Washington February 6: Top Trump administration officials on Wednesday walked back elements of President Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza and drive out the Palestinian population, insisting that he had not committed to using U.S. troops to clear the territory and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary, New York Times reported..
Mr. Trump’s brazen proposal to move as many as two million Palestinians out of Gaza and seize and redevelop it as a U.S. territory met with immediate opposition on Wednesday from key American partners and officials around the world, with many expressing support for a Palestinian state, and experts calling the idea a breach of international law. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Trump floated the plan, top administration officials sought to soften it, New York Times said.
Marco Rubio
Speaking to reporters in Guatemala, Secretary of State Marco Rubio twice suggested that Mr. Trump was only proposing to clear out and rebuild Gaza, not claim indefinite possession of the territory. Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, told Republican senators at a closed-door luncheon that Mr. Trump “doesn’t want to put any U.S. troops on the ground, and he doesn’t want to spend any U.S. dollars at all” on Gaza, according to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
And at the White House, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said “the president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza,” though she did not specify how the United States could take control of the territory without using military force.
The Gaza proposal, which Mr. Trump unveiled on Tuesday during a visit by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to the White House, upended decades of international diplomacy and opened a geopolitical Pandora’s box with far-reaching implications for the Middle East. Most immediately, it complicated talks about extending a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas; placed Egypt and Jordan in an impossible position; and threatened the U.S. ambition for normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia
In a statement issued before 4 a.m. local time, Saudi Arabia expressed its “unequivocal rejection” of attempts to displace Palestinians and reiterated that it would not establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the absence of an independent Palestinian state. Egypt’s foreign ministry said that aid and recovery programs for Gaza would have to begin “without the Palestinians leaving.” And King Abdullah II of Jordan, in a meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday, rejected any attempt to displace Palestinians and annex their land.
Gaza has been devastated by the war between Israel and Hamas, which was set off by the militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Speaking alongside Mr. Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump described Gaza as “a demolition site” that the United States would rebuild into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Hamas has ruled in Gaza for most of the past two decades and has begun re-establishing control there since a cease-fire took effect last month. The group immediately rejected the idea of a mass relocation of the territory’s population, a politically explosive proposal in a region with a long and bloody history of forced displacement.
Against the law
Mr. Trump’s proposal would be a severe violation of international law, experts say. Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is defined as a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Gaza reaction: Palestinians in Gaza expressed a mixture of condemnation and confusion over Mr. Trump’s comments. And while some residents rejected leaving Gaza under any circumstances, others said conditions were so unlivable after 15 months of Israeli bombardment that they would consider relocating.
Israeli embrace: Far-right politicians in Israel welcomed Mr. Trump’s plan as unraveling decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without creating a Palestinian state.
Around the world: Mr. Trump brought together allies and adversaries alike in opposition to his proposal, though some sought to strike a balance by not criticizing him directly.
“The fact that nobody has a realistic solution, and he puts some very bold, fresh new ideas out on the table, I don’t think should be criticized in any way,” Mr. Waltz said. “I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions if they don’t like Mr. Trump’s solution.”
Mr. Trump has been publicly pressuring the Jordanians and Egyptians for weeks to take in people from Gaza, but so far both countries’ leaders have refused. Forcibly removing the Gaza Palestinians would violate international law, but Mr. Trump said in his news conference on Tuesday that he expected they would be eager to leave the land because it was uninhabitable. Perhaps they could return eventually, he said.
He said all of that while standing beside Mr. Netanyahu, whose military campaign had obliterated much of Gaza after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — creating the very conditions Mr. Trump was referring to.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who has been trying to clear Hamas from Gaza since the Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,200 people, looked pleased as Mr. Trump spoke.
Other U.S. officials were less thrilled about the proposal. Two people close to Mr. Trump insisted it was his idea alone; one said they had never heard him mention the involvement of U.S. troops before Tuesday.
Several senior officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions, told The New York Times that they were still trying to figure out the genesis of the idea, and considered it fantastical even for Mr. Trump.
The concept is difficult to square with Mr. Trump’s criticisms of previous presidents for nation-building in the Middle East. His proposal that America take responsibility for one of the world’s worst disaster zones also came as he was shutting down the primary federal government agency responsible for foreign development assistance, U.S.A.I.D.
