Op-ed: Day 488 of the war

Trump’s ‘Extreme Makeover: Gaza Edition’ has many flaws. One of the worst is its absent morality

Hamas brought war down upon Gaza with its mass slaughter in Israel on October 7. That doesn’t mean the US has the right to ship out all its residents and develop it as real estate for others

David Horovitz

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

US President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference with unseen Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP)
US President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference with unseen Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP)

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The conventional expectation ahead of the Trump-Netanyahu summit on Tuesday was that the two leaders would publicly present a warm, united front that reflected their broadly similar positions on getting the hostages out of Gaza, destroying Hamas, advancing normalization with Saudi Arabia, and keeping Iran from the bomb. And that, behind closed doors, the president, the prime minister and their teams would tussle constructively over their differences and chart a joint course forward.

Instead, we got the president announcing that the United States intends to take over from Hamas in Gaza, encourage and achieve the evacuation of its entire populace, level the “hellhole,” redevelop it like a strip of real estate, and then sell off the new housing to the international community — including Palestinians, he allowed when asked, but evidently not Gazans, all of whom, he specified in the Oval Office, will be permanently “resettled in areas where they can live a beautiful life and not be worried about dying every day.” A case of “Extreme Makeover: Gaza Edition.”

To radically understate, the Trump Gaza-for-anyone-but-Gazans bombshell, as dropped in the course of his Oval Office appearance with Netanyahu and the full-scale press conference that followed soon after, prompts some profound concerns:

1. How is this meant to work? Part I

The neighboring states Trump is repeatedly urging to absorb large numbers of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians don’t want to do so. They consider it a betrayal of the Palestinians but, far more importantly, they also rightly fear it would destabilize their own broadly restless, unhappy, and potentially insurrectionist masses.

Meanwhile, at least some Gazans doubtless would rather live in peace, liberated from the decades-old threat of being gunned down at any moment, as the president noted, but only if they were truly being moved to somewhere better, and with the opportunity to return home should Gaza actually become livable. Evacuation will be widely unpalatable if the small print on the relocation deal is that they can never return to the place where they were born, and that it is to be usurped by US government-organized real estate developers building, as the president put it, “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Displaced Palestinians return to their homes in northern Gaza as part of a hostage-ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas on January 29, 2025. (Khalil Kahlout/Flash90)

2. How is this meant to work? Part II

Israel has been seeking for 16 months since Hamas’s invasion and slaughter to destroy Gaza’s ruling terror group, to significant effect, but not, as Netanyahu repeatedly highlights, to the point of total victory. This has cost tens of thousands of lives in Gaza — perhaps half of them Hamas gunmen and half not — and hundreds of lives of Israeli soldiers.

Is Trump about to send US forces to fight alongside the IDF in an effort to complete the job? “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he said, when asked at the press conference about the possibility of deploying American troops. Or is the idea to encourage all Gazans, including all Hamas terrorists, gunmen and supporters, to board the buses and the boats to unknown climes, in the expectation that the mere act of their relocation will render all of them “wonderful people,” as Trump described Gazans, and a boon to their new host countries, solving the problem of monstrous Hamas terrorism at a stroke?

3. Morality

What regard is being paid to the morality of what might be termed Trump’s “War to Prosperity” plan? By what international right does the US intend to occupy, empty, and repopulate a territory that, indeed, has no legitimate sovereign government, but is also not open and available to the United States simply by virtue of its desire to take it over?

By extension, what message does the very unveiling of this intention convey, say, to China as regards Taiwan, or Russia as regards Ukraine?

“A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today,” proclaimed Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, in an interview later Tuesday. What might the likes of Putin seek to make of that? And let’s not even contemplate what Israeli Jews would say if someone attempted to make that argument about us.

There are international legal provisions for the temporary relocation of civilian populations at risk in times of war, but with the essential proviso that such evacuation is genuinely voluntary and temporary. As Trump made clear several times on Tuesday, however, what he is planning is permanent.

4. What of the hostages?

Barely mentioned in the Oval Office comments or the main press conference, where does the Trump plan leave the 79 Israeli hostages still in Gaza? Families of some hostages who were in Washington planning a press conference after the White House summit canceled their event as they struggled to understand how what was being said would impact the fates of their loved ones.

