James Morrow: Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?

Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over the Gaza Strip seems bizarre. But seen through the lens of a president who wants to put an end to festering global conflict, it makes total sense writes James Morrow.

Analysis: As the world comes to grips with Donald Trump’s plan for peace between Israel and Gaza, one question keeps springing to mind.

Is the idea of having the US occupy Gaza and sending its two million residents to go live in other Arab nations while the territory is redeveloped into a new “Riviera” crazy?

Or is it just crazy enough to work?

On the face of it, the answer would seem to be the former.

The number of impossibly knotty questions that would have to be answered before such a thing could work are infinite.

For one thing, would the US really put boots on the ground, sent to the Middle East to unpick a brutally violent conflict, fighting and potentially dying in battle with incomprehensibly savage Hamas terrorists?

US President Donald Trump during a press conference with unseen Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2025. Picture: AFP

Getting involved would be a pretty radical 180 for a president who came to office promising to get the US out of “forever wars”.

For another, where would the Gazans go?

Put aside the hand-wringing over ethnic cleansing – Gaza is in the state it is in because of Hamas’s sworn aim of ethnically cleansing Israel “from the river to the sea” – who would take them in?

The first thing Egypt did after the October 7 attacks was to send tanks to its border with Gaza to keep refugees from flowing into their country.

And across the Middle East, the experiences of Arab countries from Kuwait to Lebanon have been less than happy when it comes to their experiences taking in their Palestinian cousins.

The undertaking would potentially be a forced population transfer on the scale of what happened after World War II.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference with unseen US President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2025. Picture: AFP

Naturally for such a thing to come off there would be massive pressure on the West to carry the load.

The Albanese government has already experienced massive headaches over its plan to resettle 3000 Gazan refugees; as an American ally, would we be asked to take some multiple of that figure?

Yet there is another frame in which this isn’t crazy, but makes total sense.

It is just that for it to work, Trump would have to undo a consensus which, to be frank, needs undoing, because it is unworkable.

People can talk about two state solutions, but that is impossible so long as Hamas (which seems to manage to survive every fight it has with Israel, no matter how brutal) is in power in Gaza and the not much better Palestinian Authority runs the West Bank.

Eternal flashpoint … the Gaza Strip. Picture: Getty Images

A long acknowledged reality in the Middle East is that any solution would likely have to see some multinational force, led perhaps by the Gulf States, come in to run and rebuild the joint.

This might happen, in exchange for these countries taking in Gazans, and for fully normalising relations with Israel – a process that kicked off with the Abraham accords in Trump’s first term and seems all the more urgent with rival Iran still hoping to dominate the region with nuclear arms.

Trump would also have to figure out a way to get the Gazans to want to go, and tell us who would be allowed to live in this new beachside paradise that America would “own” for the “long term”.

But again, none of this is unprecedented, post-war population transfers have occurred as recently as the 1940s, and (unlike the Palestinians, who pass their claims down through the generations) the refugees have gone on to get on with things elsewhere in the world.

Likewise, the US has held possessions overseas in the past, but that was before the world developed post-war scruples about empire and colonies.

But ultimately Trump is absolutely correct about two things.

One, the current status quo cannot go on.

And two, that this strip of land really should be beautiful, successful, peaceful and prosperous.

Even so, it’s probably a little early to book in a beach holiday at the Gaza Intercontinental.