But Mr. Trump’s impulses have never been as anti-interventionist as the isolationists in his party would like them to be. When the Iraq war began, he initially cheered it before condemning it. In 2011, when he considered running for president, he said the United States should “take the oil” from Iraq, and he has promoted the idea of the U.S. military extracting critical minerals from overseas war zones.
In his second presidential term he has put his imperialist impulses on display. He has said he wants the United States to buy Greenland, refusing to rule out military force despite the existence of a U.S. base there. He has said he wants to take back the Panama Canal and that Canada should become America’s 51st state. He has said he thinks the United States should be entitled to Ukraine’s natural resources as repayment for all the military aid America has sent to help the Ukrainians defend themselves against the Russians.
Mr. Trump views foreign policy as a real estate deal maker. He has never cared about international law, never lectured autocratic leaders about human rights as other U.S. presidents have done.
Instead, for decades, he has viewed the world as a collection of countries that are ripping America off. He is preoccupied by the question of how to gain leverage over other nations, whether they are allies or adversaries. And he searches for ways to use American power to dominate other countries and to extract whatever he can. Mr. Trump does not believe in “win-win” diplomacy; all deals, whether in business or foreign affairs, have a clear winner and a clear loser.
Like Mr. Trump, his Middle East envoy, Mr. Witkoff, is a real estate developer and investor who has done business in the region. And Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, another real estate investor who worked the Middle East portfolio in his first term, riffed last year about the incredible development opportunities presented by the Gaza waterfront.
Several advisers to Mr. Trump said they expected the Gaza ownership idea to die away quietly as it became clear to Mr. Trump that it was unfeasible. And that already seemed to be happening by Wednesday afternoon.
But Daniel B. Shapiro, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama, and more recently at the Pentagon, said even just floating the idea risked provoking more extremism: “This is not a serious proposal. The U.S. taking over Gaza, at massive cost in dollars and troops, is about as likely as Mexico paying for the wall or the United States seizing Iraq’s oil.”
“The danger is that extremists within the Israeli government and terrorists of various stripes will take it literally and seriously, and start to act on it,” he said. “It could imperil the further release of hostages, put a target on the back of U.S. personnel and undercut prospects of a Saudi-Israel normalization deal.”
When the Trump team hears warnings like this from former Democratic administration officials, they counter that Obama officials (although Mr. Shapiro was not among them) incorrectly warned that the Middle East would descend into violence after Mr. Trump moved the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in 2017. They also point out that it was Mr. Trump who delivered normalization agreements between Israel and four Muslim-majority states in his first term — an effort, known as the Abraham Accords, that the Biden administration tried unsuccessfully to expand upon.
Mr. Trump’s Gaza takeover idea delighted many on the hard right in Israel and some within America’s pro-Israel community. The Israeli government has long wanted to seize back Gaza from the Palestinians to ensure that the land cannot be used to launch terrorist attacks against Israel.
David Friedman, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, was taken by surprise by the announcement but called the president’s idea “brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.”
Mr. Friedman said in an interview that the challenge his team had faced in the first Trump term was that “we never could answer the basic question, which is, is there anybody who can rule over Gaza that will not be a threat to the people in Gaza as well as to Israel?”
He said it was intolerable for Hamas or the Palestinians who supported it to remain in Gaza. Asked who would live there instead, Mr. Friedman said that after 15 years of rebuilding it would be a “market-driven process.”
“I know I’m sounding like a real estate guy,” he said, but he could not help but imagine the possibilities presented by “25 miles of sunset-facing beachfront.”
Trump family’s deals in the Middle East.
The Trump Organization’s multiple projects in the Middle East include a deal to build a golf course and hotel in Oman, involving land owned by that country’s government.Credit…Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times
As President Trump pushes a new plan to take control of Gaza and clear out an area that once was home to an estimated two million residents, he is advocating bringing the United States much more deeply into a region where his family has a growing collection of real-estate and business interests.
There is no part of the world as crucial to the growth of various Trump family business ventures as the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Israel, when the full portfolio of Mr. Trump as well as Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, are included. Here is a look at the family’s interests in the region and Mr. Trump’s proposal for Gaza.
What Trump proposed for Gaza
Mr. Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave.
Mr. Trump suggested the resettlement of Palestinians would be akin to the New York real estate projects he built his career on. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” he said. “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”
“Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” Mr. Trump added, “developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
Mr. Trump’s aides on Wednesday walked back some of his comments, with the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, saying that “the president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza.”
