Less than two weeks after Hamas’s assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, I penned an op-ed arguing that it was “time to face reality in Gaza.” 15 months later, President Donald Trump is finally forcing the rest of the world to face that reality.
Specifically, Trump is forcing the world to understand that if we are to live up to repeated pledges of “never again,” the conditions that precipitated October 7 must be addressed. The reality is that Gaza is not just Israel’s problem, but everyone’s problem.
No matter what role the United States plays in the future of Gaza, President Trump has ended forever the myth that has dominated thinking on the issue: that Gaza and the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict concern only Israel and the Palestinians, and that if enough pressure is exerted on them, they will somehow settle everything overnight.
That notion is international political idealism bordering on childlike naivety. President Trump, a realist, recognizes that sometimes different parties want different things for legitimate reasons. As a dealmaker, he also recognizes that successful agreements are about eliminating causes of conflict, not signing pieces of paper.
The Palestinians of Gaza have some genuine grievances, but the reason those grievances are going unaddressed is not because Israel is stubborn, but rather because Israel cannot address them no matter how much Israelis wish to do so. Israelis and Palestinians are both in some sense victims of the wider international community, which has conspired to maintain the lie that the entire conflict is some municipal zoning dispute driven by immature and stubborn local politicians.
Too many Western leaders believe that there exists some magical agreement that would settle all territorial disputes, end all violence, and ensure prosperity for all if only Israeli leaders would make “concessions for peace” and Palestinian leaders would sign their names on the dotted line.
What, then, is the problem with Gaza? In the wake of the 2023 attacks, I wrote:
It is also not a lie to say that Gaza is an “open air prison” – but left-wing activists miss the significance of that comparison when they speak of an Israeli “occupation.” There is no Israeli occupation of Gaza. Israel has no claims on Gazan land. On the contrary, Israel tried to give Gaza away to Egypt, and most recently an international force. The fact is that no one wants Gaza, not even the Gazans. If Gaza is an “open air prison,” it is because the Palestinians want to leave but cannot.
The cause of conflict in Gaza is not, as anti-Israel voices have screamed, an Israeli desire to drive the Palestinian population out. Rather, it has been the refusal of anyone in the world to allow the Gazans to leave and resettle.
The desire to leave is understandable. Any sane person with aspirations for themselves or their families would wish to leave Gaza. Even in the best of historical and economic circumstances, it would be hard for 2.5 million Palestinians, or any other group of people for that matter, to build lives on that desolate territory with a population density of nearly 17,000 per square mile. A city such as Singapore or Hong Kong can maintain that density with a hinterland, but the premise of any “two-state” solution is that Gaza will not have access to any hinterland.
In a sense, this is one reason why Hamas’s message has been so popular in Gaza and why pro-Palestinian activists denounce an “Israeli occupation” of Gaza’s straits, despite the absence of any Israeli military presence since 2005 and every settlement having been dismantled by the IDF. The very existence of an Israeli state within its 1967 borders would render the Gaza Strip economically non-viable. In effect, for Gaza to live, Israel must die.
Even without the historical animosity between the populations, Israel could no more be expected to open its border than America could if Mexico faced decades of total state collapse. With the animosity, asking Israel to accept the free movement of more than a million Gazans would be like asking America to accept the free movement of 90 million hostile refugees. It doesn’t matter if the Palestinians have grievances they feel are valid. Precisely because they do, it is to ask Israel to commit an act of suicide.
In short, there is no way to create a peaceful, economically viable Gaza for its current population of 2.5 million people without open borders with Egypt and Israel. Opening those borders, without a financially viable Gaza, would likely cause more than a million Palestinians to leave, invading their neighbors. Hence, Egypt and Israel feel forced to keep the Palestinian population trapped in Gaza with no prospects, ensuring inevitable explosions of violence.
When faced with a binary problem in which both options are non-viable, there are, ironically, two choices. The first is to do what the international community and America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite have done for two decades; that is, to deny reality, insist a magical solution exists if enough effort is invested into the delusion, and then blame both sides for failing to bring about the impossible.
The other is to do what President Trump has just done – demand better options.
As I also noted back when the current conflict began:
The irony is that the actual Gaza situation is the one area of the conflict where there is an obvious way to solve this in a manner acceptable to both Israelis and Palestinians. Most Gazans want to leave, and the reason Israel and Egypt guard their borders is to prevent nearly the entire population from pouring out.
In turn, the migration of a large portion of Gaza’s population would aid Israel. The reason the problem persists is that the entire world insists that Israel must keep 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza against their will, and then denounces the Jewish state for creating “an open-air prison.” The European Union funds Hamas, which terrorizes the Palestinians, and when Hamas commits acts of barbarism, their greatest fear is a refugee crisis.
Donald Trump did not merely propose a solution this week. He shattered two key myths that stood in the way of any solution. He did so first by raising the question of what the Palestinians actually wanted and second by proving that Israel neither wants Gaza nor owns it.
The Palestinians have never been opposed to leaving “their land.” The Arab states have been most attached to historic Palestinian claims to specific parcels of land, as these states for decades have wished to keep the Palestinians trapped there. The caricature of the Palestinians as the world’s only hereditary refugee population, with children willing to give up their lives to lay claim to towns where neither they nor their grandparents have set foot, is the creation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (which Trump wisely chose to exit the United States from this week), not a reflection of reality.
The insistence that the burden lies on Israel to somehow make concessions to appease Gaza, in turn, relies on the myth that Israel somehow owns Gaza. By suggesting an American takeover of Gaza, Donald Trump made clear that Gaza is no longer Israel’s responsibility.
Contrary to anti-Israel voices that ascribe expansionist motives to Israel’s actions, Israel has done everything it can to demonstrate its lack of interest in Gaza. It offered to return the region to Egypt, pulled its citizens and troops out, and offered it to various international bodies. None of this worked because it was convenient for neighboring countries to pretend Israel wanted Gaza to saddle Israel with responsibility for it.
The brilliance of President Trump’s move is that, by accepting Israel’s offer to give up Gaza, he has destroyed any pretense that Israel wants Gaza. What is important is that President Trump publicly asked Israel for Gaza, and Prime Minister Netanyahu said yes. Everyone now knows that Israel will give Gaza to whoever asks for it, and the burden is now on those criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza to explain why they won’t take it if they care so much about it.
The Middle East is known for Machiavellian power plays. Still, it is difficult to find another move that has completely transformed a significant conflict in such a short time as President Trump’s Gaza proposal. It does not commit the United States to taking control of Gaza any more than it commits the Gazan population to entirely relocating.
The actual solution will, in all probability, be a combination of the voluntary resettlement of a substantial minority of Gaza’s population combined with a reconstruction of Gaza funded by Arab states and overseen, perhaps, by the United States.
Thanks to President Trump, however, we are now discussing these real solutions rather than continuing the pointless spiral of pursuing other courses of action that have already been tried and failed. Israel’s international critics are no longer able to hide behind myths.
Today, the world is finally facing reality in Gaza, and millions of Israelis and Palestinians should thank Donald Trump for it.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
