Middle East Press On: Trump, Gaza, Israel, Palestinians: New Age Islam's Selection, 6 February 2025
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
6 February 2025
We Shouldn't Dismiss Trump's Vision For Gaza So Quickly
Trump’s Gaza Proposal Reinforces His Image As Disruptor In Chief
Achieving A Lasting Victory: Israel Must Defeat Hamas And Break Free Of Their Trap
EXPLAINER - How Trump's Gaza Proposals Could Violate International Law
'No To Trump's Plan!' Palestinians Vow To Stay In Gaza
The Challenge To Find A Better Solution For Gaza
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We Shouldn't Dismiss Trump's Vision For Gaza So Quickly
By Jpost Editorial
February 6, 2025
US President Donald Trump gave Israelis on Tuesday something many could only have dreamed of.
He aligned himself fully with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims: Dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, securing the return of all the hostages, and ensuring that Gaza would never again pose a threat to Israel.
He made clear, after signing an order resuming “maximum pressure” on Iran, that Tehran will never acquire a nuclear weapon.
He did not pledge allegiance to the idea of a Palestinian state and said his administration would weigh in within a month on whether Israel should extend sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
He reaffirmed his intent to broker an Israel-Saudi normalization agreement.
And, most shockingly – in the sense that no one saw it coming – he said the US would take over Gaza after all its residents were relocated elsewhere.
Trump's answer
With that, Trump provided the answer to a question that has bedeviled everyone since the war began on October 7: What happens the day after? Who will take control of Gaza?
Trump’s answer: We will. The United States of America.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” he said. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different.”
Predictably, there were scores of scoffers and mockers around the world. Predictably, the Arab world rejected the idea out of hand.
Also, predictably, Israel’s airwaves were filled with commentators laughing it off, explaining why it would never work, and wondering whether it was not just lip service and a ploy to ultimately get Netanyahu to do what the president wants.
In other words, many Israelis – and Jews in certain circles in the Diaspora – did what they often do when faced with good news: Look for dark clouds behind any silver lining.
And Trump’s proposal is a silver lining. It presents a fresh, out-of-the-box approach to a problem that experienced diplomatic minds have spent years trying to solve – only to recycle the same solutions that fail time after time.
Along comes Trump, and he offers up completely new ideas. Are they realistic? Maybe not. Are they implementable? Maybe not.
But why not give them a hearing? Why pooh-pooh them as unworkable right off the bat?
There are enough people out there who will characterize Trump’s ideas as ridiculous without Israelis or Jews needing to add their voices to the chorus.
An alternative approach
We recommend a different approach: Welcome the ideas, flesh them out, refine them, and test their feasibility.
But don’t summarily dismiss them or shut them down before they’ve had a chance to take shape.
As former president Joe Biden recommended to Netanyahu last year in an entirely different context: Take the win.
And this is a win. The most powerful leader in the world has stood up and unapologetically aligned US policy with Israel’s interests. That is no small thing. Celebrate it – don’t deflate it.
The unvarnished truth, as Trump said in his press conference, is that the same solutions for Gaza have been tried repeatedly, but nothing has changed, and nothing has moved.
“You have to learn from history,” Trump said, adding, “You can’t let it keep repeating itself,” something that has been the case in Gaza for generations.
“You can’t keep doing the same mistake over and over again. Gaza is a hellhole right now. It was before the bombing started, frankly. And we’re going to give people a chance to live in a beautiful community that’s safe and secure.”
Is the idea of relocating Gaza’s people elsewhere unconventional? Of course.
Is the idea of the US taking control of the Strip revolutionary? Certainly.
Is the vision of Gaza becoming a Middle Eastern Riviera a bit too rosy? Undoubtedly.
But nothing else has worked.
This, at least, is an attempt to shake things up and break paradigms that have failed time and again.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840860
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Trump’s Gaza Proposal Reinforces His Image As Disruptor In Chief
By Andrew Silow-Carroll/Jta
February 6, 2025
For all the millions of words written about Donald Trump’s inexplicable (to his opponents, anyway) political appeal, the simplest explanation may be the way he channels coffee shop banter into actual policy proposals. Too many immigrants? Build a wall. Greenland’s a commodity? Let’s buy it.
Gaza is a wasteland? Let’s clear it out — of people and rubble — and build something better.
Thomas Friedman this week called Trump’s the “bar-napkin presidency” — his executive orders and tariffs a series of “half-baked ideas” followed by “chaotic seat-of-pants wrangling between Trump and his aides and lobbyists over which industries will be hit and which will be spared.”
