Will Gaza be the 51st State?

+ read my published article about Elon Musk's extremism

Feb 06, 2025

Don’t panic. The United States is not about to invade Gaza to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. On the other hand, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so I suppose anything is possible.

President Trump held a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu two days ago. Trump announced that the United States will take over Gaza and “own it.” This, he insisted, will bring long-term stability to the Middle East. The United States will force out the 2.2 million Palestinians living there to “develop” the enclave into a Mediterranean Riviera (no doubt with lucrative Trump name branding). Greenland is about to get some great falafel stands.

This could be a classic Trump negotiating tactic. Propose something completely outlandish to generate lots of passionate headlines. But settle for something less, which will then seem reasonable in comparison. Or this could be yet another example of Trump’s chaotic, impulse-driven, incoherent approach to ideas. Or he could be very serious and intends to carry it out. Who knows?

This is not the first time the United States has considered “owning” part of the Middle East. In fact, the U.S. could have ended up controlling Palestine instead of the British!

Let’s go back to the end of World War One.

Britain and France defeated the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany, ending more than four hundred years of Turkish Muslim rule over the Middle East. The question was what should happen with all those territories? The victors organized a grand peace conference in Paris in 1919. But there was a big division between them. Britain and France were imperialists, and wanted to divide up the Ottoman territories amongst themselves. The United States and Arab leaders were anti-imperialist, pushing for the right of “self-determination” for newly-liberated people — meaning independence.

That year, President Woodrow Wilson sent the King-Crane Commission to Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to ask the people there what they wanted. The overwhelming answer was that they wanted the United States to take over. The Arabs figured they had a better chance of obtaining independence under the U.S., which would support their self-determination, than under the British or French, who were likely to pursue their own colonial interests.

With a slight change in history, the United States could have ended up with Palestine.

The King-Crane Commission concluded that the area should be adopted as a “mandate” with the goal of transitioning the region into modern democratic nation-states. In the meantime, the United States should be the occupying power. There should be one large Arab state comprising Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, with the U.S. overseeing it. Jews would be welcome to live freely there as Jewish-Syrian citizens. But given the intense anti-Zionist wishes of the majority Arab population, there could be no independent Jewish homeland unless the United States was willing to use massive military force to achieve it — which ran counter to Wilson’s program of self-determination (note that there would be no “Palestinian” state, either, as the Palestinian Arabs were not yet considered a distinct nationality).

Nothing came of the King-Crane Commission. By the end of 1919, Wilson was ailing and the United States Congress opposed further American intervention. The British and French had already made secret deals to carve up the Middle East, and rejected any effort to change that agreement. The French ended up with mandates in Lebanon and Syria. The British took Palestine and Iraq. The Jews finally obtained independence with the establishment of Israel in 1948.

So, 106 years later, is the United States now ready to occupy a chunk of the Middle East?

Trump hit on the crux of the problem. “The Gaza thing has not worked, it’s never worked,” he said. He’s right. All of Gaza’s bad variables are frozen in place. Western countries keep funneling billions of dollars into Gaza that gets scooped up by Hamas to continue the cycle of warfare. Human rights organizations are committed to permanent Palestinian misery to justify those billions in aid, maintain their influence, and continue their ideological devotion to Israel’s elimination. The Arab countries profess deep concern for their “brothers and sisters” but don’t want radicalized Palestinians coming into their own countries to stir up unrest and instability. The Palestinians themselves are unable (or unwilling) to finally reject victimhood and armed struggle, which perpetuates both the conflict and their own suffering. And Israel hasn’t been able to definitively defeat Hamas and, more importantly, is too politically divided to make any concrete decisions about a postwar vision.

Israel can’t solve this Palestinian problem. Yet the international community insists on keeping Gaza in Israel’s inbox because no one else wants to take any blame for bad outcomes. All this makes for a complete impasse.

Gaza desperately needs a major shakeup.

