When President Donald Trump said last month he wanted the United States to take over Gaza and resettle its more than two million inhabitants in Egypt and Jordan, he effectively put the onus on Arab leaders to come up with a counter-proposal.
Arab leaders did exactly that at an emergency summit of the Arab League in the Egyptian capital Cairo on Tuesday. They endorsed a plan, proposed by Egypt, to reconstruct the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
Unlike the real estate mogul-turned-president’s absurd plan that was widely condemned, the Arab initiative would allow the Palestinians living in the territory to stay there, something the entire world has consensus on, except for the Israeli regime and its main patron, the United States.
After Trump put forward his plan for Gaza, which United Nations experts said would amount to ethnic cleansing and a violation of international law, the White House signaled it was open to hearing what an Arab plan for post-war Gaza would sound like.
Egypt’s three-phase blueprint aims to reconstruct Gaza—which Israel has leveled to the ground over the past 16 months—over four to five years and with an estimated cost of $53 billion, maintain security, and have the Palestinian Authority govern the territory.
However, as expected, the Trump administration was quick to reject the Arab initiative. The White House said the proposal failed to take the “reality” of Gaza into account and that Trump “stood by his vision” to turn Gaza into a “Riviera” for tourism in West Asia—that is, after driving its residents out of their homes.
The Arab vision, which calls for a committee of professional Palestinian technocrats to run Gaza affairs for six months before handing power to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, was welcomed by Hamas, the Gaza-based resistance movement that the Israeli regime had vowed to eliminate but failed to do so.
One could argue that such an outcome would at least be considered a quasi-victory for Israel, which has long described dismantling Hamas, the only independent political actor representing the Palestinian people in Gaza, as its ultimate goal in the genocidal war that killed nearly 49,000 people, most of them children and women, following the events of October 7, 2023.
But it’s clear that Benjamin Netanyahu wants a bigger piece of the colonial pie, and that is being communicated to the rest of the world by Trump, the “best friend” Israel has ever had in the White House.
Israel sees Hamas as the main obstacle to subjugating the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and forcing them to abandon their long-held dream of establishing an independent Palestinian state with East al-Quds as its capital.
The Palestinians, along with most of the international community, have been demanding Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders, but Israel has been moving in the opposite direction, pushing illegal settlements deeper into Palestinian lands.
Long before the new genocidal war was unleashed on Gaza in October 2023, Israel had been trying to weaken, and ultimately dismantle, Hamas as a political entity in the territory to pave the way for its colonialist agenda of ethnically cleansing the occupied territories “from the river to the sea.”
With Trump, a former real estate tycoon, back in the White House, Netanyahu has seen a golden opportunity to fast-track that process by taking control of Gaza and turning the narrow strip of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea into a luxury settlement for wealthy Zionists and a hub for Western tourists.
Zionism, at its core, is based on the forced displacement of indigenous populations through intimidation and cutting off vital infrastructure and basic needs of survival, allowing Israeli settlers to move in and permanently occupy the lands.
The Trump-Netanyahu plan for Gaza would effectively kill the prospect of an independent state for Palestinians, who want to reunite Gaza with the occupied West Bank as one state with East al-Quds as its capital.
Though the US has not officially abandoned its policy of supporting a so-called “two-state solution,” President Trump—both during his first term and now in his second—seems to be moving in lockstep with Israel’s far-right by implementing policies that are anathema to an independent Palestinian state.
Apart from its potential to become, as Trump’s former special envoy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has put it, “a waterfront property,” Gaza holds another promising wealth that Netanyahu seems to have set his sights on: The enormous gas field found in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially off the coast of Gaza.
Back in 1999, British Gas estimated that reserves in Gaza Marine alone contain about 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That same year, the Palestinian Authority, which governed Gaza at the time, granted the British energy company a 25-year contract to exploit the natural gas field.
Until now, Israel has not allowed Palestinians to receive a dime from this natural treasure to which they are entitled.
In that context, Israeli prime ministers, from Ehud Barak to Netanyahu, have tried, with varying degrees of urgency and through various illegal means, to strip Palestinians living in Gaza of their sovereignty over their land and territorial waters.