The Middle East has in the past three years turned into the hottest spot for the Trump family in terms of new international real-estate deals. Most of these are so-called branding deals, which collectively earn the family tens of millions of dollars in fees in exchange for the right to use the name to help boost luxury condo, golf or hotel sales.
Recent agreements have been signed with a Saudi-based real estate company called Dar Al Arkan to build high-rise luxury apartments, golf courses or hotels in Oman, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
“We are delighted to strengthen our ongoing relationship with the Trump Organization,” Ziad El Chaar, an executive with Dar Al Arkan’s subsidiary, said last year, in announcing one of the deals.
The project in Oman, which is the farthest along, involves the government of Oman itself, as it owns the land where the Trump golf course and hotel are being built.
Although the opening of the resort destination is still at least three years off, the Trump Organization has already raked in at least $7.5 million from the Oman deal, financial reports from the past two years show. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. visited Oman this summer to check the project’s progress, visiting the site with Yousef Al Shelash, the chairman of Dar Al Arkan.
A model of a golf course development.
Dar Al Arkan itself has close ties with the Saudi royal family; the government there has been an important partner for the real estate company’s owners as they have built up their business.
The Trump family also examined a potential deal in Israel before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and remains interested in doing a project there, The Times previously reported. Mr. Trump’s son Eric Trump has said he intends to wait until the war ends before moving ahead.
Even before this recent burst of new Middle East deals, the Trump family already had an outpost in the region. Trump International Golf Club, Dubai, opened in 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump started his first term in the White House.
The partner in this Dubai club is DAMAC Properties, run by Hussain Sajwani, a billionaire real-estate executive who, Mr. Trump boasted in December, plans to invest billions of dollars in the United States to build data centers.
A partnership with LIV Golf
The Trump family also has been a key partner to LIV Golf, the upstart professional golf league financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. In April, for the fourth year in a row, the league is slated to hold one of its tournaments at the Trump National Doral near Miami.
LIV Golf pays the Trump family to host the tournament, which also drives thousands of customers to its restaurants and hotel rooms during the weekend event, scheduled for April of this year. Mr. Trump and his family own more than a dozen golf courses worldwide, all of which benefit from the media attention that the Saudi-backed tournament brings.
Mr. Trump has long sought to attract these kinds of tournaments to his golf courses, but had at least one major event canceled after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Jared Kushner’s investments
The president’s son-in-law, Mr. Kushner, runs a private equity firm called Affinity Partners that has raised $4.5 billion, mostly from sovereign wealth funds of the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, based on relationships he built as an adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term.
Mr. Kushner, who has said he does not plan to return to the White House, also has invested in at least two Israel-based businesses: Phoenix Holdings, an insurance company, and the car leasing division of Shlomo Holdings.
Mr. Kushner’s business partner at Shlomo Holdings is also a partial owner of Israel’s only domestic builder of warships. That puts him in business with executives who are also major shareholders in an Israeli military contractor whose vessels have been used in the war in Gaza, armed with American-made weapons.
It was Mr. Kushner who last year first floated the idea of considering Gaza as a potential real-estate development site. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,” Mr. Kushner said last year during an event sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, suggesting that Israel “move the people out and then clean it up.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, seen from the side, stands at a lectern with a microphone, to speak to reporters.
Speaker Mike Johnson said President Trump’s plan for Gaza had surprised many people but suggested that it had been widely “cheered” around the world.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
President Trump’s proposal that the United States “take over” the Gaza Strip, displace about two million Palestinians and transform the war-torn enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was lauded by some Republicans in Congress on Wednesday. But it appeared to shock others.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday morning, said that the concept had surprised many people but suggested — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that it had been widely “cheered” around the world. Although the idea was swiftly met with rebukes from Arab and European nations, as well as residents of Gaza, Mr. Johnson argued that there was support for it “because that area is so dangerous.”
Mr. Trump made his bombshell statement at the White House on Tuesday, during a visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel — the first world leader the president has invited in his second term. Mr. Johnson noted the distinction offered to the Israeli leader and said it “is more than symbolism, but it is a symbol, and it shows the world that we’re not going to equivocate.”
Within hours, though, top Trump administration officials had begun trying to walk back some of the most explosive elements of Mr. Trump’s proposal, arguing that he had not committed to using American troops or funds for the rebuilding of Gaza, and suggesting that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.
