Yes, Trump’s Gaza plan is outrageous. It could also be just what the Middle East needs

When far-right Israeli ministers suggested during the war in Gaza that Israel should facilitate the voluntary transfer of Gaza’s population, the idea was considered preposterous. To hear the president of the United States propose the expulsion of Gaza’s 1.8 million people is another level of shocking. Yet considering the last century of failed efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict — with every two-state solution rejected by Palestinian leaders, as far back as 1937 — a shock to the system might be precisely what that system needs.

Even before President Donald Trump brought new attention to his relocation plan with a Tuesday proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza, the foreign ministers of five Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio protesting the idea. “The two-state solution is the only viable path to a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,” they wrote.

What those Arab officials and so many others fail to acknowledge is that every time a state has been offered to Palestinian leaders, they have vehemently rejected it. Also ignored is the fact that the very countries claiming that Palestinians must remain in Gaza are the same countries whose failed 1948 war against Israel led Palestinians to become refugees in Gaza. While they are very likely correct about the best possible outcome to this conflict, a two-state solution is only possible if Palestinians agree.

Trump’s idea, described by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “outside the box,” is so far outside the box that it does not seem designed to be implemented, but rather to illuminate how broken the box is.

To prevent another century of failed peace efforts, it is vital to understand how we arrived at this bizarre moment in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1936, when the British ruled Mandatory Palestine but were looking to deliver autonomy to the Jews and Arabs of the land, a commission was established to investigate the options. Zionist leaders met the idea of dividing the land into an Arab state and a Jewish state with enthusiasm.

But one powerful leader dissented: The leader of Palestinian Muslims under British rule, Grand Mufti Haj-Amin al-Husseini, who told the commission that the 400,000 Jews then living in Palestine simply could not remain.

After the British unveiled the first two-state solution in the Peel Proposal of 1937, Husseini published a proclamation to his people. “Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews,” he wrote. “Do not tolerate the plan of division, for Palestine has been an Arabic land for centuries and shall remain Arabic.”

When the British decided to end their mandate in Palestine, they turned the future of the embattled land over to the United Nations. In 1947, the U.N. voted to partition the land into an independent Jewish state and independent Arab state. Jews in Palestine celebrated the historic vote; had Arab leaders similarly embraced it, Palestine would have gained independence for the first time in history. After all, prior to the British Mandate, Palestine had been a province of the Ottoman Empire for more than 400 years, following a rotating cast of foreign powers that had ruled the territory for centuries.

Yet the Arabs of Palestine and the wider Arab world rejected the plan. All 10 Arab member states at the U.N. voted against partition. Even before the vote was counted, Arab delegates stormed out of the General Assembly Hall, threatening bloodshed.

Nevertheless, Zionist leaders expressed their people’s hope for peace. “We extend a hand of genuine friendship to the new Arab state which is to be established in Palestine,” the Jewish Agency’s Abba Hillel Silver announced.

Meanwhile, Husseini declared jihad. One day after the U.N. vote, Hussein Khalidi, another Arab leader in Palestine (and the uncle of Columbia University historian Rashid Khalidi) told The New York Times, “The Arabs will wage a holy war if an attempt is made to enforce the partition plan.”

Partition, Khalidi warned, was a “declaration of war against Arab countries” that would “lead to a crusade against the Jews.”

The holy war Khalidi threatened began that day, with seven Jews killed in three separate attacks. Within two days, the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem was in flames, and deadly riots spread across Palestine. When the British evacuated Palestine and Israel declared independence in May 1948, five Arab states, including Egypt and Jordan, joined the war that the Palestinians had launched.

Israel’s shocking victory in that war is known in Arabic as the Nakba — the catastrophe — in which some 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. Most fled to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egyptian-controlled Gaza. Their descendants living in these countries — the very countries that invaded Israel in 1948 — are still considered refugees, denied citizenship and the rights that come with it.

In 1967, when Egypt, Syria and Jordan tried to destroy the Jewish state, Israel again emerged as the surprising victor, capturing Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Immediately after that Six-Day War, Israeli leaders proclaimed their desire to exchange that captured land for peace. The Arab League responded with the “Three No’s” of the Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”

When Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 2000, and again in 2008, their offers were rejected, with no alternative presented. Failing to reach a negotiated withdrawal, Israel tested out unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, evicting 9,000 of its citizens in the process. The population of Gaza responded by electing Hamas, the radical Islamist group that had already dedicated itself to derailing every peace process. Hamas quickly worked to execute a complete seizure of power in the strip, and turned the coastal enclave into a terrorist state.

Even before the massacre of Oct. 7 and the devastating war it sparked, the two-state solution was on life support. Since Oct. 7, and the revelation that most Palestinians supported the massacre, many Israelis who once believed in that solution no longer can.

Now, amidst a ceasefire in which Hamas leaders and supporters are declaring victory and praising the attacks of Oct. 7, Trump’s alarming plan could serve as a wakeup call — whether or not it is something anyone considers moral or practical. That wake up call should be this: the violent rejection of peace over the course of the last century has created enough misery and destruction. This deadly charade must end.

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