The only real problem with Trump’s excellent Gaza idea

Or is the problem a virtue?

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Two notes:

• I didn’t intend Israel and Islam to be my main subjects on this platform, but they’re much in the news and I’ve not yet fully plumbed their depths. So there will be more articles like this.
• I am a voluntaryist libertarian, so nothing below should be construed as my ideal course of action, though I do support Trump’s Gaza proposal as the best currently available option.

My previous article described how to make Trump’s Gaza plan work. Since then I’ve encountered many arguments for and against. These are the main arguments against…

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• It will never happen
• We need to cut spending, not spend more
• Trump doesn’t have the legislative authority to do this
• MAGA will oppose it for being too globalist and not America First
• Our allies and/or the Arab nations oppose it
• You can’t move that many people
• It’s ethnic cleansing and/or inhumane
• Trump isn’t serious, he’s just establishing a bargaining position

This article will examine these objections, offer new evidence for why Trump’s plan is feasible and desirable, and end with the most serious problem facing Trump’s idea, and how it might really be a virtue.

It will never happen

It amuses me when people say something will never happen.

Once upon a time, people could not imagine a world without human sacrifice. The Aztecs, for instance, surely assumed such killings would always exist.

In other places at other times, people deemed animal sacrifice an indispensable and eternal feature of a functioning society. They were wrong.

Slavery too was thought essential for millennia. But then, in a matter of a hundred years, it was mostly gone in most places most of the time,

As recently as 400 years ago people thought everyone should practice the same religion, or all hell would break loose. It was only when people stopped trying to make everyone believe the same thing that all-hell stopped breaking loose.

History is full of events that couldn’t possibly happen but did.

• The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall were expected to last an indefinite time. Both things vanished in the blink of an eye.
• The number of people who were certain that Israel would never be reborn must have numbered in the millions or tens of millions. And yet here it is.
• There was no way Trump could win the Republican primaries, let alone be elected president. Then, when he lost reelection there was no way he would ever win another term. You know what happened.
• And for those you born near the middle of the last century…Nixon even went to China!

Human beings are bad at predicting what is and is not possible. Improbabilities are constantly turned into realities by people who “dream dreams that never were and ask why not?”

So…why not?

We need to cut spending, not spend more!

True, but Trump is already making massive cuts with more to come. He has also eliminated funding for the Palestinians, and that is highly relevant to his Gaza proposal, as we shall see below. Most importantly…

Trump proposes to turn a profit on the Gaza deal, so the claim that it will cost taxpayers money may not be operative.

Of course, start-up funds are needed, which brings us to…

Trump doesn’t have the legislative authority to do this

True, but that may or may not be necessary. Here’s why…

Congress has allocated many dollars for many things. Trump has already ceased spending much of that money, especially funds allocated for foreign aid. It isn’t clear how tightly Congress has bound those resources to specific purposes. Congress has been in the bad habit of leaving many such decisions to the President and the bureaucracy. It may be that Trump can simply divert some of this funding to his Gaza scheme.

A second point would be that he will seek investments for the project. This could provide the funding he needs. Elon Musk might be one of those investors. Bezos and Gates and many other billionaires have also been making positive noises about Trump recently. The oil Arabs are also a likely source, as soon as they get through with their pretend outrage. It’s important to understand that many Arab leaders are secretly rooting for Israel and dislike the Palestinians. They pretend otherwise to appease the “Arab street.” (More on this below)

Would the Republican Congress block an initiative that might cost taxpayers nothing, that could bring peace, and that might even return money to the U.S. Treasury? That seems unlikely.

Besides, aren’t we constantly told that AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is all-powerful in American politics? They’re not actually, but it sure seems like there will be more and better lobbying for Trump’s idea than against it. Except that…

MAGA will oppose it for being too globalist and not America First

I think people misunderstand Trump. Trump’s version of America First isn’t isolationist or even non-interventionist. It’s acquisitive.

The first things Trump said when he won his second term were…

• I want Greenland
• I want Canada
• I want the Panama Canal
• I want the Gulf of Mexico

And soon after he added, “I want Gaza.”

What Trump has opposed are endless wars that cost too much and gain too little. He’s a businessman. He wants things that make America bigger, stronger, richer, and more influential. Thus…

He is sending more weapons to Ukraine and Israel, not fewer, because he thinks that can help him negotiate an end to two wars. That will make America more powerful and influential while also discouraging China from invading Taiwan. He wants to deter wars, not fight them.

Achieving the above goals would mean he could spend less money on NATO and Israel.

His Gaza plan has the same intention — to bring peace to Israel and with it less taxpayer assistance from the United States. Israel wants the same thing, by the way. They are already making plans to become independent of U.S. aid.

Are Trump and his MAGA minions out of sync on these points?

There’s no doubt that some in the MAGA coalition are isolationist or non-interventionist (isolationist and non-interventionist are not the same thing). There are also anti-Zionists and anti-semites in the MAGA camp just as there are (in greater numbers) among the Democrats. But this doesn’t mean the Republican Party is broadly populated with these views.

