Trump’s Gaza Plan May Lead To Uprisings Across The Middle East

It’s difficult to listen to US president Donald Trump’s recent statements on Gaza and not be left aghast.

First was his revelation that the US intends to “own” Gaza and “clean out” the Palestinians who live there so that he can turn the Strip into the ‘Riviera’ of the Middle East. Then came the edict that Jordan and Egypt need to absorb two million displaced Gazans, lest their annual aid be cut. “They will do it, okay?”, he insisted.

Finally, was the ultimatum that all remaining Israeli captives held in Gaza be released by an arbitrary date and time unilaterally determined by Trump - high noon on Saturday 15 February - or “all hell is gonna break loose.”

Scarcely a month earlier, Trump himself was bragging about his team’s role in bringing about the Israel-Hamas ceasefire to begin with. But then the deal wasn’t good enough, and the US had the right to intervene in its terms and conditions – not only regarding dates, times and numbers of captives released, but even regarding its entire endgame.

The unhinged nature of Trump’s running commentary on Gaza oozes a desperate need for recognition – as though the world isn’t speaking enough about the ‘new sheriff in town’, with his big guns and “out of the box” thinking down at the local saloon.

Trump’s attempts to combine predatory real estate practices with ‘great game’ geostrategy would be considered comic under most circumstances. But there’s nothing particularly funny about applying vulture capitalism to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Facing Gaza

In the end it should be remembered that despite his pomp, Trump was never a successful businessman. He received a million dollar leg-up from his father when he began his career but still declared business bankruptcy six times before becoming a reality TV ‘star’. He also developed a reputation for racism and is said to have deprived hundreds of people who worked for him of their pay.

Seen in this light, ‘the statesman’ may only be a radically scaled-up version of Trump ‘the developer’, using bullying and bravado to obfuscate what’s really going on.

But what is that?

Let’s first explore what the Trump ideas aren’t.

Here, it is worth noting that the idea to transform Gaza into expensive real estate isn’t particularly original.

Singapore and Hong Kong have tended to be the tired go-to fantasies of Western projections for the Gaza Strip, with the World Bank and Thomas Friedman giving currency to these visions in earlier eras. But the truth is that no Western power has ever wanted to face the reality of Gaza and the abhorrent injustice it represents.

The territory only exits by dint of continued international complicity in the injustice of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of southern and coastal Palestine, not to mention, the festering political and humanitarian wounds this act continues to generate 77 years later.

In this respect, Trump’s ‘Gazan Riviera’ idea only continues a shameless tradition of complicity and cowardess in the Gaza obscenity, as the West seeks new slight-of-hand tricks instead of admitting it never had anything to offer Palestinians yesterday, or today.

It’s also worth asserting that Gaza fantasization has never been anything other than a prolonged nightmare. Israel repeatedly bombs the territory back to the “stone ages” irrespective of these plans and has now created conditions of pre-history, where life itself is unsustainable.

Western declinism?

It nonetheless should be acknowledged that Trump’s plans are novel in at least two respects. First, is his unapologetic call for the mass transfer of Palestinians from Gaza as a means to overcome what he refers to as the territory’s predilection for being “unlucky.”

Second is Trump’s suggestion of actual US ownership, as Gaza is added to the  list of territories he aspires to directly colonise.

How these ideas jive with his neoisolationist tendencies, or the peacemaker reputation he supposedly covets, is anyone’s guess. But that’s precisely the point.

Trump’s bluster and brinkmanship are so ideologically and politically incoherent, and so tinged with delusions of genius and grandeur, that they hardly reflect strength and vision – quite the opposite.

Indeed, they smack of late-imperial magical thinking, overly reliant on intimidation and force, and conceived in a broader context of Western declinism and approaching Israeli terminability.

Should we be surprised by this?

The very re-election of Trump speaks to deep-seated democratic and institutional crises within the US liberal political and institutional orders. Re-electing the same man who attempted to foment a coup that resulted in seven deaths in Washington speaks volumes about the failure of the US system to discipline him, or at the very least, protect the country from insider threats of such orders – rich, white charlatans with an army of aggressive lawyers.

This track record should have been a sign that Uncle Sam was in fact, far sicker than the images posted on Instagram.

As we now watch the Trump administration fill up with a wild collection of gangsters and not-so-disguised neo-Nazis, one should hardly be surprised where this dystopian zombie party bus is heading.

Of course, while it is one thing to surround oneself with sycophants and hustlers for the purpose of witch-hunting ‘woke folk’, or establishing monumental rackets of conflicts of interest, it is quite another to expect the world to join you for a two-step on what could be a last sail on the Titanic.

US policies in the Middle East

Trump’s drunken gun-toting quickly set off five-alarm warnings across the Middle East, and with good reason. In one fell swoop, the US president was abandoning a host of traditional policies that long served US imperial designs, irrespective of whether the administration was democratic or republican.

Gone is the personage of the ‘honest broker’, which the US played in its theatrical appearances across the Arab and Islamic world stage for decades. Now there is unapologetic fealty for ethnic cleansing, openly siding US policy with the most extreme right-wing line on the Zionist spectrum.

If Trump and Israel really do attempt to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the very cornerstones of US historic policies in the region would collapse overnight. The Arab and Muslim worlds would clearly see what ultimately happens when they don’t resist their elites signing peace deals with Israel. The sense of betrayal could not indefinitely be contained.

The 1979 Camp David Accords invaluably served US policy in the Middle East for generations, removing the largest Arab country from the circle of engagement with Israel. It also effectively corrupted the Egyptian officer class. Camp David also paved the way for other Arab states to cut their own bilateral deals with Israel at the expense of a unified Arab position towards supporting Palestinian rights.

 If ethnic cleansing of Gaza is attempted however, this entire political trajectory, together with the political and economic classes that engaged in it regionally, would be delegitimised and find themselves targeted by their peoples or armies for replacement.

Western assets and interests would equally find it difficult to avoid getting wet from the regional flood gates opened by these acts, given how closely the Western bloc has already backed Israel in its genocide.

While this dynamic wouldn’t necessarily happen overnight, significant aspects of it actually could take place faster than expected with the right combination of coups or popular mobilisations.

This is why the sclerotic Arab regimes quickly mobilised to present a common front against the Trump plans. They know only too well that the region’s current socio-economic and political arrangement is so precarious that it wouldn’t take much to destabilise it.

Indeed, who could have predicted that a dispute between an unlicensed fruit vendor and local cop in rural Tunisia in 2010 could set off a forest fire so large that it consumed the entire Arab world, from Morocco to Bahrain, resulting in six different Arab regimes overthrown?

Make no mistake, the embers of these fires still smolder within the ashes.

Moreover, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the broader horrific policies Israel and the West have perpetuated in Palestine, relate directly to the Arab and Muslim worlds’ identities, histories, religions and cultures.

Trump’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing and plans for recolonising Gaza also suggest a willingness to commit crimes of monumental global and historic proportions. Trump does this in an era where global systems of accountability are weakening, while personal vulnerability and precarity is also increasing.

Trump’s plan constitutes a clear threat, and a return to earlier eras of darkness regarding Western colonial butchery across the ‘Third world’. It would be a seismic turn in Western imperial history and there would be no reason why the Palestinians should have to face this new/old world order alone, especially if it means the failure to resist would invite these forces to target your state next.

Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American academic and author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory.” He has worked in various capacities across the OPT as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher, including in Gaza for several UN bodies since 1997, and was most recently the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant's Jerusalem Branch - the Kenyon Institute. He also writes for the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka.

Follow him on X: @thaddad

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.