What’s Behind Trump’s Transfer Rhetoric?

Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud) has announced the establishment of a new directorate in his ministry tasked with assisting Palestinians who wish to voluntarily leave Gaza.

This move is an obvious reaction to US President Donald Trump’s recent statements calling for the transfer of all Gazan Palestinians and the transformation of the territory into an American-owned “Riviera.”

The new directorate is expected to include representatives from various ministries and security bodies.

“The plan includes extensive assistance that will allow any Gaza resident who wants to emigrate to a third state, to receive support that includes special departure arrangements through the sea, air, and land, among other things,” Katz’s office said following a meeting on Monday.

In early February, Katz had ordered the IDF to formulate a plan for helping Palestinians to leave Gaza and said that he welcomed “Trump’s bold plan, which could allow a large portion of Gaza’s population to relocate to various places around the world.”

But Katz would be well advised to pump the brakes.

While it’s certainly possible that Trump genuinely intends to remove the Palestinian population from Gaza, it’s far more likely that the president’s statements were intended to achieve other objectives.

If we analyze Trump’s declaration about taking control over Gaza alongside similar threats regarding Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada, it seems likely that these are all part of a strategy to “make American great again” on the international stage.

It could be that Trump has moved passed the denial stage in relation to the US empire’s waning power and prestige around the world. Confronting America’s historic decline, the president may be in damage control mode and is therefore using naked imperialist rhetoric to create the impression in people’s minds that Uncle Sam is still the global hegemon that can push its weight around unchallenged in a unipolar world.

But the very fact that a US president feels a need to remind the world of Washington’s power in such a crude and thuggish manner already indicates that said power is rapidly decreasing.

Another potential reason for Trump’s contentious Gaza statements could be to light a fire under Arab states to step up and take responsibility for Gaza.

The Biden administration failed to gain commitments from friendly actors in West Asia to invest money and soldiers to rebuild Gaza and prop up the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority as the strip’s new post-war rulers. But if Trump appears to be moving towards a solution so abhorrent to the Saudi, Qatari, Egyptian, and Jordanian regimes, it could motivate Arab leaders to get serious about an alternative solution where they play an active role in facilitating the establishment of a PA government in Gaza.

A related possibility might be Trump’s desire to place a policy on the table that could motivate Saudi Arabia to sign a normalization agreement with Israel.

If the Saudis have the ability to tell their critics that their deal with Israel put a stop to the transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza – as the UAE successfully claimed in regards to the Abraham Accords stopping an Israeli annexation of the West Bank – it could make formal diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem acceptable enough for the Saudis to avoid whatever domestic or regional headaches might otherwise accompany a normalization deal with Israel.

Shifting focus to domestic Israeli politics, it could be that a potential motivation behind Trump’s Gaza announcement was an attempt to neutralize hardline coalition members (and former coalition members) from destabilizing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government before the full implementation of the ceasefire/hostage deal forced on Netanyahu by Trump and Steve Witkoff last month.

If Itamar Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit) could be convinced that the transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza is really on the table, he might rejoin the coalition and hold his nose while the ceasefire/hostage deal reaches its second and third phases.

Yet another plausible scenario is that Trump is deliberately trying to make Netanyahu look weak in order to destroy his credibility with his own political base and coalition partners. Trump has openly blamed Netanyahu for thwarting his two-state “Deal of the Century” in 2020 and may be gunning to replace the prime minister with an Israeli leader more open to territorial compromise (Trump has already made clear his preference for Benny Gantz).

We shouldn’t put it past the president to make bombastic statements about transferring Palestinians and wiping out Gaza while quietly ordering Netanyahu to stand down and continue moving forward with the ceasefire. This would create the impression that Netanyahu has an American green light to carry out far right policies but is faltering because he lacks either the courage or the will to pursue them.

Most Jewish nationalists regrettably lack the political intelligence to see through such an American tactic.

While it’s difficult to know at this point what Trump is really planning, any combination of the above five scenarios is more likely than an American occupation of Gaza or the mass transfer of millions of Palestinians from the strip (and we should oppose US rule over parts of our land no less than we would Greek, Roman, British, or Arab rule).

It’s also worth mentioning that the impact of Trump’s transfer rhetoric on Israeli society has been to legitimize the notion of transfer as a realistic and morally acceptable policy option in the minds of most Israelis – including government ministers like Yisrael Katz. While many Jews might have secretly fantasized about removing the Palestinian population in the past, they now feel free to openly discuss the idea.

The fact that all it takes is lip service from a US president to transform a policy from being beyond the pale of acceptable positions to being included in the public discourse exposes the extent of our people’s mental subjugation and the need for real psychological liberation.