Method or madness, perhaps that is also what is going on behind his proposal, at a bombshell news conference Tuesday, that “all” Palestinians leave Gaza for other countries, and that the United States “take over” the territory and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Many Middle East observers and partisan American Jewish groups consider the idea appalling, delusional and unworkable, absent a sort of military intervention that would make other historical examples of ethnic cleansing look quaint by comparison. At a White House briefing on Wednesday, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt hailed the Gaza proposal as “historic” and “outside of the box.” A number of right-wing Jews celebrated Trump’s proposal.
Some called the announcement an intentionally extreme opening bid ahead of future concessions — like Trump’s threat of military or economic coercion to gain control of the Panama Canal. Israeli journalist Amir Ettinger, writing in the right-leaning Israel Hayom newspaper, said “Trump must be taken with a grain of salt,” suggesting the gambit was a negotiating tactic.
Rachel Brandenburg of the Israel Policy Forum, which advocates for a two-state solution, said in a webinar Wednesday that Trump’s “unique style” demands and even inspires creativity on the part of his negotiating partners. Because Trump is “willing to push things to the brink,” she said, “you have to be willing to do some creative thinking alongside him or behind the scenes.”
But in terms of real-world consequences, it is one thing for your neighbor to advocate expulsion or annexation at the Shabbos table, and another when it comes from the leader of the free world. Even if the Gaza idea is an inflated opening bid — what, according to NPR, Israelis call “laying down a goat” — the real world consequences could be enormous — for Israel, for the Palestinians, for Jews and for the world.
The very idea of expulsion emboldens Israel’s far right and its supporters, who dream of annexing the West Bank and “transferring” its Palestinian residents. Treating Palestinians as unlucky residents of an area subject to eminent domain robs them of agency and undermines any claims they have to a state of their own.
In the Times of Israel, David Horovitz writes that the Gaza proposal is not just immoral but politically disastrous, especially in the signal it sends to China regarding Taiwan and Russia regarding Ukraine.“By what international right,” he asks, “does the US intend to occupy, empty, and repopulate a territory that, indeed, has no legitimate sovereign government, but is also not open and available to the United States simply by virtue of its desire to take it over?”
The proposal also does Israel no favors. For Palestinians and their supporters, the idea is bitter confirmation of Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi’s argument that from its founding Israel has been an imperial project of the Western world’s great powers. In recent years perhaps no charge has rankled the pro-Israel community more than the accusation that Israel is a “settler colonial” project of the West. It’s harder to deny the “settler colonialism” label if your best idea is to collude with a major power to remove a population from a territory and take over their land.
Disruption and problem solving
Trump and his team might not have thought these things through, but the first two weeks of his second presidency suggest that consequences are not his priority. Disruption and being seen as a problem solver — at least of the problems he uniquely identifies and amplifies — are his brand. The ideas that Trump’s critics see as his most preposterous and norm-breaking are usually applied to problems for which politics-as-usual have failed to find a fix, from illegal immigration to the flow of illegal drugs to inflation. At the height of the pandemic, his public ruminations about injecting bleach and trying untested cures resonated among frightened people looking for silver bullets.
What problem seems more intractable than Gaza? Tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, the strip in rubble, and Israelis still not convinced the Hamas can no longer kill or kidnap its people. In that context, repopulating Gaza sounds like what Trump calls “common sense.” If you can convince yourself that, despite their own objections, Gazans will be better off living in Egypt, Jordan and other countries, safe from conflict, it almost sounds humanitarian.
In the hours after the Trump-Netanyahu news conference, the media trotted out the usual Middle East experts and pundits to comment. It was striking how many decades many of them have been in the game — and equally striking how far away, despite their best efforts, Israelis and Palestinians are from a future that doesn’t include them killing each other. Against this track record of futility, Trump brings in neophytes and cronies who have their own ideas. Occasionally it works, as when Jared Kushner, his advisor and son in law, ran point on the Abraham Accords despite his experience. More often, Trump moves on to the next idea.
“Above all else, Donald Trump’s superpower is his willingness to ignore anything he said yesterday or at any other point before now in the interests of what feels right today,” writes Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. “That gives him an almost unimaginable flexibility.’
In the face of complex, intractable problems, Trump flexes his unpredictability and “common sense.” It may not solve the problem, but that may not be the goal.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840901
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Achieving A Lasting Victory: Israel Must Defeat Hamas And Break Free Of Their Trap
By Michael J. Salamon, Louis Libin
February 6, 2025
The military victory Israel achieved in Gaza masks a more complex reality. While Israeli forces have effectively dismantled much of Hamas’s physical infrastructure, the terrorist organization has masterfully transformed the hostage crisis into a psychological weapon, leaving Israel in an increasingly precarious position.
