The main goals of US President Donald Trump regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are its permanent cessation and the expansion of the Abrahamic Accords, i.e. the formalization of Israel's relations with more countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia. The idea of establishing some form of American ownership of the Gaza Strip - a concept launched by the head of the White House during his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - would be a cog in the wheel of the US president's stated goals. If Trump really learned from history, as he said we should, he would be aware that the Palestinians, like any other people, have no intention of giving up their land, and Saudi Arabia has repeatedly stated that it sees the normalization of its relations with Israel as guaranteeing the prospect of the creation of a Palestinian state, stepping on both "ribs" - the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Donald Trump's idea that the United States acquire ownership of Gaza, while the fate of the West Bank remains unspecified, is not part of the solution to the problem of the conflict in the Middle East, but a further expression of this problem. As such, it will not de-escalate the situation, but will deepen its conflictual nature.
The implementation of such a plan, again according to the words of the American president, envisages the dislocation of Palestinians from Gaza to other countries. We leave aside the fact that Egypt and Jordan, albeit for different reasons, have already refused to accept Palestinians (however, the US has possible tools to put pressure on both countries, given that the country of the pharaohs is the largest beneficiary of American military aid in the region after Israel, and the security of the Hashemite kingdom depends primarily on its cooperation with Washington). But even if we assume that Cairo and Amman's position can be subjected to external "correction", the basic problem remains: the Palestinians would not shed decades of their own and foreign blood to leave their land voluntarily, and if they were forced to do so, it would be in violation of international law, corresponding to ethnic cleansing, which would lead to new violence.
But Trump's idea of an American acquisition of Gaza is wrong for a number of additional reasons.
First of all, it would be a manifestation of the most serious social engineering of liberal interventionism in American foreign policy that we have seen from a head of the White House in recent decades. The Americans have occupied lands and installed rulers in the region (Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan in 2001 and Ayad Allawi in Iraq after 2003), but they have not yet seized the notarial deed of ownership of foreign land. The idea that the connection between a people and their land can be forcibly severed is associated both with the crimes of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR of the last century, and with the utopian-wishful thinking of liberal interventionism of the present century. In both cases, we have an attempt to trample on the emotionally saturated symbiosis between man and this geographical perimeter that he associates with his homeland and calls home. The idea that a people's attachment to their land and solidarity with their own tribe can be traded (as Trump suggested turning the Gaza Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East") is a shared fallacy between Marxism and liberalism, based on a shared understanding of the universal man inhabiting a unified world. For both Marxists and liberals, man can be "bribed" to marginalize his ethno-cultural profile with the promise of economic prosperity; after all, they will tell us, society has an economic base and a political superstructure!
Secondly, the moral basis on which Donald Trump declares that the Palestinians should leave their land, but is silent regarding the provinces in Eastern Ukraine occupied by the Russians, is astonishing. The impression is that the American president, who otherwise wants to appear extremely masculine and tough, is actually that way with the weak, but not with the strong. After the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson earned the antagonism of the Allies by advocating that every people should build a state on the territory they inhabit. A little more than a century later, Donald Trump demonstrates a different view: the strong (be it Russia or Israel) has the right to additional territories at the expense of the weak (be it Ukraine or the Palestinian Authority).
The double standards are also evident in another aspect: a critic of the refugee flows flooding his own country, which is why he was ready to impose drastic tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Trump is clearly insensitive to the considerations that Egypt and Jordan have regarding the prospect of finding themselves the target of a Palestinian immigrant wave. That is, immigrant waves are bad when it comes to the United States, and good when it comes to other countries.
Thirdly, the idea of forcibly displacing Palestinians would hardly help Donald Trump's desire to go down in history as a conflict solver. Peacemakers do not drive people from their homes. Being a peacemaker is a morally charged position (which is why politicians are usually not candidates for it, especially those like Trump, who have a clearly expressed commercial understanding of the processes in the international system). Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which the American president has wrapped around his finger, is difficult to happen when you create the conditions for prolonging, rather than resolving, the conflict.
Last but not least, Trump has repeatedly reiterated that American troops have no place in various parts of the world that are not directly related to US interests (the importance of American contingents for Washington's partners and allies is clearly not a factor in the American president's thinking paradigm). That is why Trump periodically threatens to rethink the American military presence from East Asia (Japan and South Korea) to West Asia (Syria), including concluding a lame agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2020, on the basis of which the US and its Alliance partners were to withdraw from Kabul, handing power in the country over to the hands of local radicals. At the same time, however, Trump did not rule out the possibility of deploying American troops to Gaza. For him, the role of American servicemen - whether as a deterrent against North Korea or Turkey, or as one who cuts through drug channels or terrorist networks - is not particularly important. Look, if they have to guard a hotel from the "Trump" chain that has sprung up on the coast of Gaza, that is another matter.
If Trump's idea of acquiring the Gaza Strip had been shared "in an ear" in a private conversation in front of the fireplace in the White House, it would have been the subject of awkward jokes. But when it is officially launched as American policy towards the Middle East conflict, it becomes dangerously ridiculous. As such, the attempt to implement it would lead not to the creation of a Riviera on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, but to new lunar landscapes.