Donald Trump’s Imperial Designs on Gaza Are Finally Out in the Open

Donald Trump unveiled his newest, most extreme imperialist vision on Tuesday—to “take over the Gaza Strip,” potentially by force, and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised Trump as the “greatest friend” the country has ever had, the president lamented to reporters that Gaza has been “a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades”—and then proposed moving out Palestinians so the United States can “take over that piece” and “develop it.”

“I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable,” Trump said in a press conference following a White House meeting with Netanyahu. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” the president continued. “We’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.”

The forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza—which would defy international law—would be for their own good, Trump suggested: “They’re living in hell, and we’ll make sure they’re able to live in peace,” Trump said. “We’ll make sure it’s done world-class.” (“A better life,” Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff remarked on Fox News, “is not necessarily tied to the physical space you’re in today.”)

It was a stunning proposal, even by Trump’s standard, and it triggered international outrage in the Middle East and beyond. The notion of a dramatic Middle East intervention—by a president who cast himself as an “America First” isolationist who wouldn’t get the US involved in international conflicts—also elicited pushback in Washington, even among some Republicans: “There’s probably a couple of kinks in that slinky,” North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis told Politico. “We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” offered Senator Lindsey Graham. “I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza.”

“I think that might be problematic,” Graham added, “but I’ll keep an open mind.”

But that muted concern was telling: The GOP has so far let Trump do whatever the hell he wants, and it would be a surprise if they moved to impose any meaningful constraints on his ambitions now. “The United States stands ready to lead,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X Tuesday night, “and Make Gaza Beautiful Again.”

There was some of the usual conjecture about what Trump actually meant—whether to take him literally or seriously, whether he was bluffing—and he remains, as always, unpredictable. But his proposal does not seem to have been some unexpected, improvised aside: In the lead-up to the 2024 election, which played out amid anger over Democratic President Joe Biden’s enabling of Netanyahu’s war effort, Trump suggested to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Strip could be “better than Monaco”: “As a developer,” Trump said, “it could be the most beautiful place—the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate.” And his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said earlier last year that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.”: “From Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said in an interview at Harvard University last February.

According to Puck News’ Tara Palmieri, the idea behind Trump’s Gaza proposal came from Kushner himself, who was involved in preparing the president’s Tuesday evening remarks. Netanyahu, for his part, appeared to welcome it: “[Trump] sees a different future of that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism, so many attacks against us, so many trials and so many tribulations,” the Israeli prime minister said. “He has a different idea, and I think it’s worth paying attention to this.”

“I think it’s something,” Netanyahu continued, “that could change history.”

Simply by floating the takeover, Trump not only further complicated the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but broke with decades of American diplomatic goals in the Middle East. Were he to carry out his proposed plan, it would violate the Geneva Conventions and mark an even more abhorrent turn in American policy in the region.

“This president is openly calling for ethnic cleansing,” Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, wrote Tuesday.

It’s unclear where things go from here. Trump—who presented himself as a “peace through strength” dove intent on “ending the era of endless wars”—would be undertaking a development project that his own officials say would take a decade or longer to complete. In his remarks Tuesday, he lambasted “bad leadership” in the Middle East, including by America, which “never should have gone in there a long time ago, spent trillions of dollars, and created so much death.” But he himself is proposing an extraordinarily costly, deadly, and dramatic intervention—one that would carry an unspeakable humanitarian toll, which he may not care about. It would also surely bring about more American enemies in the region, which would, in theory, run counter to his promise to “make America safe again.”

But Trump—whose expansionist fantasies include buying Greenland and annexing the Panama Canal—need not resolve the contradictions between his promises and his proposals: He is utterly unbounded at home. The president is practically daring somebody in power to finally tell him no— and, at least at this point, it doesn’t seem like anybody will.