Last week, Trump shockingly claimed that the U.S. would take “long-term ownership” of a depopulated Gaza Strip and transform it into a new Riviera.
Despite widespread condemnation for issuing a proposal “tantamount to ethnic cleansing,” in the words of a UN representative, the president has since doubled down, claiming that no U.S. troops would be needed because the two million Palestinians in Gaza would voluntarily depart.
In the spirit of taking President Trump seriously but not literally, let’s all concede that voluntary Palestinian resettlement is a fantasy. Gaza’s inhabitants are neither going to leave willingly nor magically disappear—not that the U.S. should want them to.
So forget Trump’s literal rhetoric and consider what he is seriously proposing: forced resettlement carried out by U.S. or Israeli military operations, which would surely encounter fierce resistance from Hamas.
In other words, the U.S. would fight another major insurgency in the Middle East. It would be the battle of Fallujah on steroids. The Gazan population is six times greater than that Iraqi city was in 2004, when coalition forces subdued it during the worst urban warfare of the Iraq war.
The Iraq war looms large as an example in more ways than one.
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