Hamas’s strategic manipulation of the hostage situation reveals a disturbing truth: military superiority doesn’t guarantee strategic victory. Despite suffering significant battlefield losses, Hamas has orchestrated a sophisticated propaganda campaign around hostage releases, turning each negotiation into a theatrical display of defiance.
These carefully staged events, complete with uniformed members and orchestrated celebrations, serve a dual purpose: they rally support among Hamas’s base while presenting a carefully crafted image to the international community.
The timing of this crisis coincides with President Donald Trump’s return to prominence in American politics, adding another layer of complexity to Israel’s strategic calculations. Trump’s unconventional approach to diplomacy and his tendency to view international relations through the lens of personal deals could either benefit or complicate Israel’s position.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s invitation to be the first foreign leader to visit the Trump White House is notable. However, Trump’s statement about the US taking over Gaza is at best confusing.
While the Trump administration has shown strong support for Israel, his focus on securing a financial agreement with Saudi Arabia raises questions about the durability of this alliance.
Diplomatic tightrope
Israel now finds itself walking a diplomatic tightrope. Each hostage release, while bringing relief to affected families, has become a double-edged sword. Hamas weaponizes these moments, using them to strengthen its narrative and maintain international attention on Gaza. This strategy effectively diverts focus from Hamas’s own war crimes while subjecting Israel to intense global scrutiny.
The ongoing negotiations, reliably reported to be conducted via shuttle diplomacy, reveal Hamas’s strategic depth. By retaining hostages and releasing them selectively, the terrorist organization maintains leverage while casting doubt on the possibility of a comprehensive resolution.
This calculated approach forces Israel to confront an impossible choice: make concessions that could embolden future hostage-taking or risk the lives of civilians who represent every sector of Israeli society.
Military options remain on the table, but each carries significant risks. A full-scale ground offensive could potentially rescue hostages and further degrade Hamas’s capabilities, but at the cost of high casualties and severe international backlash. Precision raids offer more focused alternatives but face substantial operational challenges, especially with Hamas using hostages as human shields.
ISRAEL’S PREDICAMENT extends beyond the immediate crisis. The country faces growing international isolation, with few allies willing to offer unconditional support. While the current American administration maintains its backing, the volatile nature of US politics and Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy suggests this support shouldn’t be taken for granted.
The path forward requires Israel to adapt to the asymmetric nature of this conflict. Traditional military superiority alone won’t secure victory in this battle of perception and psychology. Israel must develop new strategies that counter Hamas’s propaganda machine while maintaining pressure on the organization without alienating potential allies or inflaming global opinion.
As Israel grapples with these challenges, it must also prepare for a future where its security depends less on external support and more on its own resilience and strategic independence. The current crisis demonstrates that even decisive military victories can be undermined by sophisticated psychological warfare and propaganda.
The resolution of the hostage crisis will likely define the next chapter in this conflict. However, success will require more than military might or diplomatic maneuvering. It demands a nuanced approach that acknowledges the changing nature of modern warfare, where victory on the battlefield doesn’t necessarily translate to strategic success.
We have always been told that US policy is to not negotiate with terrorists. We must be prepared for the possibility of a policy change or a short-term transactional approach.
For Israel, the true challenge lies not just in defeating Hamas militarily but in breaking free from the psychological trap it has set. This requires maintaining moral clarity while developing more effective countermeasures to propaganda warfare. Only by addressing both the physical and psychological dimensions of this conflict can Israel hope to achieve a lasting victory that extends beyond the battlefield.
Dr. Michael J. Salamon is a psychologist and strategic consultant specializing in trauma and abuse. He is director of ADC Psychological Services in Netanya and Hewlett, NY, and is on staff at Northwell, New Hyde Park, NY.
Louis Libin is an expert in military strategies and innovation, and advises and teaches military innovation, wireless system operations, and emergency communications at military colleges and agencies. He founded a consulting group for emergency management, cybersecurity, IP, and communications.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840849
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Explainer - How Trump's Gaza Proposals Could Violate International Law
February 5, 2025
US President Donald Trump said he wants to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Egypt and Jordan, demolish remaining buildings to make way for a Riviera-style development project and place the Occupied Territory under US “ownership”.
Forcing people to leave their land and taking over territory are prohibited by long-standing treaties. Following is a look at the ramifications of Trump’s plans under international law.
Taking control of territory
Trump said “the US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too … I do see a long-term ownership position.”
