Trump and Gaza: The Proclamation

Interest, established.

J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, blogs as The Optimistic Conservative | Feb 6, 2025

This article is obviously a follow-up to the press conference held by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu on Tuesday, 4 January 2025, in which Trump made a series of remarkable statements about the situation in Gaza and the role he envisions in it for the United States.

Here is one of many media reactions, most of which prophesy in one way or another that Trump’s concept, to the extent we can divine its details, won’t work.

At the head of the New York Times article is this intro slug:  “President Trump’s proposal to transfer millions of people out of Gaza was hailed by the Israeli right and condemned by Palestinians. Some experts say it may be a negotiating tactic.”

Trump’s main move

And the quoted passage below is from a separate forum in which I wrote it as a comment on the NYT article linked above.

I love the intro slug, like there are experts – who have the matter wrapped up with a little bow – on the frequently recurring phenomenon of global leaders proposing to move millions of people, with terrorists embedded in their numbers, to re-homing elsewhere [checks notes] as a negotiating tactic.

Trump is definitely using tariffs as a negotiating tactic, which he’s been doing since Day 1 of the 45 term.  So it can legitimately be analyzed as potentially a negotiating tactic, when he makes moves in other matters that people weren’t expecting and can’t see a practical implementation of.

I tend to agree Trump has opened a negotiation with this volley.  But what he’s done with it is put down a marker that transcends what the tool itself (chip, incentive, disincentive, etc) is about.  His message loud and clear is that the US is taking this situation on as a national interest, and negotiations will come through and with us, or they won’t bear fruit.  That’s not an offer, it’s not a question, and it’s not something he’s submitting to an international body for endorsement. He’s setting it unilaterally as a condition.

I emphatically don’t think he is writing guarantees for Israel’s behavior.  The guarantee he’s writing is that Israel’s stake in the question is under our protection. No one’s going to hijack the disposition of Gaza out from under Israel.

I don’t think Trump has any idea of putting US boots on the ground for this.  He’s declaring political leadership.  One thing I don’t doubt at all is that he can get Israel and other nations to operate the peacekeeping and security side of things.

We’ll see how it goes.  Today’s situation doesn’t look anything like it did 17 [now 19 – J.E.] days ago when we were all lamenting Trump’s bad move on the hostage ultimatum.  There are no “experts” on what’s happening right now.

Next is the post I sent Tuesday on X/Twitter, with my quick take that Trump appears to be opening a negotiation with a sweeping statement – a plan to deviate from – about what the U.S. proposes to do

In brief extension of these points, I want to emphasize that I see Trump making Gaza a U.S. national interest, meaning nothing we don’t approve of is going to be permitted or get embedded there.

That doesn’t mean we will be doing everything there.  It means if other nations want to see something different there from what Trump has announced, they need to impress the Trump administration with it.

The superficial way to see that is as the implied negotiation.  As a tactic.  “Go ahead, folks.  Talk me down off the limb.  I’m listening.”

But the thing that matters is the one many will miss.

Trump declared the disposition of Gaza a U.S. national interest.

I’ll briefly say he did the right thing there.  We’ve seen since Oslo the result of 30-odd years of not overtly making Gaza a U.S. national interest.  The results have been, to put it politely, poor.

One of the worst dysfunctions from this policy is that presidential administrations have had no formally constructed interest statement in Gaza, per se, and can therefore act in all kinds of unaccountable ways as if we have a national interest in Gaza.

That’s what both Biden and Obama did while they were in office.  The only touchstone was the Oslo agreement, and the most recent statement of a U.S. posture on Gaza was George W. Bush’s letter to Israel when the Israelis pulled out in 2005.  (The letter was sent in April 2004, as the pullout was being negotiated.  The exchange of letters between Bush and then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is here.)

Excerpt from George W. Bush letter of 14 April 2004 to Ariel Sharon, on Gaza policy. Link in text.

Obama didn’t honor Bush 43’s intent in the letter, and it has been essentially dead since the Gaza-Israel war in 2009.

For Obama and Biden, acting on Gaza as an undeclared U.S. national interest has been entirely about pushing for Gaza to form part of a “Palestinian state,” which both presidents warned they could force on Israel by fiat in the UN.

