By his words that many often consider to be scandalous and outrageous, the 47e Now President of the United States, Donald Trump, pushes the limits of reality a little more. He drums beating a strategy, a program, that everyone has trouble following, sometimes even his own advisers. If he often ignores the current international system and its rules, international law, traditional actors of multilateralism, he builds step by step a world that he judges delivered from the institutional shackles which leads for him partly global geopolitics, like the economy elsewhere.
Because basically, since he entered politics, he has retreated but he has always been used to saying what he was doing, as to do what he said and pushed his pawns as far as possible. In the Middle East, he had decided to withdraw from the JCPOA, the agreement negotiated by Barack Obama in 2015 to try to control Iranian nuclear, and he left it. Faithful ally of the Hebrew state, he had moved the American embassy in 2018 in Jerusalem, to please his friend Netanyahu, in fact ratifying the old dream of Zionists to make the city three times the capital of Israel. He had imagined a great Sunni alliance to support Israel and isolate Iran, he produced it in 2020 with the historic signing of the Abraham agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, then Morocco and Sudan, before leaving the White House.
Remember Donald Trump, barely returned to the United States, with a new idea, this time for Gaza, destroyed after 15 months of bombing. In this period of time, nearly 50,000 of its inhabitants were killed in the war of reprisals led by Benyamin Netanyahu in Hamas after the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023 having caused the death of more than 1,200 Israelis and caused the hostage of 251 others. Since 2007, Hamas had a hand on this exsangue territory and despite the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the Gazan population for more than fifteen years, had made it a fortress to “resist” the Hebrew state. Gaza has therefore become a human cemetery but also that of international law. Including act. The International Criminal Court has issued an international arrest warrant against Benyamin Netanyahu, notably for war crimes and crimes against humanity on the spot, but also against the leaders of Hamas responsible for “October 7”.
Isn’t that a way out, as questionable, be for the Palestinians?
That said, it may seem completely surreal to hear President Trump proposing to set up America to make Gaza the new riviera of the region. We are in a dark world where the idea of population displacements is cold in the back. Is it so shocking? Is this a simple announcement effect to put the moralist and tenual Westerners of multilateralism that he hates so much at the foot of the wall? Indirectly, isn’t that an outcome, as questionable, for the Palestinians? What is more generally the displacement of forced populations contrary to international conventions less and less applied anyway? And who could leave or stay and in what terms?
It all depends on what type of future we seek to offer residents on this land. Bringing them back and leaving them at the mercy of Hamas, who knew very well that Israel would react by excess after October 7, inevitably targeting civilians, as “collateral damage” of its operations of liquidation of executives and activists of Hamas, is in itself a nonsense. We want to bring back these millions of Gazaouis, rebuild their houses, and calmly wait for the next war, which will inevitably arise. We invoke human reasons ourselves for this population totally attached to their land as we are all in ours: but back where? There is nothing left. And rebuild, Westerners and the EU in particular did it years ago, without resolving the political question of Gaza and the Palestinian State. Repairing without warning is useless.
Who today has the weight to impose a state for the Palestinians? No one therefore, because no one above all, basically, wants to separate the Palestinians and Western idealists. Certainly not us, we do not weigh much in international diplomacy. The United States yes, but Donald Trump is hand with his mediation partners like Qatar does not want it. Doha is alone in the region, but that cannot be enough. And for the rest of the Arab countries? The Emirates are linked to Israel, Saudi Arabia will soon give up its claims to sign a normalization agreement with the Hebrew State, which will bring it billions and civil nuclear to start. Cairo and Amman are not hot to welcome the Palestinians: Jordan has its share, and Egypt fears the bright currents. Honestly, these two countries, which almost only live only the monthly money from the United States for having signed peace with Israel in 1978 and 1994, will not have the means to resist if Washington for them.
