TABLET MAG
The End of ‘Palestine’
Lee Smith
February 5, 2025

Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israel officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists and Middle East terror-masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity. Palestine was an misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the UN’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the Eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. READ MORE

FREE PRESS Michael Oren: Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to the Middle East Status Quo A diplomatic coup de main or more Trumpian madness? A strategic move like Trump’s threatened tariffs for Canada and Mexico-or a sincere proposal to take over a strip in the Middle East? Depending on who you ask, President Trump’s pronouncements on the Middle East, made in the presence of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could be described either way. To review his breathtaking remarks: the President of the United States said that his country “will take over the Gaza Strip,” clear rubble and unexploded ordnance, and “develop it” into an Eastern Mediterranean Riviera.

FDD Mark Dubowitz: ‘Outside the Box’: Trump Proposes Permanent Resettlement of Gazans For centuries, millions of people have crossed borders and continents to make a better life for themselves and their children. Yet when President Trump suggests giving the people of Gaza the same opportunity — with the added benefit of international support and aid — it’s widely condemned. What stood out at Trump’s joint press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu was his genuine compassion for the Gazans and his determination to improve their lives through a plan that would permit many of them to return once Gaza is rebuilt. Those who oppose this idea are the same people — the United Nations, the pro-Hamas solidarity movement, and many EU governments — committed to keeping the Palestinians in misery in order to wage a continued war against Israel’s legitimacy that is couched in the language of humanitarianism. Thanks to Trump, that mask has now fallen, and the opportunity to reshape the Middle East’s priorities has arisen.