Sorry Trump, Palestinians aren't going to fall for 'Make Gaza Great Again'
So the Gaza Strip has been added to US President Donald Trump's wide geopolitical vision of remaking the world. After Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, Trump is eyeing the world's biggest open-air rubble storage site.
He has vowed to rebuild the 'hellish' territory into a wonderful real-estate development, perhaps including a series of Mar-a-Lago-style resorts along the Mediterranean coast.
The setting for this announcement was ripe with macabre irony, as he made it sitting next to the man who over the past year has turned Gaza into a hellscape: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sadly, no journalist among those admitted into the Oval Office dared to highlight these outrageous circumstances.
In addition to MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Elon Musk's MEGA (Make Europe Great Again), we now have a version for Palestine: 'Make Gaza Great Again'.
It is not yet clear how serious Trump's statement is. The last time the US tried to build something in Gaza - a $320m floating pier to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid for the devastated Palestinian population - it was operational for just a few weeks, and allowed just a tiny fraction of the massive amount of needed aid into the enclave. The project was swiftly abandoned.
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This time, US spending could be different, overseen by Musk's 'Department of Government Efficiency'; perhaps, for the first time, the government could give real meaning to the obsessive Biden-era slogan of 'Build Back Better'.
But there is a major problem: what happens to the approximately two million Palestinians who live in Gaza while reconstruction is under way? Trump has indicated that they cannot stay there while their land becomes a construction site for his massive proposed real-estate development.
Hard facts
Trump seems confident that neighbouring countries will take Palestinians in, but when thinking about neighbours, his notion is quite limited, and excludes the country that shares the longest land border with Gaza: Israel. In his view, Palestinians should go to Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere.
Trump does not appear to care about the joint statement issued by Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on 1 February, in which they rejected the idea of a forced transfer of the Palestinian population.
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Perhaps he is confident that he can change their minds. If persuasion doesn't work, he has other tools at his disposal, such as tariffs - which he has used to push Canada and Mexico to implement stringent border measures - or cutting aid. Why shouldn't this work with Arab states?
But as far as we know, Palestinians in Gaza will not accept being deported. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of them have been marching from the south to the north of Gaza to return to where their houses are - or were.
Full text of Trump and Netanyahu's explosive news conference Read More »
They preferred to go back to their now-scorched land, rather than to consider alternatives. These are the hard facts that Trump and Netanyahu should be aware of.
More than seven decades of tragic historical experience have taught a hard lesson to all Palestinians: if they vacate their land, they will never be allowed to return.
And if the Israeli army, with its endless funding and ruthless military tactics, could not prevail over Hamas during the recent 15-month war, it is safe to assume that no one else will.
To achieve what he is dreaming about in Gaza, Trump would have to deploy US armed forces to dislodge the Palestinian people. Does he really want to inaugurate his presidency and cut further into the US budget by deploying American military forces in another Middle Eastern war - a war that one of the world's best-equipped armies has been unable to win?
Dangerous trade-off
If all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the US has spent in supporting Israel, which itself has used the funds in its decades-long quest to destroy the Palestinian people, had instead been given to Palestinians, then each household would have had the resources to resettle in luxury anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, for people accustomed to monetising everything, like Trump and Netanyahu, it is not possible to understand that there is something money cannot buy: dignity.
Are Trump and Netanyahu sure that owning Gaza is worth the loss of Egypt and Jordan?
Palestinians want self-determination in their own independent and sovereign state, built on their land, which even today is just around one-fifth of historical Palestine. Their rights and dignity are not for sale.
But there is another crucial point that the US president and Israeli prime minister are dangerously missing. Transferring two million Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan, two fragile economies riddled with significant internal tensions, could collapse their ruling systems.
Egypt and Jordan are not just two Arab states neighbouring Israel; they are also its main local security partners through the deep cooperation among their respective security and intelligence services, engaged in preventing daily hostile actions against Israel. The collapse of the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes would compromise this cooperation.
Are Trump and Netanyahu sure that owning Gaza is worth the loss of Egypt and Jordan?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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