The News
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday he had ordered the military to make preparations for the removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip through land crossings as well as “special arrangements by exit from land and sea.”
The move came after US President Donald Trump said that the US would take control of the territory and rebuild it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump’s proposal was widely rejected in the Middle East, including by US allies, and was quickly walked back by White House officials, most of whom had not been told of the plan before Trump’s announcement. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned Washington against the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza, after Trump said all two million Palestinians living in the strip would be displaced.
SIGNALS
Trump’s surprise proposal to own Gaza gets some Israeli backing
Trump’s hastily-devised proposal to take ownership of Gaza shocked not only members of his own administration but also Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, people briefed on their interactions told The New York Times. Still, sections of the Israeli media have rallied behind the idea: Trump’s plan “presents a fresh, out-of-the-box approach to a problem that experienced diplomats have spent years trying to solve,” a Jerusalem Post editorial argued, adding that Israel should “take the win” of the US finally aligning its foreign policy with Israeli interests.
Trump’s plans will embolden Israeli ultranationalists
Trump’s Gaza ownership plan may not materialize, the BBC’s international editor argued, but the president’s announcement nevertheless risks weakening the already-fragile ceasefire agreement in Gaza by emboldening ultra-nationalists in Netanyahu’s government who want to resettle the enclave with Jewish Israelis. Netanyahu vowed to resume the war against Hamas at his press conference with Trump, telling reporters “You can’t talk about peace…if this toxic murderous organisation is still in charge.” Trump’s comments were simply “the latest example” of how government officials in Israel and the US now speak about the takeover of Palestinian land, The New York Times wrote, and Netanyahu’s appointment of a West Bank settler as an ambassador to Washington represents an attempt to seize that opportunity.
Trump is now ‘talking the language of imperialism’
Trump has always said he opposes US intervention, but his second term has seen him “begin to talk the language of imperialism,” whether over Gaza, Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Canada, a columnist wrote in The Guardian. Still, Trump’s unilateralist posturing is based on the misguided assumption that the US still commands the same global power and influence that it has historically, Howard French argued in Foreign Policy, but countries in an increasingly multipolar world are bound to reconfigure their diplomacy in response to Trump’s strongman tactics.