Trump Unleashes Mind-Blowing Gaza Plan

Let Donald J. Trump cook.

On Tuesday night, President Trump gave an absolutely stunning, ground-breaking, timeline-changing press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he announced his plan for the Gaza Strip. He made the announcement that the United States would take over the Gaza Strip.

And people promptly went insane.

First, all of the conventional wisdom, all of the State Department-approved decades-long conventional wisdom, has led to full-scale disaster in the Middle East. It has led to an intractable, multi-decade problem of a radicalized Palestinian population that supports terrorism rather than any regime that would actually allow for peace, prosperity, and the building of a livable life.

Hamas was elected by the Palestinian people. Today, by polling data, the Palestinian people still support Hamas after the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas killing 1,200 Israelis and taking 250 into captivity, many of whom were murdered, many abused, and many still are, including American citizens.

So whatever the conventional wisdom says is wrong, and it has been wrong. President Trump, however, has always had a different way of thinking about this.

President Trump thinks outside the box. That thinking has led to more peace and prosperity in the region. People who think inside the box have helped create some of the most intractable, most violent, worst conflicts in humanity.

Trump has thrown the conventional wisdom out. He has replaced it with common-sense understanding of reality and outside-the-box thinking. The result: the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords, which came to be during Trump’s first term, stand out as the most stunning example of President Trump’s ability to think differently. Everyone said he was not going to be able to get any sort of deal done in the Middle East.

Instead, he ended up with the first true Arab-Israeli peace deal in modern history. He didn’t win the Nobel Prize for that because the Left hates him too much. What he accomplished was Nobel-Prize-worthy and everyone knows it, including the Left. Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize for existing. Yet Trump did not win the Nobel Prize for a variety of peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

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If Trump had been reelected in 2020, he was just weeks away from brokering a Saudi Arabia-Israel Abraham Accord.

That’s because Donald Trump does not think inside the box.

So here is what the conventional wisdom says, and why Donald Trump’s proposal is causing brains to explode across the conventional-wisdom spectrum.

The conventional wisdom has made various propositions with regard to Israel and the Palestinians, the Gaza Strip, Judea, and Samaria, including the proclamation that Middle Eastern peace will be reached by first solving the Palestinian problem; then, peace will bloom across the Middle East. This has been the going conventional wisdom for decades in the Middle East.

It was wrong. It was stupid. It is wrong. It is stupid. The Oslo Accords, which were originally put forward in the early 1990s, have been ongoing for three decades, and they are one of the giant failures in the history of diplomacy. They have resulted in more death, more carnage, more destruction, less safety, and all-out war in the Middle East. 

President Trump threw out that conventional wisdom. He essentially said, “Listen, we have an intractable problem over here, a deeply radicalized population that wants to completely destroy its neighbor. The Palestinian population has no interest in a ‘two-state solution, living side by side in peace and prosperity.’ So, if there’s going to be peace in the Middle East, we are going to take that issue, put it to the side, and, instead, look to the common security and economic interests of Israel and its other Arab neighbors.”

The Abraham Accords were the result. Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Everyone said it was stupid. Everybody said that it was backward, wrong, unsophisticated, naive, and not nuanced.

But Trump took the conventional wisdom and set it on fire, and it turned out he was exactly right. 

John Kerry — moron, historic dolt, and former Secretary of State — insisted that peace would never happen in the Middle East unless the Palestinian issue was put front and center. He was proven utterly wrong.

More conventional wisdom: The other countries in the Middle East deeply care about the establishment of a Palestinian state. This has supposedly been a top priority. 

Except for one thing: All of history shows this is not true. When Egypt was in control of the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, did an independent Palestinian state exist? Of course, the answer is no. When Jordan was in control of Judea and Samaria from 1948 to 1967, was there an independent Palestinian state? No.

Today, there could be an independent Palestinian state in Jordan. But the Hashemite dynasty says no, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population of Jordan actually is Palestinian. Not only are these surrounding Middle Eastern states uninterested in a Palestinian state, but they also don’t want one because they know that it will be a terror haven.

