Trump’s Gaza plan may sound death knell to two-state solution, push West Asia closer to disaster

For US President Donald Trump, the Gaza Strip is prime sea-side real estate spoiled by two squabbling neighbours — Israelis and Palestinians. He outlined a deal to resolve the issue earlier this month.

At a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump shocked the world by announcing the United States would acquire Gaza, expel all Palestinians and settle them elsewhere in West Asia, preferably in Egypt or Jordan, and develop Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

In one breath, Trump trashed decades of US policy committed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under the framework of the two-state solution that sought to establish two states in the region — Israel for Jews and Palestine for Arabs.

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Trump’s plan for Gaza goes against international law, decades of US policy that Democrats and even Republicans adhered to, and the most widely accepted solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says Mushtaq Hussain, a scholar of international law and West Asian affairs at the BITS Law School, Mumbai.

Trump’s plan involves committing a string of violations of international law: forced deportation, a violation of humanitarian law, war crime, and crime against humanity; denial of the right to return as Trump has said Palestinians’ expulsion will be permanent; and seizure of property, the most fundamental international legal principle.

Hussain tells Firstpost that the United States, or any other country, has no right to take over Gaza and displace its people.

“It’s not just against the hitherto stated US policy, but it’s also illegal. International law clearly prohibits forcing a demographic change in an area which a country doesn’t have sovereignty over. The United States has no sovereignty in Gaza. There is no legal basis for the plan. You cannot ‘buy’ Gaza. It’s not Israel’s or anyone else’s to ‘sell’,” says Hussain.

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Palestinian state is off the table, Greater Israel is on

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in land, but not the way Trump believes it.

Both Jews and Arabs have roots in the same land. Jerusalem is sacred to both. The dispute has been over who gets to control how much land for their state.

Trump has said that Palestinians live in Gaza because they have nowhere else to be and they would love to be resettled abroad. That flies in the face of Palestinian self-determination movement. Palestinians are not just seeking a state. They are seeking a state at a particular location that they believe to be their historic homeland — just like Jews sought to establish Israel at a location that is their historic homeland.

The two-state solution had been unrealistic for a long time even before October 2023, when Hamas led the attack on Israel, but now it is not just unrealistic but essentially dead, says Muddassir Quamar, a scholar of West Asia at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi.

“The last time we had realistic hope for Palestinian statehood, it was in the 1990s when the Oslo Accords were worked out. It was still complicated as there were still two disconnected Palestinian territories. Since then, Israeli settlements have consistently increased in the West Bank and land for a Palestinian state has squeezed consistently. That was also the last time there was any real Palestinian leader. Today, there is no real Palestinian leader like Yasser Arafat, the land is fragmented, and there is no will in the United States for Palestinian statehood,” says Quamar.

Instead of the two-state solution, what we might be staring at is the push for ‘Greater Israel’, which is the maximalist interpretation of the geographical extent of the Jewish state in line with the sacred texts. Supporters of the plan, comprising the most right-wing figures in Israel, believe that the ‘promised land’ for Jews does not just comprise modern-day Israel but also West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and even Turkey.

While no one expects Israel to invade Turkey or Jordan to achieve Greater Israel, the annexation of West Bank, the de facto control of Gaza as per Trump’s plan, and annexation of bordering Syrian territories in the absence of any governance there since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s regime may definitely be on the cards.

One may think that Trump’s plans in Gaza are driven by business interests alone, but there is also an evangelical Christian push here, says Hussain, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at BITS Law School.

Hussain tells Firstpost, “The evangelical Christian politicians that are now part of Trump’s Middle East/Israel team are increasingly aligned with Israel’s right-wing. They have similar beliefs in literal interpretation of biblical texts. That is also the driving force behind Trump’s policy.”

That is indeed the case. Republicans aligned with Trump have increasingly started referring to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms Israeli Jews use for the region.

Trump’s plan may ignite Arab world

Trump’s plan to ‘relocate’ Palestinians outside of Gaza, a euphemism for state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, has rattled Arab leaders — for good reason.

In one voice, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have rejected the displacement of Palestinians. In a remarkably quick and strong statement, Saudi Arabia rejected Trump’s claim that Saudi Arabia had not demanded Palestinian statehood as a condition for normalising ties with Israel.

In a statement, Saudi Arabia said it will not stop its “tireless work towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that”.

Even if Trump would go ahead with the plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza, that would simply be an impossible task. There are around 2 million people in Gaza and several thousands of them are armed members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other terrorist groups. There is no way you can voluntarily remove them or deport them the way US authorities are deporting illegal immigrants.

If the United States were to attempt forceful removal of Palestinians from Gaza, the kind of insurgency that would erupt in Gaza would dwarf what was seen in Afghanistan, says Hussain, the scholar of West Asian affairs and international relations.

“With Trump’s plan, Hamas is facing an existential threat. If Palestinians are removed from Gaza, what would be Hamas’ future? Hamas will do everything to derail Trump’s plan. There are hundreds of kilometres of tunnels in Gaza and Hamas, even though reduced in strength, is far from defeated,” says Hussain.

The insurgency will not be just limited to Gaza or the West Bank. The fallout will be across West Asia as Palestine resonates deeply with the people in the region. Even if Arab rulers might cooperate with the United States or even Israel, the two countries have never been viewed favourably in West Asia.

Among Arab countries, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will be in the most precarious conditions. Both of these rulers derive their legitimacy from their custodianship of Islamic holy sites — the King of Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the holy mosques at Mecca and Medina and the King of Jordan is the custodian of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

“No matter how much Mohammed bin Salman acts as an authoritarian leader with absolute control over the Saudi state, the standing of Saudis among the larger Islamic world is at stake. If he goes on to allow the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, that would amount to the surrender of Mecca or Medina, or Al-Aqsa on part of Jordan’s King Abdullah, and that would not be taken kindly by the larger Muslim world, the Arab street, or by rival factions within their own kingdoms and abroad,” says Hussain.

The betrayal of the Palestinian cause, which the Arab street considers an Islamic cause, may very well lead to rebellions. For King Abdullah II of Jordan, this would be an existential crisis as more than half of his subjects are of Palestinian descent. There is also history of such a movement against his family’s rule.

In 1970 during the reign of King Hussein, Abdullah’s father, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) waged a violent war with the intention to overthrow the dynasty and establish Palestinian rule in Jordan. At the time, the PLO had an army of around 40,000 that ran a state within a state in Jordan and had practically removed the Jordanian rule from parts of the country. In the Jordanian-Palestinian war, thousands of Palestinians were killed and the PLO was later driven out of Jordan. Abdullah would not want to repeat the episode.

However autocratic, dictatorial, authoritarian Arab rulers might be, they respond to their public opinion and they cannot go against them, particularly after the events of the Arab Spring that led to removal of a number of rulers in the region by popular movements, says Quamar, the West Asia scholar at the JNU.

Quamar says that Trump has to know that the plan he has outlined cannot work. He says that Trump might be looking forward to a middle ground approach by proposing something extremely outlandish and then negotiating from there.

“Trump is known for his big plans and exaggerating things. In his first term, he had similar big statements, but he delivered something very different. For example, he talked about a big peace plan for West Asia in his first term and he eventually delivered the Abraham Accords. It was not a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he had initially said that he’d do, but it was still something that added to peace initiatives in the region,” says Quamar.

Whether Trump is following such an approach remains to be seen. Even as he hails himself as the world’s best dealmaker, his track record has not been great . In his first term, he failed to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, could not convince Russia for arms control deals, failed to get a deal with North Korea, and was gamed by China in signing a trade deal that was dead on arrival.