The Gaza Strip is recognised by the United Nations and its highest Court, the International Court of Justice, as part of the Palestinian Territories under Israeli military Occupation.
International law prohibits the seizure of territory by force, which is defined as an act of aggression. The UN Charter says: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
“Ultimately, President Trump’s proposal amounts to a blatant rejection of the core tenets of international law that have operated since at least the end of World War II and the adoption of the UN Charter,” said Assistant Professor of International Human Rights Law, Michael Becker, at Trinity College, Dublin.
Were the United States to lay claim to the Gaza Strip, “this would amount to the unlawful annexation of territory. Nor does Israel have any right to cede Palestinian territory to the United States or to anyone else,” said Becker.
Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict and a specialist in international humanitarian law, said: “There are no circumstances in which it is permissible to seize territory by force. The argument that it benefits populations there or elsewhere is legally meaningless even if it were factually correct.”
Under the UN Charter, responsibility for identifying acts of aggression and responding to them falls to the Security Council, where the United States is a permanent, veto-wielding member.
Aggression is also one of the crimes that can be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court. The United States and Israel are not members of the ICC, but the Court has asserted jurisdiction over the Palestinian Territories, including over acts committed there by countries that are not members.
Moving Palestinians out
“Forcibly resettling the Palestinians of Gaza would constitute the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer,” said Dill.
Trump has said Palestinian residents of Gaza would want to leave because it has become dangerous. But, so far, there has been no indication that the 2.3 million residents wish to go.
The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits the forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons in Occupied Territory.
According to the founding document of the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, “the term ‘forcibly’ is not restricted to physical force, but may include threat of force or coercion, such as that caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression or abuse of power against such person or persons or another person, or by taking advantage of a coercive environment.”
Dill said it was also likely that removing Palestinians from Gaza would require carrying out other large-scale crimes against them.
“The scale of such an undertaking, the level of coercion and force required mean this would very likely meet the threshold of a large scale and systematic attack against the civilian population.”
Preventing Gazans from returning
Trump has said that after Gaza residents leave, he does not envision them returning.
Preventing them from doing so would also amount to a violation of international legal principles under which displaced populations retain a right to return to lands they have fled.
Even a lawful evacuation by an Occupying power “cannot involve sending people to a third country and it cannot be a pretext for ethnic cleansing or removing the population from the territory indefinitely or on a permanent basis,” said Becker.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, told Al Arabiya TV that taking the population out of Gaza would “create a high risk that you make the Palestinian State impossible forever”.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250205-explainer-how-trumps-gaza-proposals-could-violate-international-law/
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'No To Trump's Plan!' Palestinians Vow To Stay In Gaza
February 5, 2025
Gazans slammed US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the Gaza Strip and resettle Palestinians elsewhere, vowing to never leave the ruins of their homes in the coastal enclave that Trump wants to turn into a “Riviera of the Middle East“.
“Trump can go to hell, with his ideas, with his money, and with his beliefs. We are going nowhere. We are not some of his assets,” Samir Abu Basel told Reuters from Gaza City.
“If he wants to resolve this conflict he should take the Israelis and put them in one of the states [in America]. They are the strangers, not the Palestinians. We are the owners of the land,” said the father of five, who has been displaced from his house near Jabalia on Gaza’s northern edge.
Trump said he envisioned building a resort where international communities could live after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment devastated the tiny coastal enclave and killed more than 47,000 Palestinians.
Palestinians said the bombs had failed to eject them from Gaza and Trump would not succeed in doing so.
“He spoke with much arrogance…he can test us, and soon he will find out his fantasies don’t work with us,” said Abu Basel.
Palestinians have once again been displaced from their homes over the past 15 months, many forced to relocate five or more times as Israel’s bombing of the small enclave intensified and it targeted areas it had previously declared to be ‘safe zones’.
Many questioned whether the ultimate aid was the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza in order to allow Zionist settlers to take over the Strip.
“We will not leave our areas, we will not allow a second Nakba. We have brought our kids up teaching them that they can’t leave their home and they can’t allow a second Nakba,” Um Tamer Jamal, a 65-year-old mother of six, said, in reference to the 1948 forced expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes to make way for the creation of the Zionist state of Israel.
“[Trump] is crazy. We didn’t leave Gaza under the bombardment and the starvation, how does he intend to eject us? We are going nowhere,” she said from Gaza City.
Uniting rivals
The shock move from Trump, a former New York property developer, was swiftly condemned by international powers as well as Palestinian leaders.
