America’s annexation of Gaza won’t happen

The first thing that must be said about President Donald Trump’s proposal regarding Gaza is that forcibly removing 2 million people is immoral and illegal.

The plan also ignores the fundamental drivers of Palestinian politics. Gazans and Palestinians more broadly—much like Israelis—have shown for over the better part of a century that the pursuit of a better life for individuals is not the only motivation governing their choices. Palestinians are highly motivated by their national cause, as evidenced by all they’ve sacrificed for it individually over many decades. Viewed from the outside, it is easy to underestimate the power of nationalism in any setting—Palestinian, Israeli, and other. Steadfastness on the land in the face of adversity—“sumud”—is a foundational Palestinian value, especially with the memory of 1948 still alive in people’s minds. Palestinian political opposition to the plan is and will continue to be vehement.

Allowing those Gazans who would want to emigrate to do so would be both the legal and the moral thing to do, as in any war zone. There are likely Gazans who would want to give their families a chance at a better life elsewhere. Some of them might have left months or years ago, had neighboring Egypt, Israel, or another country, permitted their entry. But this is not the plan Trump presented.

The plan is also highly impractical. For one thing, it requires the active support of several Arab countries who would not, and could not, offer it. Arab polities held the Palestinian national cause above nearly all others for decades as a central element of their politics and collective narrative, often to the cynical benefit of their rulers. For Arab countries, assisting the removal of the Palestinians from Gaza and the transfer of the Gaza Strip to American “long-term” ownership would betray the very idea of Palestinian and Arab nationalism. It would not be a mere matter of a major diplomatic concession, such as Egypt or the Abraham Accord countries normalizing relations with Israel in 1979 and 2020, respectively. Instead, it undermines a central facet of Arab governments’ own core political legitimacy. For Jordan, it would also touch the most sensitive and long-standing third rail of domestic Jordanian society, the balance between “East Bankers” and those of Palestinian descent, with major demographic and political consequences. Hundreds of thousands of new Palestinian refugees could put new economic pressure on Jordan and threaten regime stability.

Arab support would also be necessary for Gaza’s reconstruction. Trump is correct that Gaza, as it currently stands, would need enormous efforts and funds to recover. This would almost necessarily require funds from Gulf partners, who, with the exception of Qatari aid to Hamas and the Hamas-led government prior to October 7, 2023, have shown little willingness in recent years to hand out funds to Palestinians. They would instead want to invest in something, as has been their recent practice. While the Arab Gulf states are less sensitive to the Palestinian cause than Jordan or Egypt, it too has Arab and domestic constituencies. Making Gaza American and Palestinian-free is simply not a cause they could get behind.

International pressure and U.S. leverage can do a lot—more than America often realizes. It cannot, however, make countries forgo what they see as their core national interests.

In Trump’s vision, the American public too would have to agree to run Gaza. This is not something most Americans expected to have to do. Lindsay Graham, a key Republican senator, especially on foreign affairs, has noted that his own South Carolina constituents may be less than enthusiastic to do so. If America embarked on the effort, it may find that this entails far more than a real estate development project.

What then is the consequence of Trump’s new plan? In the immediate term, it risks the implementation of the second phase of the ceasefire-hostage deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wary of its implementation, which his far-right coalition partners oppose, and of the possibility that Hamas remains the main power in Gaza when it is done. Most Israelis, buoyed by the uplifting images of hostages returning home, an emotionally transformative event on the backdrop of the past 16 months, support the deal’s continuation. The new proposal changes the conversation dramatically and offers Netanyahu a path out of the deal, if he chooses to take it. It also strengthens his reluctance to empower secular Palestinian actors in Gaza in Hamas’ stead—something he should have been doing from the start of the war.

Trump’s plan could also be an opening position, as is his wont, from which others could dissuade him and then take credit for doing so. Israel’s formal annexation of the parts of the West Bank was forgone, at least for a while, in the context of the Abraham Accords. Perhaps the American annexation of Gaza could be forgone in a similar context, such as under a Saudi-Israeli agreement. Yet any starting position that is too fantastical or too unacceptable to the negotiation partner can forestall fruitful progress rather than aid it. Indeed, Saudi Arabia wasted no time in reiterating its rejection of the plan when Trump first raised it, as other major Arab actors had already done. Had Trump wanted to help the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he might have instead suggested that Arab countries alleviate some of the need there by temporarily accepting some refugees, who would return in the context of a political “day after.” Asking them to help take Gaza away from the Palestinians prevents such cooperation.

Eyeing all this, too, is Iran. Partly sidetracked in Trump and Netanyahu’s press conference was the strategy on Iran’s nuclear program and regional activity. Before the meeting, Trump reinstated some of his “maximum pressure” strategy. Yet Trump has repeatedly signaled his openness to a deal with Iran. Shortly after the press conference, he posted on his Truth Social network that he prefers a deal with Iran over a joint Israeli-American strike, noting a deal would be a cause for a “big Middle East Celebration.” The danger is that an American proposal to take ownership of part of the Middle East would indeed be a cause for celebration in Iran, where American imperialism is the primary bogeyman of a deeply unpopular regime. This is not the kind of celebration America wants.