Will Trump and Netanyahu Convince Arab States to Relocate Gazans?

When this idea first came up in February, most people considered it a bluff. Donald Trump supposedly proposed US control of Gaza after the relocation of its civilian population to other Arab states, with the ambition of turning it into a resort property. Coming just after Trump’s return to office, most saw the chatter as a way to shake up the hostage talks with Hamas by shoving the usual Overton Window on Palestinian land claims all the way into “full dispossession” unless the Gazans got a lot more serious about peaceful coexistence.

Well, not so fast. Both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have quietly continued to push this idea with the other Sunni Arab states in the region, and the Washington Free Beacon reports today that it has gotten traction in the region. The plan also reportedly includes some sweeteners from the US to facilitate that Overton Window slide on a real basis:

Israel on Monday began negotiations with several countries it hopes will take in Gazans as part of a mass emigration plan first proposed by President Donald Trump, two Israeli officials with knowledge of the talks told the Washington Free Beacon.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer briefed the cabinet on the talks in a closed-door meeting on Saturday evening. The leaders said the talks were expected to continue for several days with the goal of securing commitments from the other countries to accept specific numbers of Gazan migrants in exchange for benefits to be provided by the United States.

“This is big,” said one of the sources, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press about the talks. “The immigration plan is moving ahead, and it sounds pretty serious.”

 Just how serious is it, though? Netanyahu claimed last week that he and Trump were trying to engage with their partners in the region for the acceptance of large numbers of migrants from Gaza, but it didn’t sound as though talks had gotten far with any of them. Four months ago, a Lebanese media outlet claimed that Egypt might allow as many as 500,000 Gazans to temporarily settle in the Sinai as part of a plan to excise Hamas from Gaza and allow for rebuilding. Egyptian president Adbel Fattah al-Sisi publicly denounced the idea at that time, and for very good reasons, as I noted in March:

The Jordanians have had real-life lessons on that point. They invited the PLO to relocate after losing a war with the Israelis in the West Bank area, and Yasser Arafat repaid them by attempting a coup to seize power in Amman. The Jordanians defeated them militarily and ejected them into Syria, where Hafez Assad had to fight them and eject them into Lebanon. Arafat and his henchmen then touched off a bloody civil war there that lasted for years and eventually paved the way for Hezbollah’s domination. 

Hamas is another Iranian proxy that al-Sisi can do without, and the Gazans are too tied to Hamas to trust. The Sunni Arabs like to dress up their refusal to take in Palestinians with language about their self-determination in the territories they currently occupy, but in truth no one wants them because they can’t trust the Palestinians not to attack the hands that feed them. The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” was practically invented by Arafat and the PLO.

A lot has changed in four months, of course, but not the destabilizing nature of large influxes of Palestinians to Arab states. It will be many lifetimes before the lessons of Black September are forgotten in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. 

What has changed, though, may make a great deal of difference to the Abraham Accord states on this point. For one, Iran’s grip on the region and the loss of its proxy strategy of encirclement, thanks to Israel’s defenestration of Iran’s air defenses and the US elimination of its nuclear-weapons project. Second: Israel has clearly determined to end the long war with Hamas once and for all. They will not go back to “Hamastan” just to get approval from their partner states, which means either that Hamas has to agree to go into exile, or the entire population will be at risk for devastation. Nor do these states particularly want Hamas to maintain a toehold anywhere in Arab lands either; the mullahs of Iran will want to return to its proxy strategy at some point, and the best way to counter that is to deny it any ground at all in Asia Minor and North Africa. (The same will be true of Hezbollah in Lebanon.)

Needless to say, though, it will prove a heavy lift to just get these countries to agree to host relocated Gazans, but the actual relocation would be enormously difficult. They would have to exit via the Sinai and then get transferred from there to non-contiguous locations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other locations. There would be no land transit lanes for that, so it would require either massive airlifts or sea travel of some sort. Israel is not going to allow tens of thousands of Palestinians to transit across its own territory into Jordan or anywhere else by land. 

For these reasons, it still looks more like a negotiating position than a serious plan. Right now, talks in Qatar over plans to release hostages in a cease-fire remain stuck “in the first phase,” AFP reports:

Gaza ceasefire talks remain in their “first phase” after more than a week of talks, even as mediators step up efforts to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas, Qatar says.

“Discussions on the framework agreement are still ongoing. Both delegations are present here in Doha, and the mediators are intensifying efforts to reach an agreement,” Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari tells reporters.

“The negotiations are still in the first phase, which is specifically about reaching an agreement of principle ahead of negotiations that will begin, God willing, in the next phase,” he says.

This could very well put pressure on Hamas to get what it can while they can. If Trump and Netanyahu start shipping Gazans out of the war zone, Hamas loses its real hostages — their civilian human shields that protect their terror operations. The IDF could truly open up hell on these positions at that point, and there won’t be many options except death for Hamas operatives who stick around. The other Sunni Arab nations have to be tired of the whole conflict by now, and might announce a mass-relocation agreement just to raise pressure on the Hamas Billionaire Boys Club in Doha. 

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

•  What is behind Donald Trump’s change in direction on Russia and Putin? 
• Andrew Malcolm predicted a major shift from Trump, and the next day Trump set out his 50-day deadline for Putin to stop the war. 
• We debate what changed Trump’s mind and approach, and how much more credibility he may have now after Operation Midnight Hammer.  

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!