The big reason that so many Arab and Muslim countries in the region don’t want to take in Palestinian refugees is because they are afraid doing so will destabilize their country.

They are correct. It destabilized Jordan when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was located there in the early 1970s, leading to the full-scale expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians, as well as the PLO. Lebanon, which used to be a Christian state, was completely overrun by the PLO and turned into a hellhole. Syrian refugee camps there still contain Palestinians because no matter how hellish Syria is, whoever has been in charge there, whether it’s Assad or HTS, they’re not particularly interested in fighting on another front with a radicalized Palestinian population. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians who had sided with Saddam Hussein.

The idea that anyone in the Middle East is deeply interested in the establishment of a Palestinian state is a lie made up by Westerners, and Middle Eastern states have gone along with that lie because it’s been a convenient way of shifting blame to Israel for their own internal failures and of prying concessions out of Westerners. 

But it was always a lie, and Trump knows it’s a lie. And that’s why he has said repeatedly that the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians, don’t really care about a Palestinian state.

Other conventional wisdom: The Arab street will be upset if reality is acknowledged; the Arab street will go wild. It will be a gigantic war in the Middle East.

The most obvious example of this was the conventional wisdom that if the United States actually moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel and the Jewish people, the entire Middle East would go up in flames. 

And it turned out nothing happened. Nothing, because that was a reality. And acknowledging reality on the ground is smarter than pretending reality away. 

Similarly, the conventional wisdom said that any move to acknowledge territorial sovereignty by Israel in disputed areas such as the Golan Heights would end with further war.

Wrong. Not only was that untrue, but it is also the reverse. When Israel has been able to defend its territory, the world gets more peaceful — not less.

The world will be more peaceful because Israel is currently occupying the other side of Mount Hermon in Syria rather than, for example, HTS, or Al Qaeda. 

Other conventional wisdom: What the Palestinians really want is peace and a thriving democracy.

There is zero evidence adduced to this idea. None. In fact, every single piece of evidence shows precisely the contrary. The Palestinians, by every piece of polling data ever done, do not, in fact, support a thriving democracy. They do not, in fact, support a “two-state” solution. They do not support peace with Israel.

The entire reason for the establishment of the Palestinian people — which was an agglomeration, a variety of people from different areas, who accreted in British-mandate Palestine over time largely because of the upward economic trajectory created by Jews who had been moving in — was the dis-establishment of a possible Jewish state there.

Thus, to give up that aspiration would be to recognize a thing that is unrecognizable for the vast majority of Palestinians.

There is yet to be a single poll ever — ever — showing that Palestinians favor a two-state solution with Israel and the Palestinians living side by side. Yet the conventional wisdom likes to pretend that’s not the case, to insist on banging their head consistently against a wall, and then to yell at the Israelis for being so intransigent about refusing to exterminate themselves.

Trump does not accept that conventional wisdom. He recognizes that Israel is not going away.

Other conventional wisdom: The Palestinians must never be allowed to leave a rubble strewn, war-torn area, even if they want to, because somehow it facilitates peace to keep would-be refugees in an unlivable situation for a decade with no infrastructure, with no jobs, with no economy other than the trash foreign aid that has been used historically by terrorist groups to build terror tunnels and stock up on weaponry.

That was the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom was that the best plan in the Gaza Strip was to pour billions of dollars into Hamas to facilitate humanitarian aid, which went directly to building terror tunnels — the only infrastructure built there, the only infrastructure that has been built there over the course of the last 15 years.

And yet somehow the conventional wisdom was: Give it more money, more air, make sure that there are more men.

Why do you think Egypt shut the border? Why do you think the Rafah crossing is closed? That is not because of the Jews. That is because of the Egyptians.

Finally, the conventional wisdom says that population movement cannot be facilitated in this area.

Now, I just have a question. Why is this the only area on earth where even if people want to leave, population movement cannot be facilitated? 