Trump and Netanyahu at the White House. Photo source: Flickr

Something, after all, has to fundamentally change. No Palestinian entity is capable of ruling Gaza. Israel shouldn’t rule it, either (they tried that from 1967-2005; it didn’t work). The UN, UNRWA, and the other major international institutions are too compromised to serve as honest brokers or competent administrators. Nor should Gaza’s civilians be expelled — certainly not by force, and definitely not by the United States with Israel’s involvement. Yet, if Gaza really is an “open-air prison” as Israel’s critics contend, then the most humanitarian response is to create a pathway out of there for the Palestinians, not to force them to stay.

Trump’s “plan” for the United States to own Gaza appalled just about everyone except for the Israeli right, which would love to see the Palestinians expelled. Congressional Democrats and Republicans panned it with varying levels of pearl-clutching. You know it’s bad when Senator Lindsay Graham, Trump’s yes-man in the Senate, meekly suggests that his constituents would never go for it. Egypt and Jordan flatly rejected it. The Saudis also said no. Their reaction probably counts for the most because Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, which he thinks runs through a Saudi-Israel diplomatic deal of the century. If we’re going with the theory that is all a negotiating tactic, then one possibility is that Trump is trying to get the Saudis to offer a deal: drop this Gaza plan and we’ll normalize with Israel. So far the Saudis aren’t buying.

The established American Jewish community has yet to say much, but Yehuda Kurtzer, the President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, was unsparing:

“I found that watching the American President casually pitching the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza as a feature of a ludicrous real estate plan to enrich himself — and seeing the Prime Minister of Israel smirking alongside him — to be just about the most disgraceful and embarrassing thing that I’ve experienced as an American and as a Zionist.”

Stripping out the most outlandish elements of Trump’s “plan” — ethnic cleansing, Trump golf course — the idea of more intensive American involvement on the ground in Gaza might actually be a good solution to the impossible logjam. We can imagine a scenario in which the United States and its allies (a mix of European and moderate Arab countries) assume responsibility for Gaza’s stability and reconstruction. This would take the problem out of Israel’s hands.

Imagine that under this U.S.-led international coalition, Palestinian civilians are temporarily evacuated to centers in Egypt and Jordan while Gaza undergoes reconstruction. At the same time, the coalition prohibits Israeli occupation and settlement, in effect holding the Gaza space for the Palestinians’ return. The coalition, not UNRWA, will be in charge of education and social services for the displaced Palestinians, making sure that it’s freed from radicalization and antisemitism. Hamas, trapped in Gaza, will have neither aid to steal nor civilians to use as human shields, and will wither to a small guerilla force.

Gaza could be divided into sectors, governed by elements of the coalition with representatives of the Palestinians. One by one, each sector will be cleared of Hamas, permanently demilitarized, and then rebuilt; after which Palestinians will move in as the coalition moves on to the next section. Civilians returning to Gaza will no longer be classified as refugees and will have to give up the demand to “return” to Israel. With ownership in their own society and governance, they can begin to build towards an independent Palestinian state.

Donald Trump is right that Gaza sits on prime real estate. An ancient land with deep history, it’s located at the hinge point between Africa, Asia, and Europe, with long beaches, proximity to the desert, and close to major urban centers like Cairo and Tel Aviv. Resort hotels, desert excursions, Mediterranean Sea adventures, desalination plants, ocean science, and much more could well be Gaza’s future economy.

This will take years. It will be messy, expensive, and come with setbacks. It will require the kind of sustained commitment and international cooperation that I serious doubt the governments involved are actually capable of. And it may not even be what the Palestinians want. But it IS a vision. Better to spend these next years building a productive future than fueling the perpetual war we have now.

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“Does Elon Musk hate the Jews?” — read my article in the J. The Jewish News of Northern California

Why are so many people invested in trying to prove Elon Musk is not an extremist?

The dispute about whether Musk’s Inauguration Day salute amounted to the “sieg heil” or an unintentional gesture was too juicy to pass up. The Anti-Defamation League, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Al Jazeera and just about everyone else on the internet piled onto the controversy.

We were treated to freeze-frames of Taylor Swift, Justin Trudeau, Michelle Obama and other notables raising their hands mid-wave, as if proving . . . READ MORE

(This is an updated and improved piece to my previous Substack post.)

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