( openDemocracy.net ) – Trump has backtracked since meeting with Netanyahu last month
Why was Donald Trump’s suggestion on turning Gaza into a Middle Eastern Riviera so helpful to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu? To understand this, it is worth briefly looking back to earlier phases of the century-old conflict.
Israel became a state in 1948, after what it calls its War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba – Arabic for ‘catastrophe’.
By then, European Jews had already been migrating to Palestine for nearly half a century, aided by the expansion of political Zionism in the late 1890s, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, which handed the UK control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, and the Balfour Declaration the following year, which expressed British support for creating a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
For Palestinians, this was a never-ending disaster that came to a head with the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, when more than 700,000 people were violently forced to leave their homes. For Israeli Jews, it was a necessity intended to ensure absolute security, particularly after the Holocaust.
In the many wars over the following decades, Israel took control of more Palestinian territory, eventually prompting the first and second Palestinian Intifadas between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. After the end of the second uprising in 2005, successive Israeli governments believed they had at last won long-term security – except for what they saw as the nagging issue of Gaza.
Why did they consider the region to be so problematic?
Around 80,000 Palestinians lived in the Gaza Strip before the Nakba, when the population then ballooned, with almost 250,000 refugees moving to the area. Most were crowded into camps, with Israel maintaining increasingly rigorous control of Gaza, including through at least four significant wars between 2008 and 2021.
Those wars cost the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) around 400 lives, but the cost to the Palestinians was hugely greater. Close to 5,000 were killed, many thousands more injured, and thousands of homes destroyed or damaged by the intensive bombardment.
Gaza’s land borders with Israel became highly controlled by the IDF, which used sophisticated surveillance systems backed up by ready use of firepower. So complete was the control that Israelis felt safer than they had for many years – and the evident tight occupation allowed their specialist arms corporations to easily sell many of their weapons to regimes across the world.
By the early 2020s, Gaza was little more than a giant open prison. But the strip’s de facto government, Hamas, was assiduously preparing for an assault on southern Israel. It caught the IDF by surprise with the attack of 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage.
The shock in Israel was visceral, akin to that in the US immediately after 9/11, and Israel’s right-wing coalition government responded with huge force. The defence minister described Hamas and its supporters as “human animals”, while Netanyahu made clear that Israel would destroy the movement, free the hostages, and never again be threatened by the likes of Hamas.
Israel’s war on Gaza has now continued for almost 18 months, with just two short pauses. Hamas has not been destroyed and, indeed, continues to control parts of Gaza. The Palestinian losses have been truly shocking, with over 60,000 people killed or missing beneath the ruins. Much of Gaza has been destroyed through weapons with a total tonnage greater than six Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
With even the IDF’s Dahiya Doctrine of using massive force against an entire population having failed to dislodge Hamas, the policy has shifted to widening the war in three ways.
The first two involve creating a permanent Israeli presence in southern Lebanon and a new long-term presence in Syria, both apparently aiming to make Israel safer.
Israel plans to ignore the ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon and keep its troops in five locations across the south of the country while also expanding its military presence in Syria. To this end, the IDF bombed Syrian military targets nationwide immediately after the Assad regime collapsed in December to limit the military power of any new regime, before moving its troops into what had been a UN-patrolled buffer zone in the south and building permanent bases within southwest Syria itself. Israel has also demanded the demilitarisation of the three Syrian provinces closest to Israel.
“Gaza,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025
The third element involves the Israelis expanding Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank while staging repeated raids on refugee camps in the area, especially in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarm. The raids have extended to evicting around 40,000 Palestinians and garrisoning the camps to prevent their return.
This plan, along with other settler violence against Palestinian towns and villages, is part of an attempt to make life in the occupied West Bank as difficult as possible for the three million Palestinians there. Israel hopes many will emigrate, initially into Jordan – regardless of what the Jordanian government thinks or wants – with those who remain forming a manageable pool of low-paid labour in an Israeli-controlled economy in the West Bank and parts of Israel.
The only problem with this plan, as far as Netanyahu is concerned, is Gaza. This is why he and his hard-right coalition partners so welcomed Trump’s proposal to evict the 2.3 million Palestinian Gazans with no possibility of return. The cost to Palestinians would be appalling, but the Israeli prime minister could present this to the Israeli people, as well as the Israeli actions in Lebanon, Syria and the occupied West Bank, as a thorough response to 7 October.
Yet, there is a problem for the Israeli government: Trump is backtracking. There have been hints of this in the past couple of weeks, but it became a lot clearer this week during a meeting between Trump and Micheál Martin, the Irish Taoiseach. Responding to a question at the subsequent press conference, Trump said: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians from Gaza.”
The US president may yet change his mind on this as he does on so many issues, but the sheer uncertainty complicates the Israeli agenda on this key issue.
Around the world, the White House is already beginning to be seen as unreliable. This may well be the start of a crisis of failing expectations with wide-ranging ramifications for US policies at home as well as abroad – especially for Netanyahu and his government in Israel.
Without US backing for anything else, all Netanyahu can do is to make life as difficult as possible for the people of Gaza, hence the current cutting off of aid supplies and electricity, as well as specific policies such as the long-term assault on women’s health. All this and much more will continue in the hope that eventually one man, Donald Trump, will change his mind.
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