President Trump’s plan to place Gaza under American occupation and transfer its two million Palestinian residents has delighted the Israeli right, horrified Palestinians, shocked America’s Arab allies and confounded regional analysts who saw it as unworkable.
For some experts, the idea felt so unlikely — would Mr. Trump really risk American troops in another intractable battle against militant Islamists in the Middle East? — that they wondered if it was simply the opening bid in a new round of negotiations over Gaza’s future.
To the Israeli right, Mr. Trump’s plan unraveled decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without the need to create a Palestinian state. In particular, settler leaders hailed it as a route by which they might ultimately resettle Gaza with Jewish civilians — a long-held desire.
To Palestinians, the proposal would constitute ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any displacement they have experienced since 1948, when roughly 800,000 Arabs were expelled or fled during the wars surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.
“Outrageous,” said Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza who was displaced from his home during the war. “Palestinians would rather live in tents next to their destroyed homes rather than relocate to another place.”
“Very important,” wrote Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli lawmaker and settler leader, in a social media post. “The only solution to Gaza is to encourage the migration of Gazans.”
“Comical,” said Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and former Israeli ambassador. “This makes annexing Canada and buying Greenland seem much more practical in comparison.”
While Mr. Trump portrayed the idea as a kindness to Palestinians living in a decimated territory, legal experts said that forced deportation would be a crime against humanity.
Past population transfers on this scale have often exacerbated social and political problems instead of solving them, and caused extreme hardship for the people forced from their homes. The displacement of roughly 20 million people during the partition of India in 1947, for example, had political consequences that lasted for decades and contributed to several conflicts.
But it is the very outlandishness of Mr. Trump’s plan that signaled to some that it was not meant to be taken literally.
Just as Mr. Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he ultimately has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.
In Gaza, Hamas has yet to agree to fully cede power, a position that makes the Israeli government less likely to extend the cease-fire. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia is refusing to normalize ties with Israel, or help with Gaza’s postwar governance, unless Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Trump’s maximalist plans may have been an attempt to get both Hamas and Saudi Arabia to shift their positions, Israeli and Palestinian analysts said.
Faced with a choice between preserving its control over Gaza and maintaining a Palestinian presence there, Hamas might perhaps settle for the latter, according to Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs.
And Saudi Arabia is being prodded to give up its insistence on Palestinian statehood and settle instead for a deal that preserves Palestinians’ right to stay in Gaza but not their right to sovereignty, according to Professor Abusada, the Palestinian political scientist.
Saudi Arabia swiftly rejected Mr. Trump’s plan on Wednesday, issuing a statement that underlined its support for Palestinian statehood. But some still think the Saudi position could change. During Mr. Trump’s previous tenure, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates made a similar compromise when it agreed to normalize ties with Israel in exchange for the postponement of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
“Trump is showing maximum pressure against Hamas to scare them so they make real concessions,” Professor Abusada said. “I also think he is using maximum pressure against the region so they would settle for less in exchange for normalization with Israel. Exactly like what the U.A.E. did.”
In turn, Mr. Trump has given the Israeli right a reason to support an extension of the cease-fire, Israeli analysts said.
For more than a year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing allies have threatened to collapse his coalition if the war ends with Hamas still in power. Now, those hard-liners have an off-ramp — a pledge from Israel’s biggest ally to empty Gaza of Palestinians at some point in the future, an idea that Israel has pushed since the start of the war.
Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said those right-wing leaders would eventually “need to see some evidence that it is actually happening.”
But for now, he added, “They will be more patient.”
Within the Israeli mainstream, however, Mr. Trump’s announcement prompted unease amid concern that it might provoke Hamas into ending the cease-fire early. Relatives of hostages held in Gaza avoided direct criticism of the plan but implored him to focus first on persuading Israel and Hamas to extend the truce.
Others were more explicit about the potential disruption that the move might cause.
Israel Ziv, a former general in the Israeli Army, described the announcement as “a diplomatic terror attack that will push us very far backward.” Mr. Ziv said in a radio interview that the move, if enacted, would anger Israel’s neighbors, who do not want responsibility for such a large and potentially disruptive population.
Previous generations of exiled Palestinian militants used countries like Jordan and Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks on Israel, exacerbating domestic tensions in those countries and leading to damaging Israeli counterattacks.
“We would all be happy to wake up one morning to find that a bad neighbor had moved away,” Mr. Ziv said. “But we’re talking about 2.5 million neighbors. There is no chance at all that they will have any desire to cooperate.”
Regardless of whether Mr. Trump’s plan materializes, there were also misgivings among some Israelis about the general direction that he and Mr. Netanyahu seemed to be nudging the country.
The two leaders oversee administrations that are unusually favorable to the annexation of the West Bank — a move that some fear would undermine Israel’s democracy unless it gave citizenship and the right to vote to Palestinians in the newly annexed areas.
“You’d have to make a choice between demography and democracy,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
“If you don’t give them citizenship, you lose your democracy,” he added. “If you do give them citizenship, you lose the Jewish character of the state.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