No one wants a Palestinian state apart from the Palestinians and Western idealists
Donald tRUMP had the merit of lifting a major hare in this story: it is a life -size test to see who is really ready and has the means to save the Gazaouis. The answer is sinister: nobody. Whatever the causes of the drama experienced by the Gazaouis and the Palestinians, who will come back and will bend Israel to leave Hamas in Gaza, and make the settlers leave (they are 450,000)? Certainly not the United States. If Donald Trump does not want this Palestinian state, all the Arab countries that have signed standardization with Israel either, somewhere. And when Antony Blinken, the former American secretary discussed two months ago with Mohamed Ben Salmane, the latter discreetly told him that basically the Saudis cared little about the Palestinian State and that it was an official political posture to hold as long as possible, but everything could change overnight, if the Israelis came to the country to invest and save the 2030 of MBS, which has been beating financially from the wing from the start.
Is it human to leave the Gazaouis, attached certainly to their land, leave as in the year 40 in Gaza, starting with children and young people in general? If we offer the possibility to those to have a future, in an Arab country, to study, to build, to cure the trauma that this land has generated in them, with the complicity of all, is that not the true humanism? Do we not rock illusions by hammering every day ball in mind, “You need a Palestinian state, the Gazaouis must come back, etc. »» ? Peace today is often economic, because it is the nerve of war and that is what Trump believes.
Today peace is often economic, and that is what Trump believes
Therefore, from the point of view of international law that no one unfortunately respects, starting with the United Nations, Trump’s proposal to occupy Gaza and build a sort of new Dubai, or “Ben Mar à Lago” is unacceptable. But to constitute (“offer” on a voluntary basis the possibility of leaving, to begin with, as proposed by the Minister of Defense Israel Katz recently) Gazanis to join another Arab country, such as Jordan or theEgyptis also a golden opportunity to restart something zero. What can a five -year -old kid who saw death everywhere in Gaza and who is surrounded by still smoking ruins?
This story is tragic, and the Palestinians have already been the losers of history for 70 decades. And provoking the departure of the Gazaouis will undoubtedly be the additional engine of this global current of detestation of Westerners and Americans who are already circulating. Israel is also likely to confront new threats from Arab societies and individuals ready to do battle to avenge their Palestinian “brothers”.
But honestly, the International Community of lessons voted so many resolutions that has never been able to apply to Israel, or to Palestinian extremist movements. Who could change the situation to put the file back on the agenda of international institutions? Where is Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the Moribonde Organization of the United Nations? Obviously, Trump plays with the void we offer him. We just spend our time offending ourselves, playing the frightened virgins, but we no longer have the means of our ideals. Half or half full glass? Does Trump want to steal the land from the Gazaouis? Probably. Do we have anything else to offer to get them out of this quagmire and offer them a decent life on the spot by relaunching this famous “peace process” completely empty of meaning today? Unlikely. Can Israelis and Gazaouis live as a daily life that will return “to normal”? Not surely.
Do we have something else to offer Palestinians to get out of this quagmire?
Now the question of legitimacy from the international point of view of the proposal of Trump evacuated, to make Gaza a TERNew, economically dynamic, gleaming and full of money from the Gulf countries, would partially bring security to Israel from Gaza (the only minimum thing the Israelis demand basically). Basically, the Israelis had done so since 1948 with Jaffa, who became Yafo. The Palestinians expelled at the time kept the stigmata all their lives. What did we do at the time to prevent this? Nothing. What did we do to prevent Gaza from reliving the same thing and provoking this “tabula rasa” ? Nothing either, it is this ideal world of international institutions in which we naive and credulity that this “Gaza 3.0” question, which could see the light of day than imagined it.
* Doctor of Political Science, Arab and Geopolitical World Researcher, teacher in international relations at IHECS (Brussels), associated with CNAM Paris (Defense Security Team), at the Institute of Applied Geopolitics Studies (IEGA Paris), the Nordic Center for Conflict Transformation (NCCT Stockholm) and at the Geostrategic Observatory in Geneva (Switzerland).
