“There’s no place where they clash more than in the Middle East—our values and our interests,” Anne Patterson once famously said. Throughout its more than two centuries old history in the region there has been nothing closer to the truth than this statement by the veteran US diplomat and a Middle East expert.
However, US policies in the Middle East under President Donald Trump are steadily diverging from simply expressing the paradox of US interests in the region and its values to alienating millions of Arabs who see Trump’s proposal to relocate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip as a relic of Western imperialism.
The torrent of bizarre approaches by the Trump administration to Middle East issues, especially Trump’s proposal to transfer the Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, marks a more aggressive style of US diplomacy that amounts to attempts to blackmail and browbeat even its closest Arab allies.
Since he won the US presidential elections at the end of last year, questions have been raised about the nature and character of the foreign policy that the Trump administration will pursue, especially due to the dramatic events triggered by the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
Since the start of his second term, Trump has been pushing for the relocation of the Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan and has signalled his recognition of Israel’s annexation moves in the West Bank, sparking fears that the United States is angling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Though the US strategy in the Middle East has always been unjust and biased in favour of Israel, this is the first time that a US president has stood unequivocally in support of Israel’s systematic and aggressive policy of liquidating the Palestinian cause through ethnic cleansing.
Trump’s proposal that the US take over a “long-term ownership position” in the Gaza Strip, which belongs to the Palestinians, would also pull the US even more deeply into protracted and bloody Middle East conflicts.
While the reckless proposal remains earthshaking for the Arab world, any attempt to forcibly implement it will both scandalise US Middle East policy and have devastating consequences for its long-term geostrategic interests in the region with global dimensions.
It will underscore how the troubled history of the US engagement in the Middle East has been concerned with influence, power, and hegemony and not with the values of freedom, universal human rights, and the international rule of law. It will also reveal the betrayal of the network of alliances that have been the pillars of Western security in the region.
More than two centuries have passed since the first US contact with the region, which would later be known in American literature as the Near East and then as the Middle East and would become one of its main global strategic arenas.
The curve of the US engagement with the region is manifested in the upward trend that started with its bid in the 18th century to establish footholds in the region for commercial and missionary expansion.
This resulted in the first major war fought outside America with the then Ottoman Empire, which was demanding tribute to prevent pirate attacks on American ships sailing near North African coasts.
A major leap came after World War I, when the United States emerged as a partner in the victories achieved by the Allies. America’s share of the war’s spoils took the form of concessions in oil resources in the Middle East, with these later becoming a key pillar of Washington’s strategy in the region.
The privileges came after the United States abandoned then president Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination proposals in the famous Fourteen Points he put forward at the end of the war under pressure from Britain and France, which were plotting to put large parts of the Middle East under their colonial rule.
Consequently, there was a sense of betrayal among many Arabs who felt that their causes of liberation and independence had been abandoned for US vested interests, while the Jews were encouraged and supported to establish their own state at the expense of the Arab Palestinians under promises made by Britain in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
After World War II, the United States became directly involved in the Middle East through its interventionist policies in the three main areas of energy supply lines, national security, and Israel’s defence and protection.
The meeting between then US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdel-Aziz on the American cruiser the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal in 1945 was considered a milestone in building the US presence in the region.
The Cold War was the lever that placed the United States at the centre of Western policy and hegemonic strategies in the Middle East by putting the region at the heart of the containment process and competition for spheres of influence.
America’s policy in the region would be rooted in solid foundations: combating Communism, containing Soviet influence, and confronting Arab national-liberation and nationalist movements.
For this purpose, the United States fought fierce political battles and carried out intrigues and conspiracies, including regime change, in order to consolidate its presence and influence as a dominant power in the region.
One of the ideological instruments used by the United States at the time was to flirt with Islam and work to translate Muslim fundamentalism into politics and harness the trend as a force to oppose international Communism and rising Arab nationalism.
