Feb. 5: Gaza-a-Lago

Mixed messages on Iran; CIA offers buyouts; Is Politico a government op?

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The Big Story

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order reinstating “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, and he also withdrew the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council and cut funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. All that news was dwarfed, however, by a proposal the president made in a psychedelic Tuesday evening press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, illustrated below:

That’s Gaza, and we’re only slightly joking. On Tuesday, Trump, who has repeatedly indicated his desire to resettle Gazans throughout the Middle East, dropped a diplomatic bomb. The United States, he said, intended to “take over” and assume a “long-term ownership position” in the Gaza Strip, relocate “all” of the 1.7 million people living there to “areas where they can live a beautiful life,” develop the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” and resettle it with “world people.” As the president explained:

We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different.

Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for years.

Trump returned to this idea of doing “something different” several times throughout the press conference:

I think it’s very important. It just doesn’t work the other way. You can’t keep trying. They just—[it] has been going along for so many decades you can’t even count. You just can’t keep doing—you have to learn from history.

You can’t keep doing the same mistake over and over again. Gaza is a hellhole right now. It was before the bombing started, frankly.

If you have some time, we’d encourage you to just watch the whole thing here:

Whether we should take Trump’s proposal to “take over” Gaza and remove the population literally, or merely seriously (i.e., as some sort of five-dimensional-chess negotiating gambit), is anyone’s guess. Several of his surrogates, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, have indicated the latter. On Wednesday, for instance, Waltz said in a CBS interview that Trump’s proposals would encourage others in the region to “come with their own solutions,” and Rubio said that the president was merely offering to “clear the place up from all the destruction” so that “then the people can move back in.” That sounds all nice and respectable, but it is not what the president said.

Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, on the other hand, gave a more full-throated endorsement to the Trump proposal in a Tuesday evening interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. “Peace in the region means a better life for the Palestinians,” Witkoff explained. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you’re in today.” And The Wall Street Journal noted in a Wednesday article that Trump has long toyed with real-estate development as a solution to the world’s hot spots. From the article:

In late summer, Trump told Netanyahu in a phone call that the Gaza Strip was a prime piece of real estate and asked him to think about what kinds of hotels could be built there, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. But he didn’t mention the U.S. taking it over. He also told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this fall that Ukraine would be a good spot for real-estate development, particularly mentioning the city of Odesa, a person present during the discussion said.

Trump made a similar case to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his first term, hoping the allure of hotels and development along the country’s coastlines would encourage Kim to dismantle his nuclear arsenal.

Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband (remember him?), has also publicly mused about the potential value of Gaza real estate, so we’re inclined to think that the president simply means what he says. At the same time, everything with him is an opening offer.

Absent more details, it’s hard to say for sure whether the plan is brilliant or insane. We certainly don’t want to see U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza, and the last thing Washington (or Israel) needs is even more U.S. responsibility for governing a fractious and violent buffer zone wedged between its principal regional ally and its largest Arab client. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “the president did not commit to sending troops to Gaza”—but he also explicitly did not rule it out, and here again we have the problem of whether aides’ comments really reflect the president’s thinking. But as Elder of Ziyon notes on her blog, Trump has typically been reluctant to deploy U.S. troops in service of “foreign adventures,” so he may intend to delegate the “clearing out” part of the plan either to Arab states or (more likely) to the Israelis, with Washington in the role of “owning” the territory at arms’ length. At any rate, the Israelis would be fools not to offer to do whatever they can to help the Americans with resettlement.

Elder of Ziyon makes another important observation, similar to one made by Tablet’s Lee Smith on X: “The Palestinian Authority is utterly absent from this vision. So is Palestinian rule.” In other words, whether or not Gaza-a-Lago is a good idea, the president’s new position represents a decisive break from the conventional “peace process” and “two-state solution” thinking beloved by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment over the past three decades. That process was mostly dead before Oct. 7, and Hamas’ pogrom made it even deader.

In that respect, at least, Trump’s proposal has the considerable virtue of acknowledging reality, which is that Gaza cannot go back to the way it was before.

Read more in Lee Smith’s article in THE BACK PAGES, “The End of ‘Palestine’”

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The Rest

→While offering the Israelis the prospect of solving their Gaza problem and pledging to increase financial pressure on Iran, Trump appears to be signaling that he would like the option of military action against Iran taken off the table—at least for now:

As we noted yesterday, Trump has repeatedly indicated his interest in diplomacy with Iran while also stating his intention to be “tough” to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon. But though Trump has stressed the nuclear element, the text of his Tuesday executive order had a much broader scope than what he’s indicated in his fairly dovish public comments. Here’s an excerpt from the order (again, hat tip to Elder of Ziyon):

It is the policy of the United States that Iran be denied a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles; that Iran’s network and campaign of regional aggression be neutralized; that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and its surrogates be disrupted, degraded, or denied access to the resources that sustain their destabilizing activities; and to counter Iran’s aggressive development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities.

