Trump's asinine offer to take over Gaza

[Magical Realist]

What an idiot. Offers to remove all the Palestinians from their homeland of Gaza and then come in and redevelop the land into some swanky Middle Eastern Riviera. The Arab nations are aghast, calling it basically ethnic cleansing. The world laughs, and Trump spokespersons backpeddle like crazy. Is there no end to the demented absurdities from this clown?

"In Gaza, Palestinians living among the wreckage of their former homes said they would never accept the idea.

"Trump can go to hell, with his ideas, with his money, and with his beliefs. We are going nowhere. We are not some of his assets," said Samir Abu Basel, a father of five in Gaza City displaced from his house by the war."

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-eas...025-02-05/

[Syne]

Decades of "common wisdom" has said you can't broker a peace deal between Israel and Arab countries and that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem would cause havoc. But in Trump's first term, he brokered the Abraham Accords and moved the embassy without any upheaval.

Palestinians don't have a homeland (again, Palestine is just a geographic region, never a country). They've been expelled from every Arab country for being a destabilizing force. They have had a prison, where Egypt won't let them leave the southern border and Israel's safety couldn't allow them free access to Israel. No one knows what they may want if given options they've literally never had before. If you think all you'll ever have is an impoverished and war torn spit of land, it could be hard to believe otherwise.

But the Mediterranean coast is a valuable asset that they can't even see they already had. If only they didn't vote for terrorists and harbor violence that precludes any possibility of tourism.

Even if just an opening gambit, Trump has proven he can make progress in the Middle East, where no one else has. "Common wisdom" has been a failure for decades.

[Magical Realist]

Palestinians don't have a homeland (again, Palestine is just a geographic region, never a country).

Uh...when you and 2 million of your people live in a region for over 60 years, it's pretty much your homeland. Every human being on earth deserves a land they can call home. The Palestinians are no exceptlon.

Even if just an opening gambit, Trump has proven he can make progress in the Middle East, where no one else has. "Common wisdom" has been a failure for decades.

It's certainly not impressing the rest of the world nor anyone outside of his own republican ass-kissers..

"Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has talked about a U.S. takeover of Greenland, warned of the possible seizure of the Panama Canal and declared that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
Some critics have said his expansionist rhetoric echoes old-style imperialism, suggesting it could encourage Russia in its war in Ukraine and give China justification for invading self-ruled Taiwan.
World leaders said they remained supportive of the two-state solution that has formed the basis of U.S. policy in the region for decades, which has held that Gaza would be part of a future Palestinian state that includes the Israeli-occupied West Bank."

There's "thinking outside of the box" and then there's just dementia. How old is Trump again?

[Yazata]

I have to admit that I'm exceedingly doubtful that the US taking over Gaza makes any sense, unless we could get rid of the Palestinian population of the place beforehand. And I see little chance of that happening.

It's true that a great deal of the place is wrecked from the war. And it would be much better for the population to move somewhere else where they can live better lives. That's all true.

But 1) most Gazans don't want to move, and 2) none of the other Middle Eastern nations want to take them in because so many of them are pro-Hamas radical militants that would be destabilizing in their new homes.

That being said, I do like the fantasy image of Gaza turned into a glitzy Vegas-style Mediterranean beachfront Magaza. It could be done, if it weren't for the people who live there. The residents are the reason that it's the rathole that it is.

My guess is that the idea was originally Netanyahu's. His dream is probably to resettle all of the Palestinians somewhere else and tried to enlist Trump to that end. And the Magaza vision probably appealed to the developer in Trump, who might already have been thinking of what somebody could do with that strip of land.

Never gonna happen though

The democrats will oppose anything Trump does simply from TDS. And some kind of forever military occupation with the US taking on the cost and responsibility for Gaza, the Gazans launching a terrorist war against us while simultaneously demanding US citizenship and welfare, while the rest of the world criticizes and condemns, would lose Trump a big segment of his America First MAGA support.

It would almost certainly be a disaster and would ruin Trump's otherwise promising presidency.

[C C]

I might slimly entertain the suggestion bounced around that he's proposing the equivalent of a four-mile skyscraper in order to make a one-mile-high skyscraper seem more feasible later on (like the psychology in the Yiddish folk tale of "A Big Quiet House"). But the fact that his son-in-law first submitted it early last year makes this appear that it really is just empty tomfoolery to generate attention. Trump: “If you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”
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What’s behind Trump’s call to take over Gaza?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/5/...-over-gaza

EXCERPT: Determining Trump’s true intentions are often difficult. The man who released a book called The Art of the Deal prides himself on his negotiating acumen, and it can be hard to differentiate between what is his starting position and what the end goal is – or even if an end goal currently exists.

