Can this be serious? When US President Donald Trump mused in February that he could turn the wretched rubble of the Gaza Strip into a glittering Riviera, those familiar with the torturous conflict between Palestinians and Israelis rolled their eyes and hoped that this figment too would pass. Now, although the Riviera idea is back, apparently on the advice of people such as Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
It is circulating in Washington in the form of a presentation in the style that you would expect in the world of real-estate development, the natural habitat of Kushner, Trump and Steve Witkoff, the president’s “special envoy” to the Middle East and other places. In a draft seen by the Washington Post, the Gaza Strip would pass into an Orwellian-sounding GREAT Trust (for Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation). The trust would beautify the land of misery into a gleaming hub for tourism, technology and commerce.
The wrinkle is that most of the about 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, one way or another, would have to leave. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his right-wing Cabinet members have already bandied about the idea, as they prepare another military onslaught to occupy most or all of the strip.
Illustration: Yusha
The Israeli government has apparently considered deporting Palestinians to such places as Libya, South Sudan and Somaliland, none of which has been called a Riviera. Some of the historical echoes are disturbing.
The GREAT draft emphasizes that any relocations would be “voluntary,” an adjective it deploys liberally. The Palestinians, the plan suggests, would not be forced but encouraged to depart, with incentives such as US$5,000 in cash and promises of food for a year. Palestinian landowners might get a “digital token,” whatever that might turn out to be.
I ran the proposal by Shibley Telhami, an expert at the University of Maryland on American policy in the Middle East who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations.
“This particular and insane Riviera idea sounds like a glitzy way to sell ethnic cleansing,” he said.
He added that as he analyzes the US’ overall policy in the region, he is for the first time in his career “scratching my head, honestly.”
If there is a coherent US strategy somewhere, it is well hidden.
Trump “doesn’t know much about much,” Telhami said, which invites people to mess with his mind.
Those range from Mike Huckabee, the Evangelical and theologically pro-Israel US ambassador to Jerusalem, to Netanyahu, who appears to have mastered the art of simultaneously flattering, ignoring and manipulating Trump.
“Netanyahu is getting what he wants with him, just as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is getting what he wants with him,” Telhami said.
That has already been evident in contiguous conflicts, such as those in Syria and Iran. For example, Trump wanted to avoid bombing Iran while negotiations, led by Witkoff, to limit Iran’s nuclear program were ongoing. Then Netanyahu went ahead anyway. When the Israeli strikes proved successful as well as telegenic, Trump ordered his B-2 bombers and other aircraft to drop US ordnance, too.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel has restricted food supplies for much of the year, either creating or allowing a situation which a professional body backed by the UN officially calls a “famine.” Trump seems to agree: He has called the situation “real starvation stuff ... and you can’t fake that.”
However, Huckabee hews to the Israeli government’s line and blames everything on Hamas. The net effect on US policy is to keep Washington aligned with Jerusalem: Breaking with other members of the UN Security Council, the US has rejected the famine label.
In the same way, the Trump administration resists the label “genocide,” even as more politicians (even among Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base) as well as jurists and academics adopt it — most notably the International Association of Genocide Scholars itself. Whereas more of the US’ allies — from Australia and Canada to France, Malta, Portugal, the UK and possibly Belgium — plan, at this month’s UN gathering, to join the 145 nations that already recognize Palestinian statehood, the US is heading in the opposite direction, denying or revoking visas to keep Palestinian leaders away from the UN General Assembly.
In July, Washington boycotted a UN gathering of dozens of nations that renewed the call for a peaceful settlement of the conflict with a two-state solution.
The signaling by Washington should in theory be puzzling, because the two-state solution has been the official US policy goal for decades, and the Trump administration has technically not dropped it. (It admittedly came close when Huckabee mumbled something to that effect.) Nor has it gone unnoticed, of course, that several members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet believe in annexing Gaza and the West Bank, and that Netanyahu has consistently done whatever you would do to make a Palestinian state impossible. The US seems to be letting him get on with it.
The resulting policy vacuum is causing no end of confusion and distress throughout the executive branch, Shahed Ghoreishi said.
He was a press officer in the US Department of State and in January, after Trump took his second oath of office, became the point person for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From that moment on, he tried to issue statements that reflected the administration’s policy and put it in its best light, even drafting X posts on behalf of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
His best efforts finally broke down on three consecutive days last month. It started on a Sunday, when Ghoreishi was planning to offer simple “condolences” after an Israeli airstrike killed four journalists from al-Jazeera. During the clearance review, that statement was deleted, which seemed “odd to me.”
The next day, he was drafting a reply to a question from the press about those Israeli plans to deport Palestinians to Africa. Ghoreishi wanted to say that “we do not support forced displacement.” That line too was deleted, which was bizarre. Is the US now in favor of forced displacement?
The following day, Ghoreishi was working on a statement about an earlier trip by US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson to the West Bank, as the territory is called in international law. Then he saw one of Huckabee’s advisers in Jerusalem editing the shared document and changing “West Bank” to “Judea and Samaria,” a biblical name used by Israeli settlers. With backing from his colleagues at Foggy Bottom, Ghoreishi cut the line out.
A few days later, just like that, Ghoreishi was fired, without explanation.
Although he refused to side with Israelis or Palestinians in the underlying matter, he stressed his worry about morale at the State Department, where he and his colleagues kept hearing during the clearance processes that they should defer questions to the government of Israel. In effect, US policy “became that we no longer answer the question” and instead “green-light every Israeli policy,” he said.
As Israel prepares another massive incursion into Gaza for the purpose of seizing and holding essentially all of it — with a goal of removing the Palestinians in ways yet to be explained — the US stance is no longer tenable. Trump promised his base to make “peace through strength,” not to let rogue allies make wastelands and call them peace. If Trump has a policy, and strength, the Gaza Strip right now is a good place and time to prove it.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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