The Magic Pier

That was the policy narrative President Biden never deviated from, as he sought by hook, crook, and floating pier to secure a U.S. presence in Gaza for the post-combat phase after 10/7.  I explained over and over that what the Biden administration wanted to do was establish an American interest in Gaza in order to make us a ground-presence party with a special stake, for whatever post-combat negotiations interested parties would have.

Ahem. Excerpt from TOC article in 2024 (one of many framing this topic.) Link in text

But Biden, instead of declaring the interest overtly and affirmatively, sought to make the interest a fact on the ground without declaring what it was.  It could be discerned that the “Palestinian state” would obviously be connected to it.  Biden and his spokesmen didn’t open their mouths without saying “Palestinian state.”

During the pier episode, however, the media commentary ensured that the overwhelming majority of the American public was unable to see that the Peerless Pier wasn’t a vanity project for Biden; it had a significant purpose.  It was, precisely, the way his team saw to get a wedge of literal U.S. presence into Gazan territory.

The supposed “humanitarian crisis” was the problem to be solved by the exact remedy that would put an American presence in Gaza.  That presence, having as its conduit an entry point offshore – not entering through Israel or Egypt – was to be the ingenious method of creating a stake-holding U.S. posture.

I said this incessantly during the event (a year ago now).  It’s not a new insight.  It is, however, a contrasting approach to Trump’s establishment of U.S interest this week.

The pier was a subterfuge, leaving open the question of what the U.S. interest would actually be.  Trump’s contrasting approach is to outline the vision of the U.S. interest from the get-go, openly and clearly.

The vision thing

So we should listen when he says what the interest is.  To put it briefly, I hear him saying that there will be no sustainable, stable situation in Gaza as long as its uncertain status can be exploited by terrorists bent on destroying Israel.  That situation isn’t livable for anyone.  It can’t be the basis of a recognized nation-state.  It’s only convenient for the terrorists and their backers in Tehran.

It is essential to recall that Trump enunciated the principle behind this in 2020, in the run-up to the signing of the Abraham Accords.  The Jewish Policy Center’s Shoshana Bryen reminds us of that in an article at JPC’s inSIGHT publication on 6 February.  Together with a JPC inSIGHT article from 2020, she makes three points about the 2020 Vision outline for the Abraham Accords that go directly to the current situation.

• Trump previewed the U.S. national interest in the outcome in Gaza in 2020.
• For any formation of a “Palestinian state” there are preconditions that the Palestinian Arabs must meet, for international security and integrity of practice and standards, if for nothing else.  America will enforce them as a requirement.
• The Palestinian Arabs have consistently failed to meet the preconditions.

(Here is the original Vision document in PDF form.)

It’s time, as Bryen indicates, to move to a Gaza Discussion 2.0.  Here’s how she ends the 2025 article:  “In 2020, Palestinians chose not to participate in The Vision, which became the Abraham Accords by the end of that year. In 2025, the deal is different. Less favorable to the Palestinians in the short term, perhaps, but that’s the price of losing the war they started.”

We shouldn’t be all that surprised that moving the Gaza-dwelling Palestinians to other countries where the culture and language are compatible, and remaking Gaza so that it cannot revert to what it’s been, is Trump’s plan:  a “plan to deviate from.”  That’s the plan; if you want to do something else, something you think is better, the Suggestions Window is down the hall, and we look at all of them.

Again, both Obama and Biden evinced willingness to behave even more peremptorily about Gaza and a Palestinian state, and have Israelis bear the cost and make all the adjustments (including the very possible demise of their nation, if a bad Palestinian-state deal were forced on Israel).

Trump’s policy is that that is unacceptable, and the better concept is to alter the nature of Gaza so thoroughly that it affords no one a terrorist sniper perch against Israel, and condemns no one to a life ruled by terrorists and their bombs, rockets, and tunnels.

Signally, Gaza would no longer be a forward operating base for Iran.

That also means the larger interests of the United States, which include the security of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Suez Canal, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the chokepoint belt from the Canal to the northern Persian Gulf, would face one less center of threats and instability.

I don’t think Trump needs to do either of the following to get what he wants out of this:  force actions on an unwilling Israel, or on Arab partners; or deploy U.S. military force.

