President Trump offers Palestinians a chance for peace and prosperity

Since President Trump’s re-election, we’ve seen the most momentous first two weeks of any presidential tenure. But even by Trump’s standards, this week’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu can’t be considered anything but historic.

In his first term, their discussions produced the lauded Abraham Accords.

This time, President Trump came out and said what no American leader has had the courage to say since the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023: The United States is willing to step up and play a leadership role in the Middle East to prevent such an attack from happening again.

TRUMP'S PROPOSED US TAKEOVER OF GAZA STRIP ELICITS POSITIVE RESPONSE ACROSS ADMINISTRATION

But the only way to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself is by breaking the paradigm of failure that has been repeated for half a century and creating a new mold. President Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu suggests that he intends to do just that.

For those 50 years, America and others have failed due to the insistence that the Palestinians are something they’re not: a nation-state. Without the durable institutions of a state in place, such efforts prove futile at best, a fact evidenced in the long-term inability to achieve the so-called "two-state solution" despite the insistence over generations that it must be so.

Now President Trump is taking a new tack. He recognizes that the situation in Gaza is untenable. In his joint news conference with Netanyahu last night, he announced his intention to initiate a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip, temporarily relocate Palestinians, and develop the war-torn region into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

In doing so, President Trump provided what the international community (and many Americans on the political left) have been clamoring for since the beginning of the war: a plan for the "day after" the war in Gaza. Instead of hysterically rejecting this plan out of hand, the very people who demanded it should either propose one of their own or engage with it.

This proposal reflects Trump’s determination not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Currently, Gaza lacks the institutions to make a two-state solution viable. Pretending that they exist will only lead to failure – which is unacceptable in an area critical to Israel’s security that has already cost American taxpayers many billions of dollars.

President Trump’s position illustrates his understanding of this, as well as his ability to recognize a valuable piece of real estate when he sees one, especially one falling so far below its potential.

Critics are already arguing President Trump’s plan simply parrots talking points out of a right-wing Israeli playbook, and that it marks an "alarming escalation in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."

But this isn’t at all what the president proposed. Rather, his goal is to rebuild Gaza as a place that’s no longer a launching pad for terror attacks – something that will make it a better and safer place for Palestinians to live if they chose to make this their future rather than remain mired by Hamas in perpetual victimhood.

Tellingly, these critics are some of the same people who prophesied a virtual apocalypse when Trump announced the U.S. embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017. With a similar certainty to what they are claiming now, they proclaimed that the move would inflame the Arab street, and Israel’s neighbors would be compelled to attack the Jewish state whether they wanted to or not. Obviously, their claims didn’t hold true then, and there’s no reason to assume they will now.

Nor, in that case, did President Trump’s decision prove to be mere talking points from the Israeli far right. Rather, the clarity the move brought to the region about the U.S. position secured peace in Jerusalem, on the way to the broader peace of the Abraham accords.

Today, President Trump extends that pattern further by offering Palestinians what he has always offered: peace through prosperity. It's theirs to take.

Victoria Coates is vice president for foreign policy and national defense at The Heritage Foundation.