In 2022 Israel was supported by 75% of conservative Republicans and 62% of moderate Republicans. As recently as last year 64% still supported Israel’s war against Hamas despite all the media fulminations against it. Those are significant majorities.

Will MAGA turn their backs on their hero if he pushes his Gaza plan? I doubt it. And where MAGA goes Congress will follow. But Trump will still have to make a good sales pitch, including answers to the next few objections…

Our allies and/or the Arab countries oppose it

It doesn’t seem to me that Trump gives much of a damn about what our allies think or that he will follow their lead. Rather, he seems intent on making them follow his lead and has been successful at achieving that.

Meanwhile, the Arab countries will be both for and against the plan at the same time. I’ll explain more about that below, but for right now, let’s just say that Arab leaders secretly want this and will even participate after a decent interval of public protests.

You can’t move that many people

My previous article started to answer this objection. As I pointed out, the tiny country of Kuwait expelled more than 300,000 Palestinians in 1991 and the world hardly noticed. Now I can take the analysis further.

The YouTuber Ryan McBeth is an intelligence analyst with a fetish for military logistics. He has examined the task of moving 2 million Gazans and found it logistically feasible.

There are other examples of mass deportations besides Kuwait…

• During Operation Keelhaul after World War II the American Army deported two to three million displaced people back to Eastern Europe (dooming them to communist rule by the way — my libertarian heart bleeds).
• The U.S. also deports up to 400,000 undocumented aliens every year, and Trump is currently planning to deport 13 million (my libertarian heart bleeds even more)!

The claim that it cannot be done is simply wrong. Indeed, it may be more logistically difficult to both rebuild Gaza and care for the Gazans while they are still there, living amidst the rubble. But this brings us to a stronger objection…

It would be ethnic cleansing and/or inhumane

George Orwell warned us. The Left, of which he was a member, is expert at corrupting language. Most recently they have turned the words genocide and apartheid on their head. Now they are employing the term ethnic cleansing to attack Trump’s Gaza plan. They are at least a little closer to the mark this time in the sense that ethnic cleansing, unlike genocide, involves moving people in addition to killing them. But that second aspect of the term instantly negates its use in this case.

Trump isn’t proposing to kill anyone. Quite the contrary. He is proposing to give the Gaza Arabs better lives and prevent more killings in the future.

The ethnic part of the term also fails. The Palestinians are not an ethnicity. They are at best a nationality, even though no nation called Palestine has ever existed in all of history.

The Gazans are ethnic Arabs, There are no ethnic Palestinians, and most of the Arabs who lived in the area when Israel was created were recent arrivals, not natives.

The idea that some unique Palestinian culture is being threatened is pure fantasy. Their culture is Arab Islamic and it exists in 22 other Arab nations. Or, to the extent that a unique Palestinian culture has been created, it’s mostly death cult psychopathy.

So the Left is butchering language once again. But if Trump’s plan isn’t ethnic cleansing, is it nevertheless inhumane?

The opposite is true. Leaving two million people to live in rubble and/or tents for many years would be inhumane. Trump is offering to give them a better life, with no threat of violence. It will be voluntary, and it will work. Here’s how I think it will go…

Based on the polling I’ve seen about 25% of Gazans are reasonable people and 75% are death cult psychos. Most of the reasonable people will want to leave, and many of them are already doing so with assistance from Israel.

As for the death cult psychos, many of those will be killed and captured by the IDF after the ceasefire ends. This is something critics like Jonah Goldberg don’t understand. The people who are most likely to resist voluntary resettlement are the Hamas fighters. But most of those people aren’t intended to make the journey anyway. They’re going either to prison or the grave when the war resumes. Destroying Hamas is a predicate to Trump’s Gaza plan. That must happen first.

As more Hamas lunatics die or go to prison and the more reasonable people leave, the incentive for the less virulent militants to also migrate will steadily increase. Voluntary migration is how most of their ancestors got there and it’s how the descendents of those ancestors will now depart.

But some people think none of this matters because…

Trump isn’t serious, he’s just establishing a bargaining position

That’s reasonable. Trump does do that. But in that case, what is he bargaining to achieve?

Does he simply want someone else to rebuild Gaza? Maybe, but who would that be?

The only options are the oil Arabs. But why should they do it? What’s in it for them? Anything they build would only be destroyed again in some future conflict.

Please understand the relevant history

In 2005 Israel gave the Palestinian Arabs sovereign control over Gaza. Israel “ethnically cleansed” Jews from Gaza to achieve this. Israel also provided the Gazans with water and a flower-growing industry to sustain them. Israel even offered to build Gaza a port.

The Gazans could have declared a Palestinian state then and there, but accepting that two-state solution would have ended their claim to rule the whole area from the river to the sea. So instead they pretended that Gaza — prime oceanfront real estate — was really an open-air prison. (Note: It’s a strange prison where the inmates receive billions in international aid that they then spend building tunnels and weapons to murder their neighbors.)

