Last week, Trump shockingly claimed that the U.S. would take “long-term ownership” of a depopulated Gaza Strip and transform it into a new Riviera.
Despite widespread condemnation for issuing a proposal “tantamount to ethnic cleansing,” in the words of a UN representative, the president has since doubled down, claiming that no U.S. troops would be needed because the two million Palestinians in Gaza would voluntarily depart.
In the spirit of taking President Trump seriously but not literally, let’s all concede that voluntary Palestinian resettlement is a fantasy. Gaza’s inhabitants are neither going to leave willingly nor magically disappear—not that the U.S. should want them to.
So forget Trump’s literal rhetoric and consider what he is seriously proposing: forced resettlement carried out by U.S. or Israeli military operations, which would surely encounter fierce resistance from Hamas.
In other words, the U.S. would fight another major insurgency in the Middle East. It would be the battle of Fallujah on steroids. The Gazan population is six times greater than that Iraqi city was in 2004, when coalition forces subdued it during the worst urban warfare of the Iraq war.
The Iraq war looms large as an example in more ways than one.
According to Washington lore, former secretary of state Colin Powell famously (if perhaps apocryphally) warned George W. Bush against invading Iraq by citing the Pottery Barn rule—”You break it, you buy it.”
We all know how badly that turned out.
Trump’s plan for Gaza amounts to the Pottery Barn rule in reverse: he wants the U.S. to pay the cost of occupying Gaza without being the one who broke it.
Whether or not Powell actually made the Pottery Barn quip, his cautions against regime change were prophetic. Powell understood the inherent unpredictability of military intervention, especially against a regime that, while objectionable, might be the one thing binding a society together. The danger, as he once told Walter Isaacson, is that “the whole thing falls apart, there’s nothing underneath it [and] you get chaos.”
Sadly, Powell’s wisdom went unheeded. The Bush administration’s platitudes about spreading democracy, coupled with reassurances about being “greeted as liberators,” turned out to be fool’s errands, dashed by the ensuing Iraqi civil war and an insurgency that cost the U.S. $728 billion, killed nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers, and wounded over 32,000 more.
Why would the United States want to sign up for that again?
Trump’s delusions of “making Gaza great again” are all the more detached from reality given how much worse the circumstances are compared with 2003 Iraq. Iraq was a functioning country before the U.S. invaded. And Iraqis did celebrate the ouster of Saddam Hussein, who was an unelected tyrant, deeply hated, and far removed from society, hiding in his many palaces. Even so, his Baathist followers eventually transformed into a deadly insurgency determined to resist U.S. occupation.
Gaza has never functioned as a normal state and already lies in ruins. Hamas, the group in charge of Gaza, enjoys some level of popular support, having been elected in 2006 and remaining deeply embedded in Gazan society ever since.
Ordinary Gazans would fight alongside Hamas to defend what they consider their homeland. Many resent the group for the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack that prompted Israel’s devastating 15-month war. But surely they hate Israel more—which has killed some 64,000 Gazans in that war—and possibly the U.S. too for supplying Israel with the weapons to do it. If Hamas becomes the sole force opposing resettlement, Palestinian sympathy for it would only increase.
U.S. intelligence leaders warned last fall that the Gaza war could have a “generational impact on terrorism,” with consequences not only in Israel but in the United States as well. Surely Trump’s scheme to take over Gaza would make the United States public enemy number one in the Middle East, destabilizing U.S. relationships with countries like Egypt and Jordan, perhaps irreparably.
Terrorism and insurgency aren’t existential risks, but why on Earth would Washington want to invite them over a conflict not of its making? And for what—the privilege of beachfront development at the expense of two million displaced Palestinians?
The American people must emphatically reject this madness. The U.S. needs to get out of places like Syria and Iraq, not increase its exposure to the region’s violence.
Rosemary Kelanic is the Director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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