https://www.jns.org/trumps-call-to-resettle-gazans-could-end-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/
Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.
U.S. President Donald Trump, sitting alongside Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a geopolitical earthquake on Tuesday, doubling down on calls to resettle “1.7 or 1.8 million” Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip.
The calls go beyond any concept of “total victory” that Netanyahu has verbalized and possibly even considered at any point during the current war with Hamas in Gaza. A little more than a week ago, the questions on the table were whether Israel could ever return all of its hostages and who would rule Palestinians living in Gaza on the “day after” the war.
Trump—in the way only he could do—has stated what should have been patently obvious to a normal observer but unspeakable for any world leader: Gaza is completely uninhabitable, and its residents will need to be resettled elsewhere.
If Trump’s suggestions come to pass, it will not only represent a “total victory” beyond even Netanyahu’s wildest imagination but represent the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, removing any parity of numbers between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
If successful, calls for Israel to permanently cede land for the creation of a Palestinian state within the Jewish biblical homeland will end, and Israel will finally win the conflict. Jews would then be the overwhelming majority and Palestinians a smaller ethnic minority, removing once and for all the phony claims that Israel is an apartheid state.
Trump even hinted that America may support full Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (commonly known in the international community as the “West Bank”). “We’re discussing that … and people do like the idea. We haven’t taken a position on it yet, but we’ll be making one probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”
If America recognizes Israeli sovereignty in the provinces of Judea and Samaria, then it will permanently slam the door on the failed Oslo Accords and the two-state paradigm that the Palestinians never wanted in the first place.
The president, who worked extremely well with Israel’s prime minister during the 45th administration, has previously succeeded in breaking paradigms in the region with the brokering of the historic Abraham Accords agreements in the fall of 2020.
In his remarks in the Oval Office, Trump stated tersely that he will “never win a Nobel Prize” for his groundbreaking role in brokering the unthinkable agreements.
He is now bringing his unconventional thinking back to the region just days into a new term and looking for an end to the conflict that began when Hamas penetrated Israel’s border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 men, women and children in the south, and kidnapping to Gaza more than 250 others in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Trump acknowledged that many “want to deny that Oct. 7 took place, just as many want to deny the Holocaust took place.”
‘Israel fought back bravely’
In the press briefing after the meeting between the two leaders, Trump called the Oct. 7 assault “an all-out attack on the very existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland.” Then he went on to praise Israel’s response to Oct. 7.