What Israel got in return for its many gifts to the Gazans was neither peace nor a two-state solution. Instead, they received constant missile attacks and full-scale war in 2008, 2014, 2021, and again on October 7, 2023.

The oil Arabs would have to expect more of the same if they paid to rebuild Gaza with the Palestinian Arabs still living there.

Why on earth would any sane person do that? Constantly repeating the same mistake while expecting different results is how some people define insanity.

The Abraham Accords suggest a different possibility.

Pretense and reality in the Arab world

Here’s the dirty little secret of the Middle East. Most Arab leaders give the Palestinian cause lip service to appease Arab public opinion, but what they really want is peace with Israel and an end to Palestinian fulminations.

Indeed, this is what many Arab leaders wanted even back in the 1960s. Egyptian President Nasser, the leader of the Pan-Arab movement, wanted it, but he feared assassination if he pursued such a goal. He had good reason to be afraid. His successor Anwar Sadat was murdered for making just such a deal.

Here’s what I think will happen: Arab leaders will condemn Trump’s plan in public but encourage it in private. In fact, we’ve already seen the public condemnations and I bet the encouragement has also happened through back channels.

This means Trump’s idea cannot be a negotiating ploy, because he has no one to negotiate with. No one else wants the Gaza job. They want him to do the job while they reserve the right to complain about it (to appease Arab opinion).

All of this leaves us with…

The only real problem

The biggest obstacle to Trump’s plan is Arab popular opinion. This is nothing new. Before the advent of theocratic Iran the so-called “Arab Street” was always the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Iran can be contained, but what about Arab popular opinion? What can be done about that? First, we must understand where Arab views come from.

There is no explicit verse in the Qur’an or unequivocal hadith (saying of the prophet) requiring that any land ruled by Islam must always be ruled by Islam, but millions of Arabs believe it.

This makes Israel a double affront to Muslims, because it was once ruled by Muslims and because Jew-hatred is another staple of Islamic culture. Actually, the affront is triple because the Jews are successful while the Arabs are failures.

U.S. ownership would likewise be viewed as a religious violation. It’s not hard to see that Trump’s new Gaza Riviera could soon become a target for Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers. But this isn’t just a problem for Trump’s Gaza plan.

Arab religious beliefs are a problem for the whole world

Muslim doctrine holds that the world is divided into two areas, the area of Islam (Dar al-Islam — Abode of Islam), and the area of war (Dar al-Harb — Abode of War). And this will be so until the latter becomes the former.

Said differently, war must be waged until the whole world is Islamic, and any territories lost to Islam must be quickly recovered.

Supporting Qur’anic Verses include…

Surah Al-Anfal (8:39): “And fight them until there is no more fitnah (persecution), and religion is all for Allah…”

Some have interpreted this to mean that Muslims must rule the world.

Surah At-Tawbah (9:29): “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture — [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”

Some Muslim scholars have interpreted this as justification for maintaining Islamic rule over non-Muslim subjects.

And this hadith…

“Islam shall always be uppermost and never be surpassed.” (Narrated by Al-Daraqutni and others)

It has been taken to mean that Islamic rule should not be relinquished once established.

That’s the bad news. How can we ever have friendship with people who believe God has ordered them to subjugate us? It’s an even bigger problem given that there are potentially two billion such people spread over a large portion of the planet, and some of them are willing to commit acts of terrorism and martyrdom to advance their goals.

The good news is that not all Muslims even know these doctrines, nor do all Muslims honor them or emphasize them. Some Muslims have even attempted to spiritualize these and similar ideas by, for instance, transforming jihad into an inner struggle of personal transformation.

The task before us is to figure out how we can foster more of the latter approach and less of the former interpretation. A few historical notes give cause for both hope and concern…

Ataturk was once able to secularize Turkey, though that country has now turned in the opposite direction.

Egyptians hated living under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and quickly turned against it.

Iranians despise their theocracy with a white-hot intensity, and many have now rejected Islam outright. The appeal of American culture experienced through satellite downloads of movies seems to have played a role, but we must also remember that the 9–11 hijackers had an opposite reaction to Western Culture. In addition, terror attacks have been committed by second and third-generation European Muslims. Our cultural products are not necessarily a universal curative for Islamic violence.

Recently Egypt stopped teaching anti-semitism in its schools, and that is surely a good sign. Could that have been sparked by talks with incoming Trump advisors in anticipation of his Gaza initiative? It seems possible. It also seems relevant that only Egypt and Lebanon were spared when Trump froze foreign aid.

I want to end on this point. Something must be done to tame Islam. That must happen whether Trump’s Gaza initiative goes forward or not. And if Trump’s Gaza plan helps to focus the world’s attention on this need it will turn out to be a virtue.

Copyright © Perry Willis 2025

Perry Willis is the co-founder of Downsize DC and the Zero Aggression Project. He co-created, with Jim Babka, the Read the Bills Act, the One Subject at a Time Act, and the Write the Laws Act, all of which have been introduced in Congress. He is a past Executive Director of the national Libertarian Party and was the campaign manager for Harry Browne for President in 2000.