We are living at a truly momentous time in history. Donald Trump illustrated that yet again on Tuesday evening during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “You have to learn from history,” Trump declared and proceeded to upend the political order that has prevailed in the Middle East for decades. It is a multiply failed order and new approaches are very, very long overdue, but no one has dared to question it and suggest new solutions. Until now.
The most momentous announcement of this most momentous of press conferences was Trump’s declaration that Hamas would not be permitted to regain control of Gaza and that, in fact, the U.S. "will take over the Gaza Strip... we will own it." He also reiterated his insistence that 1.7 million Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, explaining several times that this was necessary because the failed policies of the past should not and must not be applied yet again.
Hamas, Trump said, had ruled Gaza for years and offered no options for the Palestinian people beyond bloodshed and death. He sketched out a vision of a restored Gaza that would be an international area, populated not just by Palestinian Arabs but by people from all over the world who would be able to enjoy its renaissance as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
BREAKING: President Trump just announced: "The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. 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… pic.twitter.com/dnoMKDSQFA
— George (@BehizyTweets) February 5, 2025
When asked if this meant that he was rejecting the possibility of a “two-state solution,” Trump said that he wasn’t addressing that at all, but merely saying that the old policies of the past had failed and that new solutions needed to be tried. He and Netanyahu also both expressed confidence that Saudi Arabia would soon normalize relations with Israel, which would have a seismic effect upon the Muslim Middle East, as it has shown unremitting hostility to Israel ever since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.
Trump’s plan may sound crazy, and the establishment media and establishment policy analysts are already purporting to explain just how crazy it is. But in reality, the crazy plan is the one that has been in place since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and which has remained the view of the conflict that virtually everyone has taken for granted for over three decades now.
The idea of the Oslo Accords was that Israel would relinquish sovereignty over certain areas of Judea and Samaria (that is, the West Bank, as the Jordanian government renamed the region in 1950 in order to obscure its ancient ties to the Jewish people), as well as of Gaza, and that the Palestinian Authority would be established to govern those territories. Israel and the Palestinian Authority would then work with the Palestinians toward the establishment of a fully independent Palestinian state. The two states would then, as the rhetoric of a thousand establishment politicians has affirmed since then, live side by side in peace.
There were numerous problems with this plan from the beginning. One is that the Palestinians are not in reality a distinct ethnicity or nationality; they are identical culturally, religiously, linguistically, and ethnically to the Arabs of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Giving them the Palestinian Authority, and ultimately a state, would simply be establishing a twenty-third Arab state at the expense of the world’s lone Jewish state and would be rewarding the propaganda campaign that has convinced much of the world that the Palestinians are actually the indigenous people of the area.
Even worse, the fundamental reason why all peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians have failed is because of the imperative in the Qur’an, “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). That passage is the basis for the Islamic idea that any land once ruled under Islamic law belongs by right to Islam forever and that Muslims have a responsibility before Allah to remove any people from what they think is Islamic land.
Thus, the two people would never live side by side. That has been proven abundantly, not least by what happened after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Instead of resuming normal lives, the Palestinians turned Gaza into a new jihad base. They will never accept an Israel even the size of a postage stamp; the Qur’anic imperative to drive them out will remain. This is why Hamas always breaks every truce, every peace accord, every ceasefire.
So Trump is right. A radical new approach is needed. And he is right also that Egypt and Jordan should take in the Gazans. They have refused to do so for decades because they wanted to keep the Palestinian issue alive as a weapon to use against the Jewish state that they also hated for Islamic reasons. Now, in view of the fact that they are one people, they should accept their brethren just as Germany accepted the displaced Eastern Germans after Germany rightly lost territory following World War II.
Related: Hamas Celebrates Ceasefire Deal in Gaza, and With Good Reason
As for American administration of Gaza, it could work as a temporary measure, but only if leftist nation-builders are kept far away from the project and the whole area is approached in a manner that has not been attempted before: not to teach the natives who hate the West and democracy to love both but to free the area of jihadis and then build a new life with those who remain.
In any case, there is still a long way to go and many hurdles to clear before Trump’s plan can even come close to being implemented. In discarding the old failed policies, however, he is very much on the right track. All free people should be praying for his success.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member