Trump's Gaza plan: A real estate vision of displacement

All eyes were on the official visit to the White House by King Abdullah II of Jordan, to whose country US President Donald Trump had intended to expel some of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza, as part of his cockamamie plan to empty Gaza of Gazans, “take it over”, “own it” and then turn it into a Cote d’Azure of the Eastern Mediterranean.

We would’ve been all the more edified if we were all ears as well, for we would’ve heard what the American chief executive was saying in advance of his meeting with the Jordanian royal.

When asked by reporters on Monday whether he would withhold aid from Jordan if it refused to take in Palestinians, effectively using the $1.5 billion the country receives from the US annually in economic and military aid assistance as leverage to force Amman to comply with his Gaza proposal, he suggested that he would.

“Yeah, maybe, sure, why not”, he stated. “If they [Jordan and Egypt, another intended destination of Gazan expellees] don’t, I would conceivably withhold aid, yes”.

Moreover, in an interview with Fox News later in the day, he made it clearer still what fate awaited the people of Gaza once expelled from their homeland.

Asked by the interviewer if these folks would be allowed to return to their homes, Trump’s response was blunt. “No, they would not because they’re going to have much better housing. In other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them”, he said, again referring to Jordan and Egypt as the countries where the entire population of the Gaza Strip would ideally be resettled, expressing confidence a “deal” would assuredly be struck with both countries, to which, added, “we give billions and billions of dollars a year”.

In its malignant aims and in the shock-and-awe scale of its assault on a people considered the most vulnerable in the world today, Trump’s plan is unmatched in the cruelty it envisions to inflict on Palestinians, and equally unmatched in the sheer effrontery it constitutes to the Arab world and that world’s people, a plan that has been met with predictable outrage and emphatic rejection by the global community — with only Israel, now a reviled outlier in it, voicing support — and by Palestinians, to whom it is a painful reminder of the catastrophic time in 1948, known as the Nakba, that saw the dismemberment of their homeland and the expulsion from it of close to a million people to the neighbouring countries.

Never again

Never again, Palestinians are today vowing, shall we allow anyone to ethnically cleanse us out of our ancestral land. Never again, as Native Americans might put it, shall we endure another Trail of Tears.

Finally, in his meeting in the Oval Office with President Trump on Tuesday, King Abdullah, as expected, simply reiterated the Arab countries’ unified rejection of Trump’s proposal for Gaza, insisting that addressing the humanitarian crisis in the Strip and rebuilding it, not displacing its population, “should be the main focus of all parties”, including that of the United States.

For his part, President Trump told reporters during a portion of the meeting that was made open to them that he was, well, less sure now that cutting aid to Jordan was the right path for the US to take. “No, I’ll think we’ll do something, I don’t think we’ll threaten with money”, he said, mangling his syntax, as is his wont.

But the president, a former real estate tycoon, made no attempt — to the seeming discomfort of his Jordanian guest — to soften his head-spinning plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza and develop their land into premium, storefront housing.

“We’re going to take it”, he bragged to reporters. “We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it”.

And never mind that taking over and holding the enclave, forcing Palestinians to leave and preventing them from returning would be, without a doubt, as many experts have already opined, a violation of international law — and, as more details of this bizarre plan emerge, “the list of potential violations become even clearer”, wrote the New York Times on Tuesday.

Folks, the United States of America is no longer the United States of America that we have known throughout our adult lives as the land where Jeffersonian principles were born and there thrived.

As the sun rose on Jan. 20, 2025, the world was ushered into a new era, a kind of twilight zone, with an unpredictable leader holding the reins of the most powerful nation on this God’s green Earth.

So, let’s get used to it.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.