Trump’s ‘Gaza Riviera’ scheme may be more than a fantasy

It’s tempting to dismiss Donald Trump’s bid to take over Gaza as just another wild proposal, designed more to change the conversation and wrong-foot negotiating partners than as policy.

Call it talking crazy to force incremental wins. But watching his extraordinary news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, I think we need to be open to the idea that he could be serious.

Trump was reading from prepared remarks when he said the U.S. "will” take over the Gaza strip. His logic and language were those of any unscrupulous real estate developer, including his approach to the territory’s current, Palestinian, residents. "You don’t think you want to leave your homes,” the schtick would go, "but believe me you’ll be better off in these great new apartments we’ll make for you someplace else.”

For more indication that Trump’s "Project Riviera” may be a considered position, listen to what the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been saying about Gaza’s value as a "waterfront property” for at least a year. Or to Trump’s own language on Tuesday, right down to his praise for the materials used in building a U.S. embassy for Jerusalem, whose construction he ordered in during his first term.

Likewise, Trump’s choice of Steve Witkoff, a billionaire New York real estate investor, as his special envoy to the region. Witkoff’s eponymous company describes itself as: "One part developer. One part investor. One part landscape-changer.” With that mindset, Gaza must seem a unique opportunity: Beachfront property of uncertain legal ownership, with a wildly supportive neighbor and in obvious need of reconstruction.

Of course, you would have to think of this as a business deal for it to make any sense, because the moment you treat it as a foreign policy proposition it makes none whatsoever. Although some Palestinians in Gaza might leave if given the chance (some always take the buyout in a redevelopment), it’s highly unlikely that most would do so voluntarily, knowing they would never be allowed back.

Gaza is not a real estate prospect. It’s a highly complex, 70-year-old territorial dispute, made intractable by the politics of identity, religion, national determination and an accumulated history of violence and hate from both sides. A population of about 2 million would need to be removed by force, either at the point of a gun or through starvation and neglect. In either case, the only accurate way to describe that kind of population transfer would be ethnic cleansing.

Equally difficult would be to cajole Egypt into opening its border with Gaza to refugees or for that country or Jordan to accept hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as Trump’s plan would require. Both have refused point blank. Their own populations would see them as collaborating with the U.S. and Israel in a war crime against fellow Arabs. The political consequences could be extreme. The Gulf States are opposed for the same reason.

Any host governments would also inherit a major problem and burden. Palestinian demands for a return to their homeland and the terrorism that tends to follow when no political path forward is on offer wouldn’t go away. Hostility in the region toward the world’s only Jewish state would if anything grow. Relocating Gaza’s population would, after all, also relocate Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Jordan’s case is particularly acute. Israeli leaders have been talking about turning this young country — created only in 1920 and independent since 1946 — into a Palestinian state since at least former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. A majority of the Arab nation’s 11 million population are already of Palestinian origin.

Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy has worked hard to assimilate ethnic groups into a separate Jordanian national identity, precisely so the country didn’t just become an extension of the West Bank and all its problems. When Amman agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, it insisted on a clause to prohibit the "involuntary movements of persons in such a way as to adversely prejudice the security of either Party.”

Yet if Trump is serious about trying to strong-arm Israel’s neighbors into accepting what amounts to the end of Palestinian hopes for their own state, his argument needs to be broken down and dealt with. Because there are some things Trump said that were true, during his mind-bending news conference alongside a beaming Netanyahu.

It's a fact, for example, that Gaza is a demolition site, strewn with dangerous ordnance as a result of Israel’s punitive response to the horrors of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. And as any contractor will tell you, it would be cheaper and more efficient to raze it all to the ground and rebuild from scratch.

There have been redevelopment plans drawn up for Gaza before, in preparation for when Israel turned Gaza over to Palestinian rule in 2006. Among the proposals were an airport built out into the sea, an artificial island and port, new rail links, an industrial zone along the Egyptian border and more. Gaza’s first election after the Israeli withdrawal put an end to those dreams because Hamas, a party openly committed to the destruction of Israel, won.

It’s also a fact that reconstruction would take time and that it is hard to imagine any constructive solution for the strip working, so long as Hamas remains in control. Equally, with Israel still refusing to elaborate a day-after plan or path to a political settlement, the prospects for peace seem remote. Life would indeed, as Trump said, remain miserable for Gaza’s civilian population.

These problems need solving. If Trump’s goal is indeed just to shake Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States into involving themselves in Gaza’s reconstruction, without the condition that Israel first open the door to a two-state solution, then perhaps there is method to his madness.

But given how unlikely that is to succeed, the sooner he drops Project Riviera and starts grappling with how to reconcile Israeli and Palestinian interests, the better.