Will Trump’s Gaza Plan Restore Hamas to Power?

Can Donald Trump possibly be serious about ridding Gaza of Gazans and creating a gleaming new US territory? Is it really a clever strategy for shaking up hidebound thinking? Or is it just a Trumpian musing that’s gotten out of hand?

Most likely the latter. Trump likes to float offhand, sometimes outrageous proposals that come out of nowhere and bring him attention.  Sometimes these ideas are both sound and feasible (the US Space Force), sometimes they’re impulsive (the travel restriction characterized by some as a “Muslim Ban”), sometimes they’re just never-gonna-happen brain farts (swallow Canada and Greenland, take over Gaza).  Offering these ideas as a negotiating tactic to reach an intermediate goal isn’t Trump’s style. He means it when he says it.

And no idea, once articulated, is ever abandoned. The Trump Infallibility Doctrine precludes it. Trump’s position remains that he won the 2020 election and that Mexico has, in fact, paid for the border wall he hasn’t yet built. Trumpian musings are often walked back to a point of workability so Trump can claim a win and (kind of) vindicate what he originally said. That seems to be happening now with his Gaza plan.

Trump’s original idea, remember, was to disperse the population of Gaza to other countries, clean up the rubble and unexploded ordnance, and turn what is, actually, prime beachfront real estate into a tourist paradise. The idea of relocating a population from a war-devastated region is not crazy, particularly where potential host countries have similar ethnic and religious makeup. Gazans who claim a “right of return” to Israel don’t oppose migration. But it will never happen – the resistance on all sides is overwhelming. Trump is already retreating by conceding that the Gazans’ departure might only be temporary.

Count on the Qataris to manage further walkback. In a mediation proceeding, good lawyers (usually assisted by bad lawyers opposing them) can win the trust of the mediators and become something like a resource to them. At that point it’s all over for the other side. Qatar has gone one better. They’re both the mediators and the able lawyers for Hamas, and Trump’s envoy, who has done big business with Qatar, praises the Qatari “mediators” for doing God’s work.

Rather than erupting in indignant rage at Trump’s Gaza proposal, the Qataris calmly suggested that it’s “premature” to discuss such long-term plans and preferable to focus on phase 2 of the current ceasefire. Qatar’s negotiating objective is to convince Trump that with some minor tweaks, the ceasefire plan will actually realize, more or less, his boldly articulated vision for Gaza. Those tweaks will not compromise Hamas’s interests.

Here’s why. As chemists know, a molecule can assume an infinite number of configurations but only a few are stable. The only stable, long-term configurations in Gaza are Hamas rule or Israeli rule. Any formula other than Israeli administration will quickly evolve to rule by Hamas. It happened in 2007 when Hamas violently ejected Fatah from the territory and will happen again if Hamas is challenged.

It won’t be. Qatar will propose a technocratic civil government in Gaza and a multinational Arab force to provide security. Hamas has no interest in trash pickup or sewer management, so will happily offload responsibilities it wasn’t shouldering anyway. Qatar will quietly assure Hamas that the multinational Arab force will cooperate with it, as UNIFIL cooperates with (or at least doesn’t oppose) Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Now comes the greater challenge – convincing Trump that this makes him look like a winner and fulfills his vision for a new Riviera. You can imagine Qatar telling Trump’s envoy, in a confidential whisper between men of the world, that no other country wants Palestinians; everyone remembers the trouble they caused in Jordan in the 1970s and, much more recently, when half of Gaza poured into Egypt after Hamas blew up a section of the border wall in 2008.

Trust us on this one, they might say. We and our partners in petroleum will finance the reconstruction and supply a strong militia that will keep a badly beaten Hamas defeated indefinitely. There will be hotels and condos, we’ll even work with Israeli developers – and you too, of course, if you’re interested – so that everyone has a stake in Gaza’s success. And if we’re wrong, well, Israel has shown it knows how to handle Hamas.

That last bit is malevolent genius, because Qatar knows how this has always worked. When Ariel Sharon cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005, he promised that Israel would not tolerate a single rocket fired from Gaza. Five wars, thousands of rockets and thousands of Israeli deaths later, Israel still has not extirpated Hamas from Gaza.

But the vision of prosperity is appealing. It preserves Trumpian Infallibility.  Peacemakers get Nobel Prizes, and the rest of us forget even recent history in the euphoria of returning hostages and the heady desire for peaceful coexistence. And Hamas will bide its time, amassing the usual arsenal in the usual way, plotting its next atrocity.