A few days ago, a European Israeli real estate developer received a surprise call from an old friend, now at the White House. Al -Siddiq wanted to ask him some informal and detailed questions: about banking regulations that involve investments in the Palestinian territories, and to reach the energy network and possible ties with the major construction giants.
To the developer, who asked not to designate the private talks, it seemed to be as “déjà vu”: the repetition of discussions held five and a half years ago, when Donald Trump was another in power and was formulating his “fateful peace” “a fateful peace for him.” To prosperity “a plan for Israel And the Palestinians.
This plan in 2020 – which suggested a huge seizure of lands for Israel, and a $ 50 billion reconstruction fund in Gaza and capital for the Palestinians in a dust and poor suburb separated from East Jerusalem by a large wall – faded after a complete boycott of the Palestinians.
This time, the US President planned more rude. It was unveiled on Tuesday at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who can barely suppress his bliss, the most powerful man in the world expressed a long ambition from the Israeli right: expelling millions of Palestinians from their land.
“We will take care of this place, we will develop it, we will create thousands of thousands of jobs and will be something that the entire Middle East can be proud of,” Trump said. .
As for the Palestinians who are called Gaza home, he added: “We must go to other countries that are important with human hearts … and building various fields” until Ghazan lives.
The marginal idea that has already become the poor pocket and the enemy may become “Dubai on the Mediterranean”, if not Hamas, has found an audience in the Trump inner circle.
Last year, Jared Kushner, Trump's son -in -law and a consultant in the Middle East during his first administration, told Harvard University that the transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt (“with the correct diplomacy”) or temporarily to the Israeli desert, Negif, will help Israel win its war with Hamas.
This, in turn, will help liberate the coastal land of Gaza. “The properties of the waterfront in Gaza may be of great value,” he said, adding that the Hamas base has made investments in education and innovation impossible. “From the point of view of Israel, I will do my best to move people abroad and clean it.”
In the history of Trump's interventions in the Arab -Israeli conflict, which spanned relatively four years of peaceful years during his first term, and the appearance is now during a fragile ceasefire, a clear pattern appeared.
Where Trump can turn on US sites for a long time through the decree alone, it was done quickly. In 2017, he realized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and in 2019, Israeli claims to the Syrian highlands, which occupied since 1967, were accepted by legal law.
But the ideas that require working with the Palestinians to build a consensus, and forcing the Israelis to make concessions, died on the vine. This kind of great proposals, such as the “Peace to prosperity” plan, and Trump seemed to have returned this week.
This time, however, it comes 16 months after the most destructive war in the history of the Arab -Israeli conflict. The fierce Israeli attack on Gaza, which followed the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, left a lot of strip in the rubble and raised a humanitarian crisis far from ending, even when the first stage of the ceasefire entered last month.
Trump's idea, which depends on his calls last month to “clean” Gaza, threatens to repeat what the Arabs call Nakba, or the disaster, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes during the 1948 war that reached Israel. It is the result of Ghazan Ghazhan being interested in avoiding repetition.
“In the end, the largest force for the Palestinians is the right to say no (a bad peace agreement),” said a person close to the Palestinian leadership, who spoke to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about Trump's sudden declaration this week. “We said no to Trump before. We will say it again.”
This did not prevent Trump from overcoming the Palestinian leadership, which is not popular before. During his first term, he cut aid to the Palestinians, closed their mission in Washington, and punished them for refusing to enter the negotiations.
After revealing his map in January 2020, the threat that Israel would catch up with vast signs by the West Bank helped to urge the United Arab Emirates to abandon decades of official enmity with Israel and the signing of Ibrahim agreements after six months. (It appeared later that Trump also agreed to evaluate the sale of F-35 aircraft to the United Arab Emirates as a sweetest.)
This opens the possibility that Israel can make peace with its Arab and Gulf neighbors without making peace with the Palestinians, as it ended the taboos of decades and undermines the cornerstone of the “Arab Peace Initiative” in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the year 2002.
Trump is now designed to normalize relations between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which considers herself a leader of the Sunni Islamic world. At the press conference on Tuesday, he said that the United States ’acquisition of Gaza will reduce this goal, which was tired of its first term.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia immediately opposed, saying in a statement hours after any attempts were rejected “to remove the Palestinian people from their land.”
The real estate developer, who spoke to the person at the White House, said that the questions asked of them appeared to overcome urgent issues in Gaza and seemed theory. “Let's see,” he said. It was a serious discussion. But it was serious (five years ago) as well. “
But he said that he was surprised by the vision of discussions jumping from possible future development in Gaza by foreign companies to Trump, who suggested expelling the Palestinians. He said, “All this is politics, I am not involved.” “But this is Trump, everything is negotiations, a high level.”
Diana Bhutto, the Palestinian lawyer who worked with Abbas during a failed tour of negotiations in the early first decade of the twentieth century, suggested that the destabilization of 2.2 million Palestinians in neighboring countries was an introduction to other talks, perhaps, perhaps not equal to, Options for the future of the tape.
She said: “I think this is directed at the Arab countries and says to the Arab countries:” Pressing Hamas to accept everything we want to see. ” “If you do not accept our conditions for what will happen next, the alternative is that you will be expelled and sent to Sinai (in Egypt) and to Jordan.”
In fact, Trump explained his expectations for Hamas in the near future-a successful completion of Israeli-Palestinian hostile publications, and now in its third week.
“We would like to get all the hostages, and if we do not do so, it will make us somewhat more violent,” he said.
Additional reports by Kanani Taber's owner in Beirut