Israel not only facilitated the population movement of Jews out of Gaza, but it also forced people who didn’t want to leave out of Gaza in 2005. Israel took cities filled with 8,000 Jews and removed them forcibly with Israeli soldiers.

It turns out that according to the conventional wisdom, the only people who can be forcibly removed in this particular area are Jews, while the people who certainly cannot be moved under any circumstances are Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Those people can’t move at all.

It doesn’t matter if Kuwait kicked them out, Jordan kicked them out, Lebanon kicks them out, or Egypt refuses to take them. It doesn’t matter whether they live in refugee camps in Syria. None of that makes a difference. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are forced out of Syria due to civil conflict, ending up in Turkey or even in Europe.

That’s all fine and dandy, but the minute anybody says that people want to leave the Gaza Strip because they don’t wish to live in the rubble of Khan Yunis under the thumb of Hamas, all of a sudden the conventional wisdom says, absolutely not; they must be forced to remain.

Trump has ignored all of this conventional wisdom because it’s wrong and stupid, and he thinks outside the box.

Donald Trump’s generalized premises when it comes to the Middle East involve intractable problems that are intractable, and they’re not going away. Simply saying, “two-state solution,” “democracy,” “living side by side,” “peace,” as a mantra, doesn’t make it magically happen.

Just saying it over and over ends up facilitating the opposite because the terrorist groups and radicalized populations take advantage of such naivete and stupidity in order to build up their own weaponry so as to do things like the October 7 massacre. They make common cause with terror states like Iran. They make common cause with the Houthis and with Hezbollah.

They do all of that because they understand Western weakness and Western stupidity. Failing to recognize intractable problems is dangerous. Recognizing intractable problems and not banging your head against the wall is a necessity. Recognizing that reality is how things like the Abraham Accords are made possible.

Other recognitions of reality: Israel is not going away, nor should it. President Trump understands that underlying so much of the discussion over the past several decades has been this idiotic idea that if Israel just keeps giving up land and makes itself more and more unsafe, then peace will magically break out. Underlying that is a baseline idea that if Israel disappeared, well, you know, maybe the world would be a better place.

Israel is not going to disappear. Israel is not going to go away. They’re not going to surrender. They’re not going to cut off their own heads. And after October 7, they’re certainly not going to allow the creation of a terror state in the heartland of the land that Israel is currently on. That is not going to happen. Understanding that is understanding reality.

And Trump plays in the world of reality.

Finally, President Trump understands again the conventional wisdom that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is central to the Middle East is wrong and a lie. He recognizes that.

It turns out Saudi Arabia has its own priorities that don’t involve the Palestinians, like economic development. That is the big priority for Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince. What he wants more than anything is a non-oil-based economy with a future. That’s because the fracking revolution in the United States has totally transformed the Middle East over the course of the last couple of decades.

The complete revision of global oil dominance by the Middle East, that the United States is a net exporter of liquid natural gas, has completely reshaped how the entire globe does energy. So, Mohammed bin Salman, who’s sitting on a bunch of oil, is recognizing that technological developments mean that he must move along with the tech or he’s going to lose out and his regime will become unstable. 

Trump recognizes that the same thing is true of the United Arab Emirates and even Qatar. 

The reality is that people in the Middle East have interests that are completely disconnected and antithetical to the interests of a terror state that a state of Palestine would be.

All of this led up to Trump’s actual proposal, because here’s the thing: All of the conventional ideas are stupid and have failed.

I don’t know whether President Trump’s vision is going to come to fruition. I don’t know whether it’s an opening gambit in a broader negotiation.

What I do know is that all of the same conventional wisdom morons who said the Abraham Accords would never happen were wrong. All those conventional wisdom morons who said moving the Jerusalem Embassy would set the entire Middle East on fire were wrong and stupid. All the same conventional wisdom dolts who suggested that pressuring Israel in the middle of a war was somehow going to result in more peace rather than more war were wrong and stupid. 

So let the man cook.