

What on earth could Trump be thinking?

By Wednesday afternoon, Trump had backpedaled on some of the more extreme aspects of his plan. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “The Trump administration does not intend to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza, nor has it made any commitment to send U.S. troops there.”

But just as Trump’s retreat from the brink with Canada and Mexico did not signal an abandonment of tariffs as an economic and political weapon, he is sticking with what was most transformational about his initial statement—which he said was not improvised but resulted from “a lot of months” of study: Neither Gaza nor the West Bank will become a Palestinian state on his watch, and that indeed, a Palestinian state is not necessary to a resolution of the regional conflict.

Previous administrations—both Republican and Democratic—had viewed the Israel-Palestine conflict as the source of regional instability, which could be solved only through establishment of a Palestinian state. This theory, known in policy circles as “linkage,” has determined American strategy toward the conflict for the past 30 years.

This policy persisted despite the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of statehood offers (in 1937, 1948, 2000, 2001, and 2008). It persisted despite their refusal to discuss whether their state would be democratic and secular or totalitarian and Islamist. It persisted—most alarmingly—despite their refusal to promise whether they would ever make a permanent peace with Israel.

Even Trump paid a certain homage to the two-state solution in his first term, incorporating a version of it in the peace plan he dubbed the “deal of the century.”

The Palestinians’ failure to preserve their mini-state in Gaza, and their overwhelming support for the horrors of October 7, 2023, did little to temper two-state groupthink in Washington and across the West. If anything, it caused many, especially among liberals, to advocate it even more insistently.

For Trump today, the core problem in the Middle East is not the absence of a fantasized state for the Palestinians, but the presence of a Palestinian population condemned to pursue conflict, both by their socioeconomic circumstances and by their addiction to a victimhood narrative.

Hamas and its supporters may stand on Gaza’s ruins, declaring victory to the Muslim world and misery to the West, but Trump isn’t buying it. No more will America abide Hamas’s Pyrrhic victories, he seems to say, nor enable the Palestinians’ addiction.

In his view, the cause of the Palestinian problem is not Israel’s policies but the lack of economic opportunity in the “demolition site”—his phrase—of Gaza.

Once the problem of Gaza is resolved—so the president apparently holds—the Saudis and perhaps other Sunni states can reconcile with Israel. A region long mired in economic stagnation and strife will enjoy unprecedented productivity and peace.

Even if Trump’s radical vision could be realized, however, the overall threat of Iran would remain. On this point, Trump makes a total departure from long-standing U.S. policy. Unlike Biden and Obama, who believed Iran could be incentivized to behave less malignantly, Trump knows that the ayatollahs cannot be bought but only coerced.

Though he appears to prefer to negotiate with Iran rather than bomb it, the president vowed to reimpose the punishing sanctions which, during his previous term, dried up Tehran’s terror-supporting cash reserves. “Hamas was not being funded,” he recalled during the press conference. “Hezbollah was not being funded. Nobody was being funded.”

With his revolutionary words, Trump may have forever changed the discourse, yet it remains to be seen how, or if, any of them translate into action. Exactly how can 2.5 million Palestinians be relocated and, with every Arab state objecting to the plan, to where? Will the Saudis agree to peace with Israel without Palestinian independence, and will Iran try to ply Trump with a nuclear deal only marginally better than Obama’s?

Pretty big questions, which might be answerable—or not. The one certainty of the second Trump administration, daily demonstrated since its inauguration, is that nothing is certain.

For the Middle East, long hampered by chronically failed policies, that may be encouraging news.