‘It's really just insanely ridiculous': Locals react to Trump's Gaza comments

Boston Globe

05-02-2025

'The reaction both from American Jewish groups, from our allies, from Arab nations, from the Palestinian leadership, makes it clear that this is a nonstarter,' she said. 'I join others in wondering if this is serious or not because it's so far fetched.'
Advertisement
Although members of his administration are already walking back portions of Trump's remarks, the president's controversial statement Tuesday night that the US would redevelop the war-torn territory, displacing some 2 million Palestinians in the process, continued to reverberate around the world. He proposed the US turn Gaza into 'the Riveria of the Middle East,' describing its current state as a 'big pile of rubble' after the 15-month war between Israel and Hamas, and perhaps would even deploy American troops there.
'I don't think people should be going back,' Trump said. 'You can't live in Gaza right now. I think we need another location. I think it should be a location that's going to make people happy.'
On Wednesday, Trump administration officials sought to qualify the president's remarks, for example, insisting he had not committed to using US troops and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.
Trump's rhetoric could rock the next stage of talks that could extend the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
'Of course, this could undermine a ceasefire,' said Anwar Mhajne, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who lectures as a political scientist at Stonehill College in Easton.
Her first reaction when she heard Trump's comments was, 'Wow, we're really normalizing ethnic cleansing as an official US policy these days.'
Advertisement
While Trump has floated expansionist ideas before,
If Trump's ideas were to come to fruition the U.S. would be 'causing more instability and masking it as a humane way for people to live peacefully.'
Jeremy Burton, the chief executive of Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, said Gazans should be the ones to
decide whether they stay or leave the territory, and that such a decision needs to be made 'free from any coercion by Hamas which has held them under the control of its terrorist regime for nearly two decades.'
'No decision to commit the United States to a new, large-scale, and potentially very expensive foreign policy initiative should be made without broad, bipartisan, and explicit support from Congress,' he said in a statement.
He expressed gratitude to Trump for his efforts 'toward achieving the current ceasefire,' and said his organization's priority continues to be bringing the remaining hostages home and continuing the ceasefire into its next phase.
To be sure, with a conflict as polarizing as that which has unfolded in Gaza, not everyone finds Trump's idea objectionable.
'The millions of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze who neighbor Gaza can no longer live beside a territory whose populace willing elected the terrorist organization Hamas,' he said in a statement.
Advertisement
Kestenbaum, who addressed the Republican National Convention last year, said he supported Trump's decision 'to allow the safe evacuation of women and children while Israel continues to obliterate the threat of Hamas.'
'Once that is complete, the Administration has been clear that all Gazans will be able to safely return,' he said. 'This has been done in almost every other conflict, so I am unclear why there is a Palestinian exception.'
Maria, the Palestinian American from Roslindale, meanwhile, said the people of Gaza should be the ones to determine their own future. 'They lived through 15 months of genocide not to be shepherded out of the Gaza Strip but to stay,' she said.
What stood out to Maria as Trump spoke Tuesday evening alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House was how that Palestinians were boxed out of the discussion.
'Zero representation,' said Maria, who works in the pharmaceutical industry and is the director of programming for the Boston Palestine Film Festival.
For Juliet Salameh Olivier, another Palestinian American who lives in Boston, Trump's comments reflect what Palestinians feared to be the end-goal regarding Gaza all along: land theft and ethnic cleansing.
'Our ancestral homeland is, to him, merely an ocean front real estate conquest,' she said.
She dubbed the idea that of Palestinians leaving the territory en masse 'ludicrous.'
'We will return, we will rebuild,' she said. 'The steadfastness of the Palestinian people to stay on their land comes from a deep sense of belonging. We belong to the land as stewards. A colonizer does not understand this sacred relationship but seeks only to steal, exploit, and destroy.'
Advertisement
Hamas, which has reasserted control over Gaza since the ceasefire began last month, has said it will not release hostages in the second phase without an end to the war and a full withdrawl of Israeli forces. Netanyahu, meanwhile, maintains that Israel is committed to victory over Hamas and the return of all hostages captured in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered the war.
Hamas triggered the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack, which killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel responded with a fierce offensive that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and displaced an estimated 90 percent of Gaza's population, sparking a humanitarian crisis.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at