Mr. Johnson, who spoke before the Trump administration’s apparent damage control efforts, defended Mr. Trump’s original comments, urging people to wait until more details emerged before judging the plan.
The speaker accused the Biden administration of appeasing Iran and its proxies — which include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — by encumbering Israel with restrictions and praised Mr. Trump’s new “bold” approach.
He also suggested that people “withhold judgment on all of it” for the time being, promising “more developments” to come. Mr. Johnson is expected to meet with Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday.
But some Republican lawmakers, even as they praised the president, seemed stunned by his proposal, which would appear to violate international law, and questioned its viability.
“Donald Trump is a visionary, a builder,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said. “He sees a beachfront property and has big ideas and floats those ideas.” But, he added, “the impracticality of it, I think, is hard to miss.”
Mr. Cramer noted that the United States had no claim to Gaza but suggested that the president “floats these big ideas” in order “to see what happens and see what shakes out.”
Similarly, Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, struck a conciliatory tone, saying that he understood the sentiments behind the proposal. Gaza has been decimated by more than 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas, a conflict ignited by the Oct. 7, 2023, attack Hamas led on Israel. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Rounds suggested reconstruction would be easier if the two million Palestinians living in Gaza went elsewhere.
“The question is, how do you go about rebuilding a place in the middle of a construction thing?” Mr. Rounds said. “So I understand as a real estate developer, the president saying, if you move them out of the way, we can move and expedite the stuff on it.”
Other Republican lawmakers, when questioned about the plan on Tuesday evening, grimaced about the comments and declined to respond. Those who did speak appeared skeptical, though they maintained a cautious tone and did not outright dismiss the proposal.
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said that he did not “think it’s the best use of United States resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza,” adding that he would prefer that money “be spent in the United States first.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said the plan “might be problematic,” but pledged to “keep an open mind.” He added that the United States would “see what our Arab friends have to say about” the president’s proposal.
Arab Nations
Arab nations swiftly rejected the plan, which would put some of them — notably Gaza’s neighbors Egypt and Jordan — in an impossible position. Egypt and Jordan are among the top recipients of American military aid but dare not risk alienating their populations by appearing complicit in what many see as ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Forcing Gazans out of their homes, many Arabs say, would doom a shared desire for Palestinian statehood and destabilize the entire Middle East in the process.
Democrats in Washington were far less circumspect in their outright rejection of the president’s idea.
“It’s a bizarre fantasy,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia. “It ain’t gonna happen.”
Palestinians in the United States could not believe what they were hearing.
A President Trump proposed an American “takeover” of the Gaza Strip and the removal of its Palestinian population on Tuesday night, a sense of bemused horror took hold in living rooms, dorm lounges and the group chats of Palestinian families across the country.
“Honestly, it was pandemonium,” said Thaer Ahmed, 38, a physician outside Chicago. “Everyone was texting each other. There were mixed emotions — some people thought it was hilarious, some people were furious. But nobody saw this coming.”
Mr. Trump made his proposal during a White House news conference as he stood beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
The idea was met with immediate opposition from world leaders, who called it a breach of international law and a threat to regional stability in the Middle East. On Wednesday, the administration tried to walk back elements of the proposal, saying that Mr. Trump had not committed to sending U.S. troops to Gaza and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.
In interviews, many Palestinian Americans said the idea of expelling millions of people from the Gaza Strip and placing it under American control was horrifying and absurd, and also unsurprising, given the broader context of Middle Eastern history.
“There’s a long list of adjectives we could run through,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington D.C., a think tank, when asked for his thoughts on the proposal. “Outrageous, criminal, harebrained. How much time do you have?”
But he noted that the idea of forcing Palestinians from their homes was in no way new.
“The region has suffered for decades from instability and conflict precisely because of the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948,” said Mr. Munayyer, referring to the expulsion and flight of some 750,000 Palestinians from the land. “That’s not lost on anyone there in the region.”
Just over two weeks ago, Mr. Trump and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were celebrating a long-sought cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel that was negotiated by advisers to both administrations in the closing days of Mr. Biden’s term.
But on Wednesday, all of that seemed very far away. Many Palestinians in the United States said they felt a deep sense of foreboding about the effect Mr. Trump’s comments could have on the fragile peace deal, under which Hamas has released Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Negotiations over the cease-fire’s second phase only began earlier in the day on Tuesday.