What he does need to do:  slam the door on the malevolent intervention of the current Iranian regime, and shoulder off Russia and China (and, let’s face it, Erdogan’s Turkey).

He can do that without using force as his organizing rubric – unless Iran prods the situation to one of force.  Iran is in a poor position now to do that without suffering a setback likely to be catastrophic for its regime.

Only under the geopolitical protection of the United States can Israel and the Arab nations work out with goodwill and straightforward bona fides a new path for Gaza.  Trump has clarified that that protection will be there.

Once a bold president

When we ponder the heroic nature of Trump’s proposal, keep this in mind.  After surviving an assassination attempt in July 2024 that came within a quarter of an inch of very probably killing him, Trump has reflected as we’ve never heard him do before on the providential protection of God.

Trump’s reflections are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, when Reagan wrote in his journal, after the attempt on his life in March of that year (emphasis in citation): “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”

Reagan’s boldness in approaching U.S. national security and the Soviet Union ramped up that year.  In November 1981, he wrote a letter to then-Premier Leonid Brezhnev, outlining an unprecedented, even “unthinkable,” “zero-option” vision for theater nuclear weapons in Europe, to be negotiated by the U.S. and the USSR.  His letter was a dud in both the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the Kremlin.

But in 1985, a new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, made that letter the basis for his counterproposal to Reagan.  By December 1987, the zero option Reagan proposed in 1981 was implemented with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

What Reagan did in 1981, coming off the fresh spiritual commitment of his assassination survival, with the boldness it gave him, changed the trajectory of the Cold War.  (His initiation of the “Star Wars” missile defense project in 1983 was similarly based on bold vision and spiritual courage, largely unendorsed even within his own administration.  But Star Wars as an intractable reality was a good half of what drove Gorbachev to back to the negotiating table after the “failure” in Reykjavik in 1986, before the INF was finally agreed to.  The other half was the increasingly parlous condition of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, relative to the strength of America and the Western alliance.)

Feel the noyz

Note this well.  Throughout the Reagan years when the Cold War’s trajectory was changing adversely for the Soviet Union and for communism as a vision for the human future, the Western foreign policy establishment repeatedly insisted that it wasn’t changing.  Communism, socialism, whatever implementation of collectivism:  they were here to stay.  Their framework would continue to rule.  That was the arc of history, doing its thing.  Some form of collectivist vision, whatever we called it, was still the course of humanity’s future.

The naysaying continued until the day the Berlin Wall was torn down by the German people, unarmed except by their hands and their hearts:  on 9 November 1989.

Even the remarkable confluence of like-minded key players in the free world – Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and let us not forget Lee Kwan Yew, who had been there the longest – didn’t faze the establishment, so sure was it of its complacent certainties.

But change the trajectory did.  I urge readers not to count that out.  Remember that Trump’s proclamation about the hostages held by Hamas has functioned not to get them all released on 20 January, but to guarantee Hamas’s behavior, in an interim in which Trump is now putting a U.S.-interest stamp on kicking Hamas permanently out of Gaza.  As with Kim Jong-Un, a guarantee of Hamas’s behavior, one that works over any period of time, is even harder to achieve than getting hostages released.

The public was expecting hostages arriving on jet planes.  Trump had in mind changing the entire reality of Gaza. The old reality has been slaughtering people long enough.  Meanwhile, hostages are coming out, though not exactly as their families and an anxious and grieving public hoped.

Negotiating Trump’s proposal to move the Palestinian Arabs out of Gaza will not be a continuation of the old trajectory.  It will be new, and achieve a different outcome from what is to be expected on the old trajectory.

What won’t happen is a reflexive reversion to the old rut of Hamas recidivism. Trump already put that marker down in the Abraham Accords, five years ago.

My confidence in framing it in those terms grows by the day.  As always with Trump, listen with your ears to what he has actually said.  With the Abraham Accords, he has meant every word.

Let the negotiations – and, sure, the construction of hotels and golf courses (and dare I say piers?) – begin.

Feature image:  A moment to be present for. Trump and Netanyahu hold their press conference on 4 February 2025. White House video, YouTube.