This year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will scurry through the Middle East, bringing President Donald Trump’s tips for resolving the conflict in Gaza and pacifying the region.
But in advance of the journey, Rubio is running into a problem that vexed Trump’s foreign legislation crew members during his first 2017-2021 term in office: how to make sense of the government’s apparently off-the-cuff policy claims consular officials regarded as off-the-wall.
It has created confusion outside and inside the new leadership. To recap: On February 4, Trump announced a potential US invasion of the Gaza Strip that would contain moving all its residents to” a beautiful location to absorb people, permanently”, after which Gaza would be reborn as a Mediterranean” Riviera”.
He said he had already fingered Jordan and Egypt as the “beautiful area” for Gaza’s Palestinian transplants. ” We’re going to take over”, Trump wrote online. And it will make the Middle East a very proud place to live.
Rubio, who at the time was traveling in the Caribbean, tried to clarify. Judging that the war’s rain of destruction had left Gaza uninhabitable, he suggested residents would have to leave, but only for a while, to allow for rebuilding. ” To fix a place like that, people are going to have to live somewhere else in the interim”, he said.
Rubio insisted Trump was only referring to a US “willingness” to be responsible for fixing the place.
On February 6, Trump clarified Rubio’s clarification: By the time the US took over, the Palestinians would already have “been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe and free”.
The policy ping-pong suggests a return to the ambiguities and disagreements that characterized Trump’s first-term foreign policy leadership. Then, even hand-picked aides left in despair or were fired, including:
- Rex Tillerson, an oil executive, was fired as Secretary of State because of frequent policy disagreements regarding Russia policy.
- Over disagreements regarding Trump’s desire to meet with the Taliban ahead of a US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, veteran diplomat John Bolton, who served as the country’s national security advisor, was quoted as saying.
- Joint Chiefs of Staff head James Mattis , over Trump’s desire to abruptly pull US troops out of Syria that were supporting indigenous anti-regime forces.
Will Rubio make another mistake? His effort to make sense of Trump’s remarks was at odds with Trump’s notion of “disruptive diplomacy”, which he practices with the supposed goal of untangling policy paralysis among what he considers stale bureaucrats, worn-out allies and bloated international organizations.
When asked in a briefing what exactly the Gaza policy would entail, Trump’s spokesman Karoline Leavitt described it as an “out-of-the-box idea” to prevent” the same people pushing the same solutions to this problem for decades.”
It’s not clear that she was referring to Rubio, a Florida senator for 14 years. In any event, rather than explain how the new” Riviera” approach would work, she did detail what it would not entail: US troops in Gaza or American taxpayer money to fund reconstruction.
The evacuation-reconstruction proposal, according to Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz, is not something that allies in the area must support at all, but rather as a tool to spur their own fresh ideas. Trump’s announcement “is going to bring the entire region to come up with their own solutions”, Waltz predicted.
Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan, have roundly rejected the notion of moving Palestinians out of Gaza.
Badr Abdelatty, Egypt’s foreign minister, reported speaking with 11 Arab nations that had all “rejected any measures aimed at removing the Palestinian people from their land or encouraging their relocation to other countries outside the Palestinian territories.”
Any such actions would constitute a “flagrant violation of international law, an infringement of Palestinian rights, a threat to the region’s security and stability, and an undermining of opportunities for peace.” It was described as” a declaration of war,” according to a Jordanian official.
Israel, on the other hand, predictably welcomed the idea. This is” the first good idea I’ve heard.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump last week in Washington, and I believe it needs to be seriously pursued and implemented because I believe it will have a different future for everyone.
His comments ought not to surprise. For at least four decades, Netanyahu’s Likud Party and other nationalist right-wing organizations have been recruiting Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Trump’s remarks represented a well-devised strategy. Reporters in Washington requested from White House officials to produce a policy paper or direct the committee that had prepared the plans. The answer was there was neither, just Trump “laying it out to the American people”.
In reality, a similar idea had been broached in Trump’s orbit last year. A similar transfer idea was described as a real estate opportunity by his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a businessman and real estate investor who served as Trump’s senior advisor during his first term but does not currently hold a formal position.  ,
During an appearance at Harvard University, Kushner said Gazans could be resettled into Israel’s far southern Negev Desert, thus opening” Gaza’s waterfront property” for development that” could be very valuable”.
” It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel‘s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up”, Kushner said. ” But I don’t think that , Israel , has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards”.
Netanyahu isn’t waiting for Rubio’s arrival to put Trump’s ideas into practice. Any Palestinians who have been given an invitation to travel to any foreign country that would take them must leave immediately by land, sea, or air, according to his Defense Minister, Israel Katz, who issued an order to soldiers inside Gaza.
Gazans should have “freedom of movement and migration”, Katz said. Countries that have criticized Israel for the war were “obligated” to take in refugees, he added without elaborating.
The removal idea was first proposed by Netanyahu in 2012. His diplomats immediately questioned the United States and European governments about accepting tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians after Israel invaded Gaza in response to the deadly Hamas raid in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
None agreed at the time.