President Donald Trump shook up the diplomatic world with his Feb. 4 proposal that the Gazans relocate and that the United States take over the Gaza Strip, clean it up, and redevelop it.
While many experts in Middle Eastern affairs have expressed doubt that Trump’s relocation proposal will come to pass, they agree that Trump has effectively challenged a half-century of international consensus that the so-called two-state solution—an independent Palestinian state next to an independent Jewish one—is inevitable and the only path to peace.
“The idea has been dead for a long time,” Leon Hadar, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told The Epoch Times. “This clearly is not helping to revive it.”
“Even if nothing comes out of it, he’s challenging the status quo,” he said. “He’s saying, ‘It can’t continue like this forever.’ That’s a good thing but in practical terms, I don’t see anything happening.”
Hadar and others noted no country has yet to say it will accept Palestinian refugees.
Trump won’t find much American support for military intervention in Gaza, a quagmire that could “make Iraq look like a picnic,” Hadar said. It would have the potential to end in disaster like U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s sending Marines to Lebanon did, with 241 U.S. servicemen killed in 1983 when a Marine barracks in Beirut was attacked with a truck bomb.
Realizing the economic potential of Gaza also seems far off, he said. The strip hasn’t had a functioning economy since 1948, and is dependent on foreign aid and its people working in Israel.
Hadar said he thought Trump was giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at their joint press conference and in statements since, “the green light to finish the job” of destroying terrorist group Hamas so that the United States could enter to repair and redevelop without U.S. military involvement or casualties.
Hamas may not see the advantage in continuing with the exchange of hostages for prisoners if it’s going to then be annihilated, Hadar said.
Eli Sperling, an Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the University of Georgia, told The Epoch Times it was possible the two-state solution was finished as an idea. It’s more likely, he said, that Trump in any case doesn’t see Gaza included if it were to go forward.
“Many foreign policy thinkers have discussed Gaza as a Hong Kong-style city state, maybe incorporated into a Palestinian state later,” he said.
“It is harder to maintain the pretext that there can ever be a two-state solution,” he said. Israeli academics say “it’s been impossible for decades.”
A majority of Israelis and Palestinians don’t want it, for different reasons, he said.
Sperling suggested Trump may have opened up a complex negotiating ploy aimed at Saudi Arabia. Trump has made normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia a priority.
The Saudis have conditioned that on Palestinian independence, something that looks less and less likely, Sperling said.
He compared the situation with what led up to the United Arab Emirates joining the Abraham Accords in 2020. They took the same position.
Netanyahu was campaigning to annex the West Bank, which Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria, but dropped that push. That allowed the UAE to declare victory and join the accords. Sperling said his own research showed that the UAE, in fact, had been ready to make peace a year earlier.
Trump’s push to relocate the Palestinians does the same thing, he said. It’s something the Saudis can seek to get reversed, take credit for that, and thus obtain enough public cover to join the Abraham Accords without an independent state.
Arab leaders, Hadar said, “are afraid they'll be assassinated if they accept deals the Arab Street is opposed to.”
Former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger, one-time Israeli Minister for Congressional Affairs in Washington with the rank of ambassador, told The Epoch Times that in the Middle East, actions speak louder than words.
Westerners should listen less to pro-Palestiniain talk by Middle Eastern leaders and instead note what they do: six have made peace with Israel without preconditioning that upon the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Pro-U.S. Arabs, he said, are aware of Palestinians’ long history of alignment with radical regimes and fear an independent Palestinian state will go down the same path.
Shmuel Rosner, senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, told The Epoch Times he sees Trump’s seemingly outlandish proposal as having two aspects.
One is the psychological aspect. Trump has signaled, Rosner said, “that he is not returning to the same old traditions of American diplomacy.”
“He does not attempt to go back to the formulas of the Oslo days or to involve the [Palestine Liberation Organization] or the Palestinian Authority. He does not insist on a two-state solution. He does not limit military aid to Israel or condition it on agreements, on the part of Israel, to do this or do that,” Rosner said.
Israelis see it as quite positive and a relief that a U.S. president would say such things, Rosner said.
The second aspect is its practicality, he said. Jewish Israelis are split pretty evenly on it.
Roughly half see Trump’s proposal as practical and hope it can be implemented, according to Rosner. The other half supports it but doesn’t see it as a real solution that can be implemented, which indicates a real end game, he said.
“They support it because they think, ‘If someone is willing to propose that our enemies just vanish one day and live elsewhere, how can you say no?’” he said.
They think it’s nice to have someone pushing for a solution “and maybe put some sense in the minds of our enemies,” Rosner said.
A majority of Arab Israelis, who are 20 percent of the population, oppose it, he said. A poll taken last week showed 54 percent of them saw it as immoral, he said. Israeli Arabs fear that relocating Gazans might lead to relocating Arabs from Judea and Samaria, or even Arabs who live in Israel proper and hold Israeli citizenship.
And this accounts for Israeli enthusiasm for the proposal, he said. “If it works in Gaza, maybe it will work in other places. And it’s the only way to end the conflict; some type of India-Pakistan resolution. You move populations around and end the whole thing.”
“It’s a radical idea,” Rosner said. “It used to be something people couldn’t even mention as a possibility. The fact that [Israelis] talk about it openly now is a result of Oct. 7. It changed something in the psychology of the conflict. It radicalized everyone and how we talk about it.”
Rosner said it was unlikely Israel would agree to a two-state solution in coming years. That being the case, “the conflict isn’t going anywhere.”
“One needs to come up with a notion of how it ends if it’s ever going to end.”
Martin Sherman, director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, said he’s been supporting the idea of Palestinian relocation for years.
“All solutions for Gaza that are not population removal are in some way a rerun of the Oslo process and its failed derivatives,” he told The Epoch Times. “They are based on the forlorn assumption that you can find some domesticated Palestinians who willingly or grudgingly will live in peace or non-belligerence with the Jewish state.”