And those interviewed said they were shocked by the ways that Mr. Trump’s proposal seemed to rewrite the recent history of the war in Gaza, which began in 2023 after Hamas and other groups killed roughly 1,200 people and took 250 hostages during a surprise attack on Israel.
In the war that followed, Israel displaced almost two million people, destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and killed more than 47,000 people, according to local health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Zahra Sakkejha, 35, a Palestinian Canadian health care worker who lives in Los Angeles, said that it was impossible to overstate how painful it was to hear people in power keep saying that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was simply to remove the Palestinians.
“It just hits the core wound of every Palestinian about the Nakba,” she said, referring to the events of 1948. “We can never be recognized for just wanting to live our life where we are from.”
Her family is from Jaffa, which is now a neighborhood of Tel Aviv. She does peace-building work with Israeli allies through an organization called Standing Together, but said that proposals like Mr. Trump’s made that task harder.
“We’re human beings, we have lives, we have the same hopes and dreams as anyone else,” she said. “So that’s part of the frustration, is that anytime that there’s mention of us as a people, it’s always in the context of either we’re terrorists or we’re a problem. We are like cattle they have to move around.”
Noreen Rashid, 22, of Rockaway, N.J., said she had long feared that the United States or Israel might take over Gaza. The proposal has made her reflect sadly on her last visit to see her relatives there, just one month before the war began.
“I saw the last of it, and the best of it,” she said. “Now I’m thinking about when I have children, and it’s an out-of-body experience to know they will never know Gaza — that it’s all going to be Trump villas.”
Laila Elhaddad, an activist and author who spent part of her childhood in Gaza and now lives in Maryland, said that watching Mr. Trump describe the removal of Palestinians from the “hellhole” of Gaza felt like stepping into “bizarro world.”
“The way Trump was speaking, it was like Palestinians in Gaza existed in a vacuum, when the person responsible for their suffering was standing there smirking to his left,” she said of Mr. Netanyahu. “They were acting like Gaza had the misfortune to be hit by some natural disaster.”
Before Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival, Ms. Elhaddad was part of a legal action by the Center for Constitutional Rights that called on the Justice Department to enforce the I.C.C. arrest warrant issued against the Israeli prime minister in November for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The department did not enforce the warrant, and Ms. Elhaddad said she had not expected it to do so.
“Netanyahu said clearly at the beginning of the war that the goal was to make Gaza uninhabitable, and they destroyed anything that sustains life — the infrastructure, the schools and universities, the fishing fleets,” said Ms. Elhaddad. “So now is Trump proposing that he will finish their plans for them?”
That was also a fear for Taher Herzallah, 35, a graduate student in Minnesota. He said he “almost burst into laughter” when he heard the news of Mr. Trump’s proposal on Tuesday night because, he said, “it’s all one giant absurdity.”
But that sense of ridiculousness was tempered by darker feelings a day later.
Mr. Herzallah said he believed that the proposal amounted to an “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip, where he has already lost 33 family members during the war.
The announcement of the cease-fire provided his relatives with a brief moment of guarded optimism, he said. But that was extinguished on Tuesday.
“I feel a deep sense of dread of what’s to come,” he said. “My family has suffered unimaginable, unimaginable pain.”
Community leaders in Dearborn, Mich., a town whose largely Arab population has made it a frequent bellwether of Arab-American politics and popular opinion, said many residents were in a state of shock after Mr. Trump’s remarks.
But Mohamed Baja, a Trump supporter who works as the chef at a local restaurant, said maybe the president’s proposal had potential. “This violence has been going on for 60 to 70 years,” he said. “So maybe this one time things could work out. Maybe a couple of countries will take” Gaza’s inhabitants.
But, he added, he immigrated to the United States from Lebanon and is not Palestinian.
“It’s up to Gaza, not to me,” he said. “It’s not my land.”
Riyadh Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the U.N., said that Gaza was a precious part of a state of Palestine. “We are not going to leave Gaza,” he told a U.N. committee on safeguarding Palestinian rights. “There is no power on earth that can remove the Palestinian people from our ancestral homeland, including Gaza.”
António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, spoke carefully in his first public comments on President Trump’s Gaza plan, which Trump unveiled shortly after signing an executive order calling for a general review of U.S. funding and involvement in the United Nations.
