Fading hopes

US President Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and said he wants neighbouring countries Egypt and Jordan to take Palestinians from the territory, as a fragile truce between Israel and Hamas aimed at permanently ending the war continues. The truce deal that came into effect in January saw four Israeli hostages and around 200 Palestinian prisoners released to joyful scenes recently. However, after 15 months of war, Trump called Gaza a “demolition site” and said he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory. Most Gazans are Palestinian refugees or their descendants. For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark historical memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation 75 years ago. Egypt has previously warned against any “forced displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai desert, which Sisi said could jeopardise the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979. Jordan is already home to around 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees, according to the United Nations. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million, adding that “something has to happen”. “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said, adding that moving Gaza’s inhabitants could be “temporarily or could be long term”.

The vast majority of Gaza’s people have been displaced, often multiple times, by the Gaza war that began after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Trump’s new administration has promised “unwavering support” for Israel, without yet laying out details of its Middle East policy. He has confirmed that he had ordered the Pentagon to release a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs for Israel which was blocked by his predecessor Joe Biden. In Gaza, Palestinian police prevented hundreds of displaced people from reaching the Israeli-controlled passage to the north, where Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles were blocking the road. The Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said Gazans were not allowed to approach the Netzarim Corridor, through which they have to pass to reach their homes in the north, “until it is announced open”. “These instructions will remain in effect” until further notice and until “Hamas fulfils its commitments”, Adraee said. The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.” Barely a month into his presidency, Donald Trump tore up the United States foreign policy playbook, wanting to ethnically cleanse Gaza, dump the proxy war in Ukraine and annex Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s tempting to think these are the moves of an unpredictable despot. But the US is dealing with unprecedented challenges to its dominance in the world. Far from being irrational, Trump is responding to this decline of US supremacy like his other predecessors, favouring a “go it alone” approach on the contrary. The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s were an attempt to send a signal that the US was still the top power in the world. But its defeats in the Middle East accelerated its crisis of dominance.

When Trump was first elected in 2016, he was seen as a threat to this liberal international order. Liberal political scientists Robert Keohane and Jeff D Colgan said: “The time has come to acknowledge this reality. We have to push for policies that can save the liberal order before it is too late.” But Trump’s aggressive stance was responding to the challenge of China. In 2018, the White House said that “great power competition” was the main challenge facing the US rather than the war on terror. The crisis of US hegemony accelerated since Trump left office in 2021. The threat of China has only grown — epitomised by the development and popularity of its DeepSeek AI crashing the US stock market. Joe Biden’s presidency built on many of Trump’s policies. He continued the trade war with China, and passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, which sought to invest in US manufacturing to increase its competitiveness with China. But Biden stuck with America’s web of alliances while Trump sees allies as draining US resources and not paying their own way. His “America First” approach goes against “multilateral agreements” between the US and many allies. Instead, he wants to focus on bilateral agreements with countries. Trump’s calls to ethnically cleanse Gaza are similarly a bid for imperialist control over the Middle East. Even Trump’s own cabinet is divided over the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it would only be “temporary”.

Trump is threatening Jordan’s King Abdullah II with withdrawing funding if he refuses to align with the plan. However, the Arab regimes accepting the plan could spark revolt in the region against dictatorship, imperialism and Israel. The rulers of Egypt and Jordan are haunted by the memory of the Arab Spring of 2011. And a return of that revolutionary force would cause more crises for the US. Its allies and adversaries alike have denounced Trump’s proposal for the United States to take ownership of the Gaza Strip, forcing 2 million Palestinians to move to other countries and then turn the territory along the Mediterranean Sea into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Global reaction to Trump’s suggestion was swift and mostly universally opposed to the projected idea. Britain, China, Germany, Ireland, Russia and Spain all said they continue to support a two-state solution — the creation of an independent Palestinian state that would include Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank existing next to Israel. The two-state proposal, aimed at ending decades of Middle East conflict and wars, has long been the bedrock of US policy in the region even though Benjamin Netanyahu’s government opposes it. As options to relocate Palestinians in Gaza continue, India’s External Affairs minister S Jaishankar backed the ‘two-state solution’ to resolve the conflict at the meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Johannesburg recently. This was the first time an Indian minister reiterated India’s support for the same since Trump announced his plan. On US efforts to end the Ukraine war engaging only Russia and not Ukraine, Jaishankar underlined India’s position backing direct engagement between the two parties to end the conflict. “On the Middle East, we welcome the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release, support humanitarian assistance, condemn terrorism, and advocate a two-state solution,” he added.

Saudi Arabia, an important oil-producing American ally in the Middle East, in a sharply worded statement, said its call for an independent Palestinian state was a “firm, steadfast and unwavering position”. Netanyahu offered support for the plan, saying that one of his war goals is to ensure that Palestinian militant group Hamas never again poses a threat to Israel. But Trump, Netanyahu said, is “taking it to a much higher level.” “I think it’s something that could change history, and it’s worthwhile really pursuing this avenue,” he added. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called for the United Nations to “protect the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights,” saying that what Trump wanted to do would be “a serious violation of international law”. Hamas said Trump’s Gaza proposal was a “recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region. Instead of holding the Zionist occupation accountable for the crime of genocide and displacement, it is being rewarded, not punished.” Even before Trump called for US ownership of Gaza, Egypt and Jordan had in recent days rejected his suggestion that Gaza’s Palestinian population be relocated to their countries. Egypt’s foreign ministry issued a statement stressing the need for rebuilding in Gaza “without moving the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip”. United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk said recently that deporting people from Israeli-occupied Gaza was illegal. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a speech that “in the search for solutions, we must not make the problem worse. It is vital to stay true to the bedrock of international law. It is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.” Trump’s Gaza proposal was his first major Middle East policy statement since taking office for a second four-year term. Trump said he envisioned building a resort on the shores of the Mediterranean where international communities could live in harmony.

Much of the coastal territory currently lies in ruins, after more than 15 months of Israeli bombardment that has killed more than 47,000 people, more than half of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military says it has killed 17,000 Hamas militants. Trump’s Gaza proposal comes amid a ceasefire to halt the fighting that erupted on October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and capturing 250 hostages. About 60 living captives are still believed to be held by Hamas. At his news conference, Trump had said: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, levelling the site, getting rid of the destroyed buildings, levelling it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent, in a really magnificent area,” he said. Trump offered no details on how he plans to exert control over Gaza, which has been decimated by the war, but he did not rule out sending in US troops. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that. We’re going to take over that piece, and we’re going to develop it,” he said.

Views expressed are personal