It's been over a month since President Trump advocated relocating the ethnic Egyptians (erroneously called "Palestinians") currently residing in Gaza back to their Egyptian homeland, and HAZMAT teams have yet to finish cleaning the messes off the office walls of the New York Times and the Washington Post from all the heads that simultaneously exploded. All the Muslim nations stood in "solidarity" with their "Palestinian" "brothers" by promptly rejecting any suggestion that they should have anything to do with them at such a close berth. The Left's rent-a-mobs melted down into the predictable howling about "colonization," a term that apparently now refers to Jews resettling land that's been theirs for over 4,000 years.
Trump's genius is his creative ability to apply outside-the-box solutions to realpolitik situations. To date, our foreign policy for the last half century has been a disastrous mix of precisely the opposite, i.e., the insistence on applying failed, status quo band-aids to outside-the-box goals. In this case, a chimerical two-state solution has been obstinately pursued, against all evidence that it can never and will never work, with the result of thousands of Israeli deaths that need not have occurred.
With Trump back in office, these Muslim nations, particularly the Arab ones, might not have much of a choice. Their regimes are propped up by our aid money and the oil trade, which Trump has been using to leverage concessions from them regarding the likely inevitable relocation of Gazans. Egypt, in particular, must be pondering the costs of losing billions in American aid when its economy is already struggling.
Trump prefers offering carrots to sticks in the initial round of his negotiations, and has reportedly offered Egypt billions more in addition to the aid we're already providing should they play ball and accept the return of their ethnic kin. But should this be rebuffed, rest assured, Trump can remove the carrot and apply the stick. Both the Egyptian government and their Gazan miscreants probably realize that, after half a century of this nonsense, what Trump is offering is the best deal they're ever going to get, and that trying to strongarm Trump for more concessions will end disastrously for them. The only card they ever had to play was the effectiveness of European and world opinion to pressure past American administrations to compromise. With Trump, they no longer have this card. And they know it.
Sure, Gazans could try to wait it out another four years until Trump is out of office, in the ludicrous hope that candidate JD Vance is soundly defeated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Jasmine Crockett. But with Israel now, finally, having the full backing of an American administration, those four years won't be business as usual. That Sinai coastline must look better and better as the piles of rubble keep increasing in Rafah and Khan Younis.
As for Egypt, they're dealing with the reality that, since the Oct. 7 attacks, over 100,000 Gazans have illegally crossed over into their territory. This, despite Egypt's monumental efforts to prevent the influx. Illegal immigration sucks, don't it, boys?
There's no reason for Israel or America to try to prevent this continued emigration of Gazans to Egypt. In fact, it's an extremely useful bargaining chip. Hey Egypt, these Gazans are coming over in droves, and we're not going to stop them. In fact, we're inclined to hold the door open and look the other way. It might take a few more years, but eventually you're going to have mostly Gazans in your territory anyway. So you can benefit from this by taking our aid money and our help in resettling them, or you could slam that proverbial door shut and end up with all these Gazans anyway. Every day you delay is a day you lose negotiating leverage.
Both Egypt and Jordan have resisted taking in "Palestinians" due to security concerns. Previous acceptance and resettlement by sympathetic governments in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon were not reciprocated with gratitude from their "Palestinian" "brothers," but with violence, civil war, and coup d'états. So these governments' reluctance is entirely understandable. But the "Palestinian" cause is one of their own creation, one they constructed out of whole cloth and kept on life support long after its potential realization evaporated. Now, Frankenstein's monster is coming home to its castle.
And let's not lose sight of the fact that, by any standard of war throughout any period of history other than our own, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank belong to Israel by right of victory. Set aside the fact that these regions belonged to the Jews millennia before Islam was even a religion. After World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, these regions were given, respectively, to Egypt and Jordan. These newfound, Western-birthed nations then proceeded to play the FAFO game with Israel in 1967 and were promptly defeated, losing those regions to Israel. As victors of a war of extermination against them that they didn't start, Israel had every right to annex the land and expel its residents to Egypt and Jordan.
Mistakenly, they didn't, and here we are today.
Relocating the Gazans to Egypt should have been done in 1967. Egypt and Jordan have since made peace with Israel and accepted its existence. The Gazans have not. How many attacks will they launch against Israel before the latter asserts its lawful claim to annex, settle, and govern the land it rightfully reconquered?
That time appears to have arrived. And it appears to be the only workable solution to a lasting peace. By refusing to accept coexistence with its internationally recognized neighbor, Israel, the Gazans have long lost any rightful claim they may have had at one time to remain on that land (a claim that was highly dubious at the outset).
The entire Gaza Strip is roughly 25 miles long and five miles wide. It's the size of Detroit. The relocation, especially if a majority of it is voluntary (as recent polling suggests would be the case), could be done efficiently and safely. Should they be far-sighted enough to seize this rare and undeserved opportunity, Gazans would be far more prosperous in their new settlements.
The Trail of Tears it would not be.
And should the friskier elements of the resettled Gazans long for the days of Hamas rule when having your own neighborhood atomized was worth the tradeoff of murdered Jewish babies, they would do well to understand that the naïve days of Arab "brotherhood" in 1967 are long gone. The governments of Egypt and Jordan would have no qualms about, ahem, dealing with the "Palestinian" problem in ways that make Western governments squeamish.
You're going to behave, whether in Egypt, in Jordan, or in the hinterlands of Indonesia. Either way, we may be witnessing this problem finally being properly dealt with.
President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
Help us continue reporting on President Trump's success. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member