“Trying to psychoanalyse Donald Trump is an exercise in futility,” Jasmine el-Gamal, a Middle East policy analyst, told Al Jazeera. “Nobody knows what’s in Trump’s head.”

She continued, “It’s hard to imagine him believing [the US] can go in, push out people, and as Trump said, invite the ‘world’s people’ to live there. It’s absolutely fantasy … It’s important in the meantime to continue to not normalise these kinds of ideas, but to take stock of actual reality on the ground of Arab positions.”

The announcement could be an attempt to make Israel’s far right – who have called for the illegal Israeli settlement of Gaza – happy after their anger at his support for a ceasefire to end Israel’s war on the enclave.

It could also be interpreted as an attempt to strongarm Arab states into funding the reconstruction of Gaza – Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz framed the plan as potentially one of many. “[Trump’s announcement] is going to bring the entire region to come up with their own solutions,” Waltz said.

Trump’s comments shocked even his most ardent supporters – el-Gamal cited Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as one example. Graham doubted support, even from Trump’s Make America Great Again base, for US troops on the ground in Gaza, a point made by several other Republicans.

And then there is the reality of 2 million Palestinians who would be evicted from their land – with the vast majority having no desire to go, as seen by the immediate return to the north of Gaza by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had been displaced to the south of the territory during the war.

There would no doubt be armed resistance to any efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, and despite Israel pummelling Gaza over 15 months of fighting – killing more than 61,000 Palestinians – its army has been unable to crush Palestinian resistance forces.

In fact, despite inflicting losses on Hamas, the group has reportedly recruited as many fighters as it lost and repaired much of its infrastructure.

[...] Sami Hamdi, a journalist, adviser and political consultant, said that it was difficult to imagine Trump’s supporters backing the presence of US troops in Gaza. “It may well be instead that Trump pushes for a compromise whereby regional powers that are warm to Israel form a regional ‘peacekeeping’ force to contain Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera.

[...] In March 2024, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner suggested that Israel should remove the Palestinian population from Gaza and clean out the Strip, saying that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable”.

He added that the population could be taken to Egypt or to the Naqab (Negev) desert in southern Israel – Israel supports the former and refuses to consider the latter...

[Syne]

Palestinians don't have a homeland (again, Palestine is just a geographic region, never a country).

Uh...when you and 2 million of your people live in a region for over 60 years, it's pretty much your homeland. Every human being on earth deserves a land they can call home. The Palestinians are no exceptlon.

Even if just an opening gambit, Trump has proven he can make progress in the Middle East, where no one else has. "Common wisdom" has been a failure for decades.

It's certainly not impressing the rest of the world nor anyone outside of his own republican ass-kissers..

"Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has talked about a U.S. takeover of Greenland, warned of the possible seizure of the Panama Canal and declared that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
Some critics have said his expansionist rhetoric echoes old-style imperialism, suggesting it could encourage Russia in its war in Ukraine and give China justification for invading self-ruled Taiwan.
World leaders said they remained supportive of the two-state solution that has formed the basis of U.S. policy in the region for decades, which has held that Gaza would be part of a future Palestinian state that includes the Israeli-occupied West Bank."

There's "thinking outside of the box" and then there's just dementia. How old is Trump again?

They've turned down every offer to "have their homeland" for decades. They're really just the Arab world's penal colony. That's not a homeland, that's exile. In a homeland, you're allowed to leave. Gazan's are not, because no Arab country will allow it. And 60 years of squatting and waging war doesn't make something yours.

The rest of the world are the largely antisemitic morons who's best plans for peace have never come close to working. There can never be a two-state solution, because Palestinians won't allow it. They've been offered it enough times to prove it.

People said the Abraham Accords and moving the embassy to Jerusalem would never work too. Trump has a better track record for peace than anyone else.

[confused2]

For a property developer this is a great opportunity.

The value of land destined for things like luxury hotel development is going to be far higher than the value of land currently covered in rubble. According to https://www.nrc.no/globalassets/pdf/repo...n-gaza.pdf roughly 50% of Gaza is privately owned with the remainder probably 'obtainable' by means that might seem legitimate by those inclined in that direction.

[Zinjanthropos]

I really don’t follow politics a whole lot but it seems to me Trump gets the Americans and rest of the world’s attention by producing outlandish statements that are directly aimed at reducing government borrowing. For one thing I do think countries like Canada could do more in the north to ease the strain on the coffers. Calling us the 51st state gets our attention. Like it or not, free countries of the world need to know protection is an expensive enterprise.

If you want to hear Trump speak eloquently then find the doc on the 75th anniversary of D-Day and listen. I’m sure speechwriter involved but can’t be sure. Even my wife who can’t stand him was impressed.