“In the search for solutions, we must not make the problem worse,” Guterres said at an annual gathering of a U.N. committee that safeguards Palestinian rights. “It is vital to stay true to the bedrock of international law. It is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.” He urged member states to focus efforts on a two-state solution resulting in a sovereign Palestinian nation.
President Trump’s surprise proposal to seize control of Gaza upended decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus over the United States’ role in the region and tested the sprawling coalition that ent Mr. Trump to the White House last fall.
The president’s words — delivered at a 40-minute news conference on Tuesday night with classic Trumpian bombast — exploded the bounds of the country’s debate over one of the world’s most intractable conflicts and immediately set off infighting in both parties.
Already, the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s devastating response in Gaza had propelled the war into the center of the 2024 election, fracturing the Democratic Party and creating improbable new political alliances as some Arab American and Jewish voters shifted to the right.
But a new wave of recriminations arrived on Wednesday, even as skepticism abounded about the president’s far-fetched proposal and as top Trump administration officials walked back elements of the idea. Politicians and activists traded attacks and fought over whether this vision squared with Mr. Trump’s “America First” brand, which has always revolved around his promise to extricate the nation from foreign wars.
From the right, Mr. Trump received perhaps the sharpest Republican pushback of his nascent presidency, which has so far been defined by his party’s complete fealty to him. Some anti-interventionist lawmakers like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky bristled at the idea. More hawkish leaders, like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, suggested that the proposal might simply be a nonstarter.
And on the left, some Democrats criticized the Arab and Muslim Americans, progressives and others who opposed Vice President Kamala Harris in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel — “is this what you wanted?” the argument went — as others vigorously defended that choice.
James Zogby, a member of the Democratic National Committee and a founder of the Arab American Institute, was unsparing toward those who advocated a protest vote.
“There was a need to recognize the danger of Trump and some folks in my community, some hustlers, were deliberately deluding themselves and others into thinking this was actually going to be a protest vote,” Mr. Zogby said. “It was a vote for suicide. They were helping to drive the car off the cliff and taking the community and the country with them.”
But in interviews on Wednesday, several Arab and Muslim American leaders or activists who voted for Mr. Trump stood by him. Some doubted that he would follow through on his Gaza proposal while also crediting him for the recent cease-fire, a product of collaboration between the current and previous administrations.
Mayor Amer Ghalib of Hamtramck, Mich., a Democrat who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, said on Wednesday that he did not believe the United States was prepared to force Palestinians out of Gaza.
“It’s all just talk,” Mr. Ghalib said as he waited for a call from the White House.
And Rabiul Chowdhury, a founder of Muslims for Trump, was willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt, seeing him as a strong negotiator.
“Democrats and extreme left are trying to kind of use this to ignite our community, but we’re not falling for that trap — they’re still the worst in our eyes,” Mr. Chowdhury said. “We are finding our alliances through MAGA folks.”
There are many areas, he added, “where MAGAs and the Muslims align.”
Still others said that as Democrats try to rebuild a winning coalition, they should avoid casting blame for their 2024 defeat and try to win back voters who defected.
“I’m alarmed by the number of Democratic pundits who are going around with an ‘I-told-you-so’ approach to voters and communities who have voted for Democrats for 40 years,” said Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who had urged the party’s primary voters to reject Mr. Biden. “I don’t think condescension and sneering is going to be helpful.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump’s vagueness and malleability on foreign policy have done little to resolve long-running tensions between Republican hawks and isolationists.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the Gaza proposal, promising on social media that “the United States stands ready to lead and Make Gaza Beautiful Again.”
Senator Paul, a longtime opponent of U.S. intervention abroad, disagreed, suggesting that Mr. Trump threatened to break his campaign promises.
“I thought we voted for America First,” Mr. Paul said on X. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers blood.”
The conflict was the latest skirmish in a debate over foreign policy that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Paul have had at least since they ran for president in 2016.
Mr. Trump defeated them both, promising to shake up the Washington establishment on issues including international affairs.
Matt Brooks, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition and a supporter of the administration, argued that Mr. Trump was fulfilling his campaign promises by rejecting what he described as “failed foreign policy.”
“The hallmark of President Trump is he does shatter old norms and existing norms when they don’t work,” Mr. Brooks said. Mr. Trump, he added, “is willing to take the risk.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/05/world/israel-gaza-netanyahu-trump
