When President Donald Trump brokered a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas in late September, the American president was heralded, even by some leading Democrats, for his peacemaking. Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset speaker Amir Ohana said they would jointly nominate Trump for his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
The unveiling of Trump’s relatively sober twenty-point peace plan for Gaza appeared to mark a sharp turn from how the president was thinking about Gaza less than eight months prior, when he announced at a White House press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would take control of the Gaza Strip, occupy it, and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” — a possibility that, in Trump’s words, could be “so magnificent.” Shortly after the press conference, Trump shared a bizarre AI-generated video of a rebuilt Gaza on social media complete with belly dancers, Elon Musk throwing fistfuls of bills into the air, and Trump and Netanyahu lying shirtless on beach chairs.
Trump’s ambition to turn Gaza into a resortland was incorporated in a broader plan for the region’s future that came under discussion in Washington at the end of the summer. The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, was the Trump administration’s first major proposal for bringing peace to Gaza. Its logic remains operative in the current peace plan.
The GREAT Trust plan was remarkable for its bluntness: it proposed relocating a quarter of the existing population of Gaza to neighboring countries for the duration of the rebuilding process and shunting the rest of the population into temporary, restricted accommodations in the strip. That done, the United States would assume control of Gaza for a period of ten years and oversee the transformation of the devastated home of more than two million Palestinians into “a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and…
Auteur: Abe Asher
