In the Media

The ‘Gaza plan’ is almost certainly designed to scare Palestinians and third parties to the negotiation table with creative solutions.

Australian Financial Review – 7 February 2025

In the wake of Donald Trump’s dramatic Gaza pronouncements, everyone needs to take a breath.

The US is not going to take over Gaza. It’s not going to kick out Gazans. It’s not going to sell the land to the highest bidder.

Let’s put Trump’s comments in context. Since he returned to power, he’s discussed taking over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. He’s unlikely to do any of that, either.

Trump’s opening negotiating tactic is to make wild threats and put forward ambit claims. Add bluster, a dose of crazy and the might of the US, and people take him seriously enough to dilute solid red lines into shades of pink; Trump gets much of what he wants, and he doesn’t mind acting like a bully or looking like a buffoon in the process.

A few days ago, he signed off on tariffs against Mexico and Canada. Within hours, both countries came up with border-related policies that the US had long demanded and – hey, presto! – the tariffs were “postponed”. They probably won’t ever be implemented.

Yes, it’s obnoxious. It’s not the way we like doing things. Yet we need to get used to it, at least for the next four years.

Trump’s “Gaza plan” – which also took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by surprise – is almost certainly designed to scare Palestinians and third parties into being less maximalist in their demands, and to start coming to the table with creative solutions.

I imagine that Trump looks at the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and sees – quite correctly – that the way the West has approached it for the last 50 years hasn’t worked. Rather than repeat the same tactics and wring his hands when they inevitably fail, he is trying something different.

We ought to remember that trying something different in 2020 brought about the Abraham Accords – normalising Israeli relations with four Arab countries – which defied those pontificating about how Trump was doing everything wrong.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as a result of Trump’s threats, several rich Arab countries cough up tens of billions of dollars to start rebuilding Gaza. I wouldn’t be surprised if Egypt allows Gazans to move to a designated part of northern Sinai, adjacent to Gaza. This could, over time, become an extension of Gaza and help solve overcrowding in the Strip.

The details of Trump’s suggestions might be, well, illogical, but the underlying reasoning that it would make rebuilding Gaza easier is sound.

Gaza right now is littered with unexploded Israeli ordnance and Hamas-booby-trapped buildings and tunnels. The hundreds of kilometres of Hamas-dug tunnels under Gaza have weakened the very sandy soil above, making building dangerous. Safely and sustainably clearing and rebuilding Gaza will be extremely slow and extremely difficult, made even more difficult by a civilian presence.

Creative options

While the answer to this dilemma is not the forcible removal of all its civilians, creative options must be explored. Otherwise, 2 million Gazans could be living in tents for a decade or more.

While thinking outside the diplomatic box is refreshing, were we to take Trump literally, we would have reason to be very concerned.

For a start, forcibly removing a population for reasons other than military necessity is a war crime. No one should support any concrete steps to implement such an illegal policy. Happily, none are likely to be taken.

(As an aside, when Israeli forces recently operated in Gaza, they insisted that civilians temporarily evacuate battleground neighbourhoods to a designated humanitarian zone inside Gaza, to keep them, as much as possible, out of harm’s way. This was militarily necessary and so legal under the laws of armed conflict. Indeed, some scholars suggest evacuating civilians from the battlefield is a requirement of those laws.)

All the commentators hyperventilating about how Trump’s plan is illegal and unethical and uneconomical and entirely lacking in pragmatism are all technically correct, but they’ve also kind of missed the point. They’ve forgotten that they shouldn’t be taking Trump literally. It’s a negotiating tactic.

The above shouldn’t be mistaken as a defence of Trump. There are serious concerns about the long-term effects that his style and goals might have on American democracy and the international system, which has relied on an underpinning of selfless American security guarantees for most of a century. But his tactics are sometimes effective – and he is correct that the Western approach to solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has, for most of its existence, often been wrong-headed and even counter-productive.

Trump is shaking things up. It’s just possible that the end result will be good for Israel and the Palestinians. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine things being worse than the past 16 months.