The rival Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist group Hamas united in rejecting what they said was a plan to seize the Mediterranean coastal territory and expel Palestinians from their homeland.
Abbas said the Palestinians would not relinquish “their land, rights and sacred sites, and that the Gaza Strip is an integral part of the land of the State of Palestine, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior official of Hamas, which governs Gaza, said Trump’s statement about taking over the enclave was “ridiculous and absurd”.
“Any ideas of this kind are capable of igniting the region,” he said.
In Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, families sitting near the rubble of a destroyed building said they were waiting for their homes to be rebuilt, not to be expelled from them.
Addressing President Trump, Ahmed Shahin said: “You helped Israel in the first place in this destruction that we can see here. Therefore, you have to rebuild for us while we are on this land. You can’t say we have to leave for you to rebuild.”
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250205-no-to-trumps-plan-palestinians-vow-to-stay-in-gaza/
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The Challenge To Find A Better Solution For Gaza
Alistair Burt
February 05, 2025
It is quite hard to know where to begin with the news that the US president has had a revelation that the way forward in the Middle East is to move not those who are occupying land illegally, but to evict those who have been bombed to destruction in Gaza so as to redevelop it for hotels and apartments.
However, let us unpick the headline. Behind the breathtaking absurdity of the proposed solution — rightly denounced by Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan — lies a land of catastrophic destruction, people in need and a political minefield across an entire region that demands urgent attention. There are now no voices claiming that the situation between Israel and the Palestinians can be “managed.”
There was a sharp contrast in power at the press conference where President Donald Trump made his remarks. On the one hand was a president, flushed with electoral success, in complete political command of all branches of government and possessing a belief that he can now do exactly what he wants. On the other was a weakened Israeli prime minister, not in full control of his Cabinet, who could fairly claim that his actions against Hezbollah and Iran had changed the dynamics in the region, but at huge cost and without either defeating Hamas or freeing the cruelly taken hostages.
There is a logic to the new US position if you see the whole region as one vast real estate plot and believe that business and money can overcome everything. If you are not a politician, and have seen politics fail time and again, why would you not think that something different is worth a try? Gaza is indeed now a wasteland, where the condition of the people is desperate and will be for some time. Who would not want the prospect of living in the same location, but one which was safe, thriving and bustling, and making a good living? After all, he would say, barely 300 km away is Beirut, once truly the Riviera of the Mediterranean.
A moment’s reflection would remind you of the reality behind the comparison. As Lebanon and the suffering of Beirut has illustrated, the region is not real estate and it is not a new land. It is history, as well as both current and past politics.
The removal of Palestinians in Gaza as some form of logistical challenge was presented like cleaning up a landslip before construction can begin. This is reminiscent of the carelessness with the displacement of Palestinians in the past. Almost everything in the current-day understanding of the issues between Israel and its neighbor demands an awareness of the Nakba and its influence. Israel itself is a response to the historic Jewish diaspora of centuries, and the region is filled with memory, poetry and story of home, exile, the longing for return and the misery of enforced movement.
That is why, at the beginning of this round of conflict, Egypt and Jordan were clear that they would not take refugees from Gaza. They knew that Palestinians would rightly fear that, once they left Gaza, there would be little chance of a return and that their own populations would likely be violently opposed to any collusion in such a plan. They still are.
This fear is rightly bolstered by the development of hard-line Israeli politics. The racism represented by Meir Kahane and his followers, which would once never have been countenanced by a decent Israeli leadership, is now a potent force in the government itself, to the dismay of many other Israelis. Extremist settlers, too often protected by the Israeli state, terrorize Palestinian villagers in the West Bank and make no secret of their intention to push them out for the exclusive use of the territory by Jewish Israelis. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who can still make or break Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet, openly calls for Israeli sovereignty and annexation.
Is it any wonder that the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, whatever the excuse given, looks exactly like what it is: the delivery of the most carefully-thought-out, hard-line, extremist Israeli political agenda?
The tragedy of what has happened will be compounded if the possibility of a better option is lost. Saudi Arabia’s rapid response to the president’s suggestion was “to reaffirm its unequivocal rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, through … attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land.” It has reinforced its commitment to a Palestinian state as part of any normalization with Israel.
And there lies the better option. President Trump is right to say that, if we keep trying the same things, then there will be conflict everlasting. Something different is worth a try. It is called a Palestinian state and a normalized Israel, based on the Global Alliance for Implementation of the Two-State Solution.
Could it possibly be that he has, unwittingly or not, thrown out the challenge: if you do not like what I am suggesting, what have you got instead?
It is time to deliver the better option.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2589110
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