In the hours leading up to President Donald Trump’s prime-time press conference Tuesday, his team knew what was coming. He had been discussing an idea for months — a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip — with advisers, some of whom saw it as a negotiating ploy to give Israeli leaders more leverage over Hamas as they try to turn a fragile cease-fire into a lasting peace.
“This was a ‘get your ass to the negotiating table’ message,” said a person familiar with the president’s thinking who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, comparing it to Trump’s threats of a trade war with America’s neighbors. “It was just like 25 percent tariffs on Canada.”
But even if advisers were aware of the provocation, it was clear Wednesday that they did little to prepare the rest of the world for Trump’s pitch to relocate nearly 2 million Palestinians from their homeland in Gaza so the U.S. could assert ownership of the area and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
There was no written plan, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged Wednesday, as she contradicted the president’s comments a day earlier by stating that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary. Reporters who were briefed ahead of the announcement were told only that Gaza would take years to rebuild, without further explanation of Trump’s blueprint for a U.S. takeover. Many allies in Congress and around the globe were caught off-guard — left either furious, stupefied or both.
Amid strong pushback from Arab allies in the Middle East and skepticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the White House reframed Trump’s proposal Wednesday as a serious attempt to spark real and lasting diplomacy. But they walked back many of the details Trump laid out, casting his “takeover” instead as an opening salvo in what they view as an ongoing negotiation over the fate of Gaza and its residents.
Leavitt, for example, said there were no current plans to involve American troops and no taxpayer dollars would be spent, a significant departure from the sort of nation-building described Tuesday night by Trump.
Another senior administration official given anonymity to discuss internal thinking said that Trump’s blunt statement that the U.S. would “own and be responsible” for a Gaza Strip that has been reduced to rubble by 15 months of Israeli bombing should be read more broadly as an expression of his determination to lead a rebuilding process that achieves a lasting peace.
“What ‘ownership’ looks like will be determined as we go through a process,” the person said. “But what’s most important is that he’s going to own the leadership position.”
Leavitt pitched the plan as an example of Trump’s “outside-the-box” thinking and a signal that he would make a regional peace deal.
Similarly, Mike Waltz, the president’s national security adviser, stressed that Trump’s proposal was part of a diplomatic process that’s just beginning and served notice that he intends to play a leading role in the Middle East. In an interview with CBS, Waltz said that Trump’s pitch might even spur other countries in the region to submit their own plans for rebuilding Gaza.
“The fact that nobody has a realistic solution, and he puts some very bold, fresh, new ideas out on the table, I don’t think should be criticized in any way,” Waltz said. “I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come up with their own solutions.”
So far, Arab allies have not viewed Trump’s proposal as constructive. They’ve panned it.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry issued a statement in the middle of the night reaffirming its “complete rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, annexation of Palestinian lands or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land.”
According to a report from Jordan’s state news agency, Jordanian King Abdullah told Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, that he rejects “any attempts to annex lands and displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank” and stressed “the need to establish the Palestinians on their land.”
Trump is set to meet next week with Abdullah. He also has spoken with the Saudi crown prince by phone since taking office, but it was not clear if he had discussed the Gaza proposal with him.
American human rights activists, foreign policy hands and Arab Americans were also appalled at what they see as an attempt by Trump to market an ethnic cleansing strategy as a redevelopment strategy. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Middle East fellow at the Atlantic Council, called Trump’s remarks “extraordinarily harmful” to regional stability and emblematic of “an incoherent foreign policy that is defined by threats, not compelling US leadership.”
Former GOP lawmaker Justin Amash, who is of Palestinian descent, blasted the proposal on social media.
“If the United States deploys troops to forcibly remove Muslims and Christians — like my cousins — from Gaza, then not only will the U.S. be mired in another reckless occupation but it will also be guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing,” he wrote. “No American of good conscience should stand for this.”
But that backlash did not seem to deter the White House.
“The initial reaction [of leaders] does not always match the finish line,” the administration official said, pointing to how Colombia’s president initially turned away U.S. military planes returning undocumented migrants before reversing course in the face of Trump’s threat to impose sweeping tariffs. “His initial reaction to migrant relocation was pretty defiant, but that collapsed quickly.”
Trump’s comments about the U.S. taking over Gaza are hardly an outlier. Trump has also been demanding to buy Greenland from Denmark and to “take back” the Panama Canal from Panama. In remarks that received little attention, he teased his expansionist aims in his inaugural address that described an America that “will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.”
And Trump has alluded to a U.S. annexation of Gaza a couple of times since November.
“People who have been paying attention latched onto this and have been saying he’s putting on his hotel owner hat now. Gaza is prime real estate for a Trump Hotel. It’s become a running joke in GOP circles,” said one Republican operative, who was only mildly surprised to hear Trump put forth the idea as a serious proposal. “To be fair, there is no reality. Trump just said it. It’s not like we’re actually doing it.”
If Trump’s plans have been hiding in plain sight, most Republican allies in Congress said on Wednesday that they missed the signals.
“It was a surprising development, but I think it’s one that we’ll applaud,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) who, like most GOP colleagues, couched uncertainty or concern in praise.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told CNN on Wednesday that he thinks the president “wants a more peaceful and secure Middle East and put some ideas out there,” asserting confidence that the idea “will be thoroughly examined and vetted.”
Trump aides knew he wanted to take over Gaza but had no plan
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
0 Comments