Will Hamas now lay down its arms, raise a white flag, and depart the combat zone? Or will it abrogate the current deal before the still-unfinalized second phase, in which 24 living male hostages are to be released, or even during the current first phase, in which 20 more hostages have yet to be freed, 12 of them living?

Released hostage Ofer Calderon, top left, reunites with his children Rotem, Gaya, Erez and Sahar on February 1, 2025. Erez and Sahar were also abducted on October 7, 2023 and were freed in November 2023. (Ma’ayon Taof / GPO)

5. An annexation policy in four weeks

What are we to make of the president’s curiously precise prediction that he would be announcing his administration’s position on the matter of Israeli annexation of the West Bank in the next “four weeks.” That coincides with the end of the 42-day phase one, at which point Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to take his Religious Zionism party out of the coalition if Israel does not resume its military campaign against Hamas. Is this a Trump carrot, along with his Gazan-free Gaza blueprint and the insistence — denied by Riyadh — that normalization can be had with Saudi Arabia without a Palestinian state, in a package designed to enable Netanyahu to maintain his governing majority?

If so, is Trump, in return, expecting Netanyahu to stick with the current Gaza deal at least until all living hostages have been returned — a goal the president has repeatedly endorsed and championed? But if that is the case, why has Trump unveiled a plan that would appear to put those hostages’ lives at greater risk?

After the jaws drop

These are by no means the only concerns and questions surrounding the surreal proceedings we watched unfold on Tuesday.

The look on Netanyahu’s face, a mixture of embarrassment and glee, suggested (as is now being reported) that he was hearing for the first time at least some of what Trump was telling the world, and so did the prime minister’s rather halting response: “President Trump… sees a different future for that piece of land… He has a different idea… I think it’s worth paying attention to this… I think it’s something that could change history…”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and US President Donald Trump (R) participate in a news conference in the East Room of the White House, February 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Israelis have been here before to some extent — almost exactly five years ago –when the same US president, with the same prime minister at his side, unveiled his Israeli-Palestinian “Peace to Prosperity” plan.

That White House event prompted a chaotic period in which Netanyahu wanted to believe that he had been given carte blanche to annex the settlements and the Jordan Valley within days, until Jared Kushner was dispatched to disabuse him of the notion.

US President Donald Trump speaks during an event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington, to announce the Trump administration’s much-anticipated plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

A major difference this time is that Israel is in the midst of a grueling multifront war, with dozens of its people held hostage, and the margins for misunderstandings and outright missteps are even narrower than in our fraught regional norm.

It could be — it could well be — that for all the president’s repeated insistence on the necessity of his Gaza plan, what we saw on Tuesday was a characteristic Trumpian deliberate overreach gambit: the unveiling of a proposal so radical and so unpalatable that it shifts the various forces that are complicating his goals — from Hamas, to Egypt and Jordan, to the Saudis, even to Iran — and blasts open a viable path to weaken, marginalize and eliminate shared American and Israeli enemies, and jolt reluctant potential allies.

Nine months after the 2020 annexation fiasco, it should be remembered, Trump was able to broker the Abraham Accords, complete with a widely reported assurance to the United Arab Emirates that annexation was off the table for at least a few years.

“You cut to the chase. You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say,” Netanyahu extolled Trump in his prepared remarks at the press conference. “And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and say, ‘You know? He’s right.’”

Except this time, the vision is short on morality, legitimacy and practical applicability.

Family members visit the site of the Nova music festival massacre, six months after, in Re’im forest, near the Israeli-Gaza border, April 7, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Gaza is indeed a blighted, blood-drenched territory, from where despicable barbarians set out to slaughter Israelis 16 months ago. And in the war that Hamas brought down upon it, Gaza has indeed been rendered largely uninhabitable for many years to come.

Israel, with the support of a patently empathetic US president and his team, needs to ensure that a future Gaza is a dependable, allied neighbor, not another genocidal threat. What Gaza isn’t is a real estate fixer-upper.

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