Trump’s Gaza Takeover Plan May Sound Death Knell for the Two-State Solution

For decades, successive presidents in Washington have favored some version of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What no one imagined until now was that the second state would be American, not Palestinian.

President Trump’s stunning plan to displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and have the United States take over the seaside enclave has not only convulsed the Middle East. It may have also all but written the obituary for the long-sought but maddeningly elusive goal of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in peaceful coexistence.

Any vision of a Palestinian state has included Gaza as an integral part of it, along with the West Bank. In Mr. Trump’s vision, however, Gaza would become a U.S. territory transformed into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” It would not belong to the Palestinians anymore but would be open to anyone who wanted to live there. And for that matter, he signaled openness to Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, promising to reveal his position within four weeks.

The prospects for a Palestinian state had already dwindled in recent years, especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people and led to the Israeli retaliatory war in Gaza that has killed 47,000 combatants and civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian populations see the two-state scenario as a viable plan anymore, according to polls.

But the rest of the world, led until now by the United States, has continued to cling to the idea as official policy, if for no other reason than a lack of alternatives. And Saudi Arabia has insisted that a Palestinian state has to be part of any deal establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, a goal avidly pursued by both Mr. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“If Trump thinks that somehow the U.S. owning Gaza and allowing Israel to annex parts of the West Bank facilitates a deal, he’s completely wrong about that,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal, pro-Israel, Washington-based organization that promotes a negotiated peace in the Middle East. “There’s no way forward to a deal.”

But opponents of a Palestinian state feel emboldened at this point. While few took Mr. Biden’s continued insistence on the two-state solution all that seriously, they feel confident that Mr. Trump’s return to power means that there will never be a Palestinian state.

“It’s a dead issue,” said Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, which opposes the two-state solution. “I think most people think it’s a dead issue.” He added: “They had a state in Gaza. How did that work?”

Mr. Trump has long cast himself as the one person who could bring peace to the Middle East — just Thursday, he told an audience at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to be remembered as “a peacemaker” — but he has never achieved his own aspiration. When he took office in 2017, he took on the mission of finally resolving the generations-old conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, boldly predicting that it would be “not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”

But it turned out to be just as difficult as people have thought over the years. He assigned his son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a plan that was released in 2020 that envisioned a Palestinian state of sorts, but one so truncated that the proposal was widely seen as tilted toward Israel. Under the plan, Israel would have been allowed to keep its settlements in the West Bank and full control of a unified Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians would have been offered $50 billion in international investment.

The plan went nowhere, but Mr. Trump was able to score a consolation prize by presiding over the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, in what was called the Abraham Accords.

Saudi Arabia declined to join at the time, but Mr. Biden came close to securing a deal until the Oct. 7 attack blew up the negotiations. Now back in office, Mr. Trump hopes to finalize such an agreement, which would help transform the region.

But he has made no recommitment to a two-state solution since returning to power and his newly designated ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, all but ruled it out. “I’d be very surprised if he comes and says, ‘Let’s go out there and get a two-state solution,’” Mr. Huckabee said last month in an interview with Ami Magazine, a Jewish magazine based in New York.

Mr. Trump remained ambiguous about that this week. When he announced his plan to take “ownership” over Gaza at a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he was asked if that meant he no longer supported the two-state solution. “It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or a one-state or any other state,” he replied. “It means that we want to have — we want to give people a chance at life.”

Asked about that the next day on CBS News, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz said, “I certainly didn’t hear the president say it was the end of the two-state solution.” But neither he nor any other administration officials have explained how taking Gaza away from the Palestinians could be reconciled with establishing a state that would be acceptable to them.

The reaction to Mr. Trump’s Gaza plan was broadly negative outside Israel. In the past couple of days, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, as well as leaders from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Turkey, Canada, Japan, the European Union and others all restated support for the two-state solution. “There is only one solution and that is a two-state solution,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen of Denmark told Danish media.

But at some point, that came across more as a diplomatic ritual of talking points than a realistic agenda. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, the notion of two states living side by side in peace has lost the broad support it once had.

In Israel, just 27 percent of people still backed a two-state solution in Gallup polling last summer, while 64 percent opposed it. That was a reversal from 2012, when 61 percent supported it and just 30 percent opposed it.

And that was almost identical to the views of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where just 28 percent of those interviewed last summer supported such a plan, while 64 percent opposed it. That too represented a radical drop in enthusiasm from 2012, when 66 percent in those areas supported it compared with 32 percent who did not.

Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said that the two-state solution as long conceived was dead.

“There is no way to rebuild Gaza,” he told Al Arabiya television. “The West Bank is another political issue to be discussed. But in Gaza, I don’t see two million Palestinians living in less than 400 square kilometers in which 80 percent of the buildings have been destroyed.”

Elliott Abrams, who has advised multiple Republican presidents on the Middle East, including Mr. Trump during his first term, said the reality is that a two-state solution has not been viable for quite some time even if world leaders refuse to accept that. While the president’s Gaza takeover plan may itself be untenable, Mr. Abrams said it focused on the plight of Palestinians living in an area devastated by war rather than lines on a map.

“Trump’s plan changed the subject from politics to what happens to the people,” Mr. Abrams said. “He spoke about how Gazans live now, and could live so much better in the future, and he did not demonize Gazans. So his plan is a reminder that the two-state solution is just foreign ministers shouting at each other, and it’s no solution at all.”

From the other side of the debate, Mr. Ben-Ami agreed that Mr. Trump had a point. “There is an element of truth underneath all this, which is that it’s really hard to conceive how you would rebuild with two million people still there,” he said.

He also agreed that “the concept of an old-fashioned two-state solution has actually been gone for a while.” But he held out hope that it would still be part of a broader, regionwide change driven by Arab rapprochement with Israel, led by Saudi Arabia. “It’s going to have to be part of that normalization deal,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. “We’ve been referring to it as a 23-state solution.”