What Trump sees about Gaza that others miss

Everyone should be able to agree with at least one thing President Trump said about Gaza at his press conference earlier this week: the Strip cannot go back to where it was before October 7, otherwise “it’s going to end up the same way it has for years”.

What he correctly sees is that Gaza has no geographic problem. It is not some windswept landlocked area facing droughts. It is located on a beautiful part of the Mediterranean with soft sands from the Egyptian Delta. It sits at the crossroads of two ancient trade routes and connected by train through Israel to the Red Sea, it could provide competition to the Suez Canal (could that also be part of his thinking?).

It has energy reserves. It has everything it needs to be a major trading and tourism hub.

The only problem Gaza has is its politics: its people are committed to an ideology of destruction, sustained by organisations like Unrwa, which in effect means to destroy what the Jews have built next door rather than to build for themselves.

What the president seems to notice is that Gaza’s inhabitants could have built something remarkable on this strip of land but instead chose — and it was an ideological choice — to turn it into a weaponised landscape for the singular purpose of destroying Israel.

He sees what Palestinians, Egyptians, even Jordanians should have seen long ago: Gaza is an extremely valuable piece of land, if — and it’s a big if — the politics can somehow be moved from one of destruction to construction, figuratively and literally.

The Arab world, however, is no stranger to grand US ideas intended to help settle Arab refugees and move on from war. What the Arab countries have done in the past with such grand ideas, beginning in the 1950s, is to take the money, hijack the agency through which it was to be done (Unrwa), build nothing and keep the Arab refugees as they were, generation after generation, turning them into a people — the Palestinians — tragically organised around the idea of having no Jewish state.

This means that any grand project depends on taking action in advance to prevent it from being hijacked. As the US defunds Unrwa, it must avoid repeating a situation where Western money flows in but the politics of destruction remains. Perhaps this is why the president speaks of the US taking over the territory immediately.

The key to changing the politics of destruction is to end the lie and scam of perpetual Palestinian refugeehood. And to end, too, the violent vision of “return” to Israel proper which underpinned the October 7 attacks and massacres and which for generations has sent Gazans the message that Gaza is not their home but a launchpad from which to “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea”.

Any notion of refugeehood and “right of return” should be transmuted into property rights in Gaza. Gaza’s inhabitants, regardless of whether they are given temporary or permanent refuge in other Arab countries, and even if they just remain in Gaza, must be struck from Unrwa’s records as refugees. Each must recognise that they possess no such thing as a “right of return” into Israel.

In response, and only after this is done, every Gaza resident would receive a unit of property rights, such as an apartment, to be realised when Gaza is rebuilt. That right can be taken up or sold but it is a simple property right, where Gaza is home, not a destructive vision of “return” to somewhere else.

What President Trump’s proposal for Gaza has served to highlight is this: Gaza is an incredibly valuable piece of territory.

Whoever can figure out how to change its politics from one of obsessive destruction to forward-looking construction will benefit greatly themselves as well benefiting the region more broadly.