Is Jared Kushner behind Trump’s Gaza plan?

Who knew that America First had such global ambitions? Who knew that, when Donald Trump promised ‘mass deportations’, he also might have been thinking about using America’s might to extract Palestinian people out of Gaza to give them a ‘lasting home’ in Jordan or Egypt? Donald Trump promised ‘peace through strength’ on the campaign trail. The president never quite said that could mean deploying US funds and troops to remake Gaza into, as he now puts, a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’.

Standing with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington yesterday, Trump said: ‘The US will take over the Gaza Strip…level the site, get rid of destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.’

Well, as Pepper Brooks says in the film Dodgeball, ‘It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for ‘em.’ For many years, the United States has engaged in failed democracy-building in the Arab world. Donald Trump appears to be offering resort-building instead. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has so far been largely invisible in Trump’s second term, but this plan bears the unmistakable imprint of his thinking.

Trump and Kushner often speak in property development terms when discussing international affairs. For some time, they have entertained the real-estate possibilities of a revamped Middle East. ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,’ said Kushner last year. ‘If people would focus on building up livelihoods.’ And in a telephone call last Summer, Trump reportedly asked Netanyahu about building new hotels out of the rubble in Gaza.

But a full-on US takeover of Gaza is something new, and the potential costs to the US taxpayer could be unimaginably high. Israel might eventually thank the Donald by, say, reopening and renaming the now closed (for-obvious-reasons) Blue Beach Resort on Al-Rashid Street as the Trump Peace Resort, just as it did with Trump Heights in Golan in his first term.

But the extraordinary campness of the Donald-Bibi relationship is not the point here. Trump is moving fast and breaking things, thinking big and disrupting paradigms on every front. And, as ever, there’s method behind the Trump madness.

A White House press release last night declared: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The killing must stop, and president Trump will finally ensure there is peace.’

There’s no denying that, in the Holy Land, Trump is boldly proposing what no president has proposed before. He also declared yesterday that America would be withdrawing from ‘certain United Nations groups and reviewing United States support to all international organisations, on the grounds that such groups ‘act contrary to the interests of the United States while attacking our allies and propagating anti-Semitism.’

The Israeli hard right seems enthused. ‘Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’ declared Itamar Ben Ben Gvir, the former public security minister, who believes that resettling Gazans is the ‘only solution.’  There’s already considerable gratitude in Israeli political circles that Trump, departing from the Biden administration’s position, has effectively buried any US commitment to a two-state solution.

Saudi Arabia has, unsurprisingly, rejected Trump’s big idea, saying it is committed to Palestinian statehood in Gaza. Yet the US-led Gaza redevelopment proposal does ratchet up pressure on the Arab States, who pay lip service to the plight of Palestinians without ever doing much to help them. Will Israel’s neighbours now suggest a counter-proposal that might be more acceptable to the Muslim world?

Moreover, the White House’s gonzo peace plan also provides cover for its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran. The Trump administration last night also circulated a National Security memorandum detailing its renewed sanctions campaign against Tehran and its plan to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. That’s arguably the more pressing development following the Trump-Netanyahu summit, for all the dreamy talk of the brave new Levantine Riviera.