Later, the morally bankrupt American flirtation with Islamism became a very serious affair when US intelligence and military agencies began financing, training, and managing a mercenary army of Islamist volunteers to fight the Soviets after Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Many of these Jihadists later joined international Jihadist movements and terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. These became a turning point for the United States and nowhere more so than its policy in the Middle East.
With its disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 that witnessed these terrorist groups mushrooming, this fatally flawed policy drastically changed the ways that Americans thought about the Middle East and the way people in the Middle East thought about Americans.
Unquestionably, the “special relationship” the United States had forged with Israel even before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state was a paradigm shift in the Middle East and the cause of several future conflicts between the United States and the Arab world.
Along with most US presidents since Harry Truman in the 1940s who launched the US alliance with Israel, Trump is a staunch supporter of Israel. He moved the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognised Israel’s annexation of the Occupied Golan Heights, and pushed for the signature of the so-called Abraham Accords between Israel on the one side and four Arab countries on the other.
Even before beginning his new term Trump threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas won’t release the hostages. After his inauguration, Trump unleashed a diatribe of warnings and proposals including “taking over” the devastated Gaza Strip, swaths of which are in ruins after more than a year of war between Israel and Hamas.
As he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House last week, Trump said the enclave’s 2.2 million Palestinian population should be resettled so that he can build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on their land.
Striking greater anxiety in the region, which is already suffering from apparently endless wars, Trump did not exclude deploying US troops to take over Gaza to oversee his imaginary construction project in the war-torn Strip.
In an announcement that was shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency, Trump floated a proposal that Jordan and Egypt should take in Palestinians from Gaza, offering a vision of mass displacement and effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homes.
Trump’s suggestion that the United States would take “long-term” ownership of the Gaza Strip provoked a furious reaction from Palestinians, sparked an international outcry, and triggered anger and outrage at all levels across the Arab world.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas strongly rejected Trump’s proposal and insisted that Gaza is an integral part of the State of Palestine, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“Our people in the Gaza Strip will not allow these plans to pass,” Abbas stressed, warning that forced displacement would be a serious violation of international law.
Hamas, whose attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 triggered the 15-month war with Israel that has caused widespread devastation in Gaza, said Trump’s plan was a “recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region.” It said the plan would “pour oil on the fire” in the region.
The Islamic Jihad group, which fought alongside Hamas in the 15-month war with Israel, said in a statement that Trump’s proposal amounted to “a confrontation with the Palestinian people and their rights.”
Both Egypt and Jordan, the two neighbouring countries targeted by Trump to receive the Palestinians and two of the main recipients of US aid in the Middle East, made a measured response, though they also made it clear that they opposed the plan.
Egypt has repeatedly rejected any displacement of the Palestinians and said it “would not be a party to such a plan”. President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has said that the transfer of the Palestinians from Gaza would be a form of “injustice” that his country could not participate in.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II has rejected “any attempts” to take control of the Palestinian Territories and displace their people. His Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, reiterated Jordan’s rejection of any discussion about the displacement of Palestinians or the annexation of Palestinian land.
Earlier, five Arab foreign ministers who gathered in Cairo to forge a united Arab response to the plans wrote to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio opposing plans to expel the Palestinians from Gaza, as proposed by Trump.
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority, and the Arab League all said they flatly rejected Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
“The Palestinians will live on their land and help rebuild it,” the letter said.
To many analysts, however, Trump’s outlandish “Gaza-a-Lago” plan seems an unrealistic idea driven by his real-estate instincts and aimed at pushing the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. Therefore, it has been seen as more of a distraction from broader regional peace efforts than a serious proposal for the future of the Gaza Strip.
Some commentators have dismissed it as completely nonsensical and attributed it to the widely accepted “madman theory” of a politician who nobody knows how to respond to and is capable of doing anything to keep others in line.
Amid pushbacks from US allies after Trump’s proposal to take over Gaza, the US administration tried to soften the president’s remarks by saying that it does not intend to send US troops to the region and is not committed to any plan to rebuild the Strip.
