UPDATE (Feb. 4, 2025, 8:35 p.m. E.T.): During a joint press conference Tuesday night with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump said: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we’ll do a good job with it, too.”
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday and King Abdullah II of Jordan does the same on Feb. 11, one question keeps bubbling up to the surface: Can Donald Trump, the self-professed “peacemaker” who has eyed the coveted Nobel Peace Prize for many years, go where no U.S. president has gone before by striking a transformational, comprehensive peace deal in the Middle East?
Trump’s critics would answer with a big eye roll. And yet his pressuring of Netanyahu to sign onto the first stage of a three-phase ceasefire deal with Hamas — three more hostages were freed over the weekend in return for more than 100 Palestinian prisoners, the fourth round of prisoner exchanges since the deal took effect in mid-January — at least gives some credibility behind the ambition. Trump clearly has Middle East peace on his mind, and the Trump administration’s desire to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab countries, is never far from its lips. As national security adviser Mike Waltz said before Trump even stepped foot into office for his second term, Israeli-Saudi normalization is a “huge priority” for the team.
Trump clearly has Middle East peace on his mind.
But Trump can kiss all of this goodbye if he intends to move forward with his ongoing calls to expel the Palestinian population from Gaza, an idea he referenced during his joint press conference with Netanyahu at the White House. While he didn’t specifically use the word “expel” in his remarks, his suggestion that Palestinians might want to think about packing up their things and going to another area while reconstruction commences has caused shock and trepidation across the Arab world. Trump even suggested that his plan was in the works, with various countries contacting him and pledging assistance. Whether or not that’s the case, Trump appears increasingly invested in making this relocation scheme a reality. “Gaza is a demolition site right now,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “You can’t live in Gaza right now.”
If this were just another one-off, rambling comment from Trump, perhaps it could be dismissed as a nothing-burger. But it isn’t. Trump has referenced this idea on earlier occasions, first on Jan, 28, when he name-dropped Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordanian King Abdullah for help in taking Gaza’s population in, and again on Jan. 31, when he was signing executive orders in the Oval Office. Asked by a reporter about Egypt and Jordan’s refusal to play along, Trump matter-of-factly stated that they didn’t have a choice: “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it, OK? We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.”
Trump’s pretensions aside, Egypt and Jordan have their own reasons for not wanting to turn themselves into Trump’s enforcers. The most obvious, of course, is that such a proposition is extraordinarily unpopular in the Arab world. Countries throughout the Middle East disagree on a lot of things, but dislocating more than 2 million Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and opening the door to Israeli annexation of the coastal enclave — a fantasy ultranationalist Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich surely dream about — certainly isn’t one of them. If there was any dispute about that, the Arab League put it to rest over the weekend, when it released a statement that such plans “threaten the region’s stability, risk expanding the conflict, and undermine prospects for peace and coexistence among its peoples.”
Egypt and Jordan also have self-interested reasons for dismissing any Gazan relocation effort. Jordan, for one, is already hosting more than 2 million Palestinians who are registered as refugees, making approximately half of the kingdom’s population of Palestinian origin. As a resource-poor country, Jordan doesn’t have the luxury of sustaining a new influx of new refugees and wouldn’t want to, even if Washington or its Gulf allies picked up the tab (the U.S. already provides Jordan with $1.45 billion in foreign aid every year). For Egyptian President Sisi, the issue is less about economics and more about security. This is the same guy, after all, who led a 2013 military coup against a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood-led government (Hamas was established in 1987 as an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood), killed more than 800 people in the process and jailed tens of thousands more in an attempt to snuff out any resistance. If Sisi wasn’t willing to let Palestinians into Egypt when Israeli military operations in Gaza were at its height, he’s unlikely to do so when the guns have fallen silent (for the time being). Encouraging or compelling Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza, even if it’s ostensibly to accelerate reconstruction, is liable to kill Trump’s diplomatic agenda in the Middle East. Encouraging or compelling Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza, even if it’s ostensibly to accelerate reconstruction, is liable to kill Trump’s diplomatic agenda in the Middle East. At the top of the wish list is an Israeli-Saudi normalization accord, something his predecessor Joe Biden couldn’t finalize before his term ended, despite a year-and-a-half of talks with Israeli and Saudi officials. Such a deal would be a groundbreaking accomplishment for Washington in a region often associated with sunk costs, self-defeating policies and missed opportunities. And just as important for Trump, it would be an extremely impressive achievement he could rightfully brag about. Yet none of it will happen if Palestinians are forced to leave their own lands. It would snuff out an expansion of the Abraham Accords before the Trump administration even got the ball rolling. Although the Saudi government may have been open to a normalization deal with Israel before the war in Gaza, it’s no longer content with token Israeli concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. The Saudis now want a concrete pathway toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said in September, “The [Saudi] kingdom will not stop its tireless work towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. We affirm that the kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that.” The Saudi foreign minister reiterated that position in November, and it’s about as clear as it can get: Normalization without a Palestinian state (or at least a tangible process that leads to one) is impossible. Trump, therefore, needs to ask a fundamental question: What’s more important to him? Doing something all of his predecessors couldn’t do — shepherding formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab world’s most important state — or catering to the whims of Israel’s ultranationalists by proposing a cockamamie scheme that equates to deporting more than 2 million Palestinians from their own homes? The first is difficult to achieve but still doable; the second would cause more problems than they’re worth by compromising Washington’s diplomatic relationships in the Middle East, pushing his dream deal further away, and even risking the collapse of a ceasefire deal in Gaza he helped usher into being. And in this scenario, Trump can forget about seeing his name in the annals of Nobel history.
Daniel R. DePetris
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune. 
