Trump Revives Biden's Failed Proposal To Remove Palestinians From Gaza
Trump wants Arab countries to take in Gaza’s population. The Biden administration already tried, and failed, to bribe and cajole Egypt into doing so.
President Donald Trump's envoy brokered a ceasefire in Gaza and a prisoner exchange that is bringing Israeli hostages home. Now Trump is considering emptying the territory of its Palestinian population.
"I'd like Egypt to take people, and I'd like Jordan to take people. You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump told reporters on Sunday. "It is literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there."
He added that Palestinians could be moved "temporarily or could be long term."
The plan to empty Gaza of Palestinians—while insisting that it's a temporary measure for their own good—is an eerie echo of former President Joe Biden's approach to the region. In the first few days of the war, the Biden administration tried to push Egypt to accept a mass exodus of Palestinians. Bringing up that possibility again, now that the bombs have stopped dropping, is seen by both Arab and Israeli figures as an attempt to restart the war.
The Egyptian government released a statement on Sunday rejecting "the transfer of uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether in a temporary or long term way, which threatens stability and heralds the extension of the conflict." Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi also told reporters on Sunday that "Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine for Palestinians….Our rejection of displacement is unwavering."
It's telling that former Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who initially called Trump's ceasefire a "national humiliation" and resigned from the government to protest it, is now praising Trump's openness to empty Gaza.
Ben Gvir wrote on Monday that images of Palestinians returning home after the ceasefire are "another humiliating part of the reckless deal….The heroic Israel Defense Force soldiers did not fight and give their lives in the Strip to make these images possible. We must return to war—and to destruction!"
Ben Gvir's faction has long wanted to expel Palestinians to other Arab countries, even before the war that began with Hamas' October 7, 2023, attacks.
After those attacks, the Biden administration called for open "humanitarian corridors" for Palestinians to leave for Egypt's Sinai Desert, while insisting that it did not want a permanent expulsion.
"We believe that people should be able to stay in Gaza, their home," then–Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on October 15, 2023. "But we also want to make sure that they're out of harm's way and that they're getting the assistance they need."
Blinken's suggestion may have come with a serious financial offer behind closed doors. On October 14, 2023, The Economist alluded to diplomatic discussions about paying off Egypt's debt in exchange for taking in refugees. That following day, the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr reported that Egypt was "coming under pressure from western countries who are also offering economic incentives in an effort to come to a deal" over Palestinian refugees.
Although more than 100,000 refugees from Gaza have come to Egypt on an individual basis, the Egyptian government rejected the idea of evacuating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians en masse, arguing that such a plan would move the conflict onto Egyptian soil.
"Transferring the refugees, the Palestinian citizens, from the strip to Sinai would simply be transferring their resistance, the fighting, from the Gaza Strip to Sinai, turning Sinai into a launch pad for operations against Israel and making Israel within its rights to defend itself and its national security by conducting strikes on Egyptian land in retaliation," Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi warned in a speech on October 18, 2023.
Sissi suggested that if an evacuation were really necessary, Palestinians could be housed in the Negev Desert, within Israel proper. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kusher, agreed that a "secure area" in the Negev would be "a better option" than Egypt for Palestinian refugees in a March 2024 speech.
Arab fears of losing land to an evacuation were not exactly unfounded. The Israeli intelligence ministry was drawing up plans for the establishment of a "sterile zone of several kilometers" on Egyptian soil and "the construction of cities in a resettled area in northern Sinai," which were leaked to Israeli media.
Jordan is also sensitive—perhaps even more than Egypt is—about the possibility of a mass exodus. Around half the kingdom's population has Palestinian roots, due to refugees fleeing previous wars in 1948 and 1967. The latter wave led to the Black September crisis of 1970, a civil war between exiled Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian government.
Jordan signed its 1994 peace treaty with Israel in order to put the Palestinian issue to rest within the Palestinian territories, according to former Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher. Any mass expulsion of Palestinians by Israel will be considered "a declaration of war and constitutes a material breach of the peace treaty," then–Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh stated in November 2023.
And Palestinians themselves are wary of being asked to leave, given that hundreds of thousands who fled the 1948 and 1967 wars were not allowed to return home.
"The idea that [Palestinians] are some kind of spillover from other countries in the so-called Arab world—that they are just interchangeable with other 'Arabs'—is a false but routinely employed rhetorical device to erase their history on the land," wrote Rep. Justin Amash, whose father was a 1948 refugee and whose cousins live in Gaza, in response to Trump's comments. "Any effort to force them out or to pressure them to leave under threat of force is simply ethnic cleansing."
Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of Biden's approach to Gaza, says that Trump's approach "remains an outsourcing of U.S. policy to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu." Netanyahu's goal, Paul adds, is to empty out Gaza, whether "through killing, forced deportations, or simply making it unlivable and then creating an exit route for those who are in urgent need."
The reconstruction of Gaza will be a difficult and costly affair. The oil-rich Arab monarchies, the most likely investors in reconstruction, want to see an independent state of Palestine that is not run by Hamas. Just keeping the ceasefire in place, let alone muscling Hamas out of power and getting Israel to accept Palestinian independence, will be a heavy political lift.
But there's no good reason to expand the conflict into other countries, by threatening or bribing them at the U.S. expense. Biden has already demonstrated the folly of that path.