Whether unrealistic or lunatic, Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of the Palestinians has already done enormous damage to the Middle East Peace Process, making the question of the future of the Palestinians impossible to ignore.
Trump’s idea, which does not differ drastically from proposed Israeli solutions to the day after the Gaza war, would allow Israel to implement its transfer plans and formally annex Gaza and the West Bank.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday that he has instructed the Israeli military to draft a plan to “allow the voluntary departure” of Gaza residents from the enclave, just days after Trump made his controversial proposal to transfer the Palestinian population from the Strip.
According to Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) estimates, if Egypt refuses to open the Rafah Crossing with Gaza due to concerns that the Palestinians will want to remain in Egypt, it will still be possible to open traffic routes from the sea or land and from there to an airport to transfer the Palestinians to destination countries.
Trump positioned himself as an unpredictable leader in his first term in office, and it is entirely possible that, pumped up with hype and bombast, in his second term he will be as disruptive as he can. There is no more fragile region of the world where he can hit hard than the Middle East if he finds reluctance or firm rejection of his plans.
There are already signs that Trump has begun to flex US muscles by using financial and diplomatic coercion as instruments to get his own way. On Monday Trump said he might withhold aid to Jordan and Egypt if they don’t take Palestinian refugees being relocated from Gaza.
Egypt receives about $1.3 billion in military assistance from the United States in addition to significant development aid. Jordan is another major recipient of US aid which gets about $1.45 billion in US military and economic assistance annually.
Any suspension of the aid will place additional strain on their ailing economies which are badly in need for a financial lifeline to curb their losses of foreign exchange reserves.
Press reports have suggested that Trump is trying to use the ongoing Nile water dispute with Ethiopia over its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) to push Egypt into cooperating on relocating Gaza’s population to Egypt.
Trump’s threatening again with “all hell break loose” on Monday if Hamas will not release all hostages it still holds by midday Saturday, or he would propose cancelling the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, also suggests that he intends to restructure the Gaza ceasefire talks, mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States, in a way that neutralises Egypt’s role by giving his team the lead in the talks.
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen are other factors in US Middle East policies in Trump’s Gaza fantasy, which could put the entire region at risk of further chaos.
In the end, the “Gaza takeover” idea is an indicator of Trump’s swaggering approach to the Middle East, as he wades into generations-old conflicts in which the United States has ignored the region’s priorities – which are based on independence, equity, and dignity and generating prosperity, development, and progress and ensuring security for its citizens.
Trump’s attempts to displace the Palestinians is also broader and more profound than apologists or pragmatists might think. It is “imperialist bullying” and “unabashed expansionism” that gives little consideration to what the Palestinians want and what the region needs.
Trump’s provocative approach will add to the troubling legacy of mistrust that has clouded America’s relationship with the Arab world. The perception among the Arabs now is that the United States is in cahoots with Israel to reshape the geographical and political borders of the region, with Israel in control.
A sigh of relief may have gone through the region when Trump said last Friday that he is in no rush to implement his plan to take over and redevelop Gaza. Yet, there is still reason for alarm about the regional order given Trump’s unpredictability and untrustworthy behaviour.
As is the case with Canada, Mexico, China, Colombia, Denmark, and South Africa among other nations which have shown that appeasement and tactical retreats do not work before Trump’s bullying, the Arabs should not lie low in the face of Trump’s aggression.
Their rejection of Trump’s plans for the displacement of the population of Gaza has so far been unwavering, but protests may not be enough, and they must be prepared for a conflict with Trump whose “free-riding” statements and antagonism create more challenges for the region in an era of increased disorder.
By ratcheting up his threats, Trump is becoming a major test for the Arabs who are facing another big test in their modern history. The whole world will be watching how their leaderships, their elites and people across the Arab world will react to Trump’s will-nilly designs.
At this truly regional tipping point, they should not try to brush the issue under the carpet and hope the US president will change his mind. Instead, they must stand up resolutely and challenge proposals head on.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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