Trump’s Gaza Plan Changes the Conversation

Reactions from all quarters continue to pour in regarding President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night announcement of a plan for the U.S. to “take over” and rebuild the Gaza Strip. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained! Trump has done something here that has woken people up, forced them to respond,” declared Middle East expert Eric Bordenkircher on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “It’s never a dull moment with the Trump administration, and his energy is quite remarkable how he keeps going like this.”

That said, Trump’s plan “is going to be a tough sell” to Arab nations, Bordenkircher admitted, “and it will be difficult to achieve.” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) agreed. “It’s not clear that the president would have a legal authority to deploy troops into what would inherently become a combat situation.”

Trump proposed that the U.S. would assume responsibility for Gaza and rebuild it into an international waterfront destination — a sort of “Riviera of the Middle East.” The plan would require one to two million Palestinian refugees currently in the Gaza Strip to find a new home somewhere else, and multiple estimates placed the cost of rebuilding Gaza at around $80 billion.

“I don’t think it’s something that people say, ‘I really want that to happen,’ or see that as a likely outcome. I think most people are viewing it as a negotiating tactic at this point,” Davidson added on “Washington Watch.” But when “you start looking at what President Trump has done, and you read the body language of Benjamin Netanyahu as he’s there, President Trump, I think, is changing the negotiation.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins also emphasized the difficulty. “This is pretty radical — taking over Gaza Strip … developing it, moving the 1.7 [million] … Palestinians to a border country.”

One major issue is that the nations bordering Palestinian territories don’t want to accept any Palestinian refugees. “The reason the Jordanians don’t want the Palestinians is because the Palestinians have caused problems for the Jordanians in its history,” Bordenkircher explained. In 1970, a Palestinian uprising called Black September “attempted to overthrow the monarchy there.” Perkins added that, “in Jordan’s defense, they’ve taken in a lot of refugees from Syria in recent years,” even though “their population is not huge.”

Meanwhile, “the Egyptians have their own problems. They have issues with the Suez Canal [because of] the Houthis, and they’re losing a lot of money because you don’t have a lot of ship maritime traffic going through there,” Bordenkircher continued. “They seem to always be very fragile [and] on the edge. They’re just kind of a chaotic place,” Perkins agreed. Not to mention that Egypt also has “their own history with the Muslim Brotherhood,” which overthrew the government in 2011.

In addition to Jordan and Egypt, “one of the countries that has to be involved in order for this to get some kind of credibility has to be the Saudis,” said Bordenkircher. The “Saudis have a lot of money. It’s going to take a lot of money to clean up the West Bank,” agreed Perkins. Unfortunately, “they have responded pretty quickly, saying that this [plan] is off the table.”

Why haven’t these Arab nations taken more responsibility for solving the Palestinian question? For the most part, the Arab governments in the region do “see Hamas, Hezbollah as problematic,” said Perkins, but “they’ve allowed Israel to do the dirty work of having to keep them harnessed.” Indeed, Bordernkircher added, “I find that the Arab world, particularly with the Arab governments, work very slowly. … They kind of keep going down this path, [saying], ‘Why should we make any concessions? Because they’re doing our work for us.’”

That’s where President Trump’s out-of-the-box plan for Gaza comes into play. “Trump, by making this announcement, has kind of put the onus on the Arabs and forces them to respond,” said Bordenkircher.

“He’s really framing it differently to say, ‘Well, you guys can’t get along. That’s nothing new. So, how are we going to create peace?’” described Davidson. “Israel says, ‘We can’t allow Hamas to stay in charge of Gaza in the wake of 10/7.’ … So, I think President Trump framed it and said, ‘Well, what if we just control this land? How do you think about it now?’”

“It’s going to force some of these other surrounding countries that have been hands off … to come to the table, or to at least to the whiteboard, and start working through some potential solutions,” Perkins predicted. “I think they’ll say, ‘Well, okay, we all agree we don’t want America there, right?’ And that might be the starting point,” Davidson suggested. “Maybe that will force some sort of dialogue. I don’t know how it will turn out. I’m not sure President Trump knows exactly how it will turn out, but I think his sense was, you have to change the paradigm so that you can have a different kind of negotiation.”

“That is very characteristic of how President Trump has approached issues. He did it in the last administration,” said Perkins. “He has a history of … throwing out these out-of-the-box ideas that makes people’s heads explode, to force them to think. And so, this now becomes a real problem for those in the Middle East saying, ‘Wait a minute. I mean, he could be serious. He might do this. We got to get together and figure this out.’”

In particular, Trump’s Gaza plan reorients the narrative surrounding the proposed two-state solution, Perkins argued. “Throughout the Israel-Hamas War, the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly asserted that the only real solution to pursue following the end of the war was the failed two-state solution. So, when President Trump yesterday offered a different idea, everyone was caught off-guard,” he said. “The idea of a two-state solution within the current boundaries of Israel is not workable. … If you’re going to [have] a two-state solution, you’ve got to find that second state someplace else outside of the boundaries of Israel.”

If nothing else, Trump’s proposal for rebuilding Gaza “certainly has people talking,” Perkins concluded.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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