→The Central Intelligence Agency “offered buyouts to its entire workforce on Tuesday,” giving agency employees the option to quit and receive eight months of pay and benefits, The Wall Street Journal reports. The buyouts, which mirror those already extended to other federal employees, are intended both to downsize the federal government and to “signal to those [in the CIA] opposed to Trump’s agenda to find work elsewhere,” per the report. Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe, promised in his confirmation hearings to “launch more hard-edged spying operations and covert actions” targeting China and drug cartels and requested that the buyout package be extended to the CIA in the hopes that it would “pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency.” So far, however, interest in the buyout appears to be “low,” according to one CIA “career coach” quoted in the story.

→On Tuesday, Semafor’s Maxwell Tani reported that Politico failed to pay its staff for the most recent pay period due to what the company described as a “technical error,” which was apparently resolved by the end of the day. The timing of the error—coming as it did alongside the suspension of U.S. Agency for International Development funding—led social media users to start digging around on the U.S. government’s spending database, where they discovered that the government had paid more than $8 million to Politico in 2024, including money from USAID. The payment glitch and the government funding suspension, however, appear to be unrelated.

This revelation was nonetheless the cause of a great deal of excitement on X. For instance:

But the story here is not quite that simple. USAID’s “funding” for Politico was a minuscule $44,000, less than the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ($62,212), and most of the government payments to the company came in the form of subscriptions to Politico Pro, a premium “policy intelligence platform” that pitches itself as a “Bloomberg for politics” and charges about $10,000 per year for a subscription. We don’t know Politico’s current revenues, but according to the Financial Times, when Axel Springer purchased the publication for $1 billion in 2021, its annual revenues stood at $200 million, about half of which (so $100 million a year) came from Politico Pro.

So the strong version of the scandal—that the U.S. government is “funding” Politico to spread propaganda—is likely bogus. But it’s still worth noting that Politico was raking in millions of dollars in sales from the federal government while reporting on that government. And even though Politico Pro has been around since 2011, government payments to the company remained below $1.5 million per year until 2020 and then rapidly rose under the Biden administration, topping out at more than $8 million last year. That was, of course, after government insiders during Trump’s first term used Politico as one of the primary platforms for laundering their various information operations, including the infamous letter from 51 former intelligence officials about Hunter Biden’s laptop and a bizarre story attempting to connect Trump’s first national security advisor, Gen. Mike Flynn, to Russia through Turkish intermediaries, which Armin Rosen covered in depth for Tablet here.

→Stat of the Day: 10%

That’s about the share of U.S. nonprofits that receive more than half of their funding from state, local, and federal governments, or about 35,000 total, according to a Tuesday report in The New York Times on the organizations reeling from Trump’s attempt last week (later blocked by a court and rescinded) to freeze all federal grant funding. The organizations profiled in the Times were all engaged in a benign form of social work—caring for people with disabilities, helping incarcerated people stay in touch with their children, that sort of thing—so we’re not tap-dancing over their sudden financial uncertainty. But the stat is a nice reminder that a decent percentage of “nongovernmental organizations” are, in reality, de facto extensions of government.

→Wouldn’t that be terrible?

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The End of ‘Palestine’

Donald Trump reminds the world that ideas have sell-by dates

by Lee Smith

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. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always pre-disposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.

What if they won’t go, or if the Egyptians and Jordanians won’t take them? They’ll take them, said Trump. Ah, he’s talking big but it’s not real, say the experts—after all, he’s a real estate guy, and he’s pretending it’s just another property deal to pressure Hamas—Mar-a-Gaza. You can’t move a million people just like that, says an American electorate that elected Trump because he promised to deport tens of millions of illegal aliens who crossed the U.S. border in the last four years. He’s nuts says the D.C. foreign policy crowd: He’ll destabilize Egypt and Jordan, and undermine America’s best Arab friends and allies in the region.

Yet Trump is right to see both Egypt and Jordan as paltry constructions with little-to-no ability to project force on America’s behalf, and whose survival depends month to month on American aid. Cairo is useful to the United States only insofar as it, one, makes sure the Suez Canal is open and, two, observes the peace treaty with Israel—i.e., continues its campaign of repression against a populace of 112 million people who can barely afford to buy bread, and many of whose dreams are filled with the same insanity that drives Hamas. The only antidote to this misery that Egypt’s rulers have found is blaming the Zionists next door for the ills of their own society, while torturing religious extremists in their prisons. Maybe when Elon Musk is finished fixing Washington he can conduct an audit of where American money goes in Egypt. Somehow, I doubt he’d get in the door.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s problem is that he allowed Hamas to smuggle arms through the Philadelphi crossing into Gaza, thereby violating Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel—which is what we nominally pay him for. From the perspective of Trump, an American president keen to enforce treaty obligations, Sisi has a new chance to prove himself as a friend of America and not a grafting liar by adding a million Gazans—who in the past have been ruled by Egypt and have family names like al-Masri (“the Egyptian”)—to Egypt’s existing population of 112 million, amounting percentage-wise to roughly the same number of legal immigrants that the United States accepts per year. Sisi can deal with the Hamas members among the Gazan immigrants the same way he deals with Muslim Brotherhood militants in his own society—or he can give them all medals for their service. It’s up to him.

And if not? Well, he might remember that Hosni Mubarak’s regime collapsed not because of Muslim Brotherhood-led street protests during the 2011 Arab Spring but because Barack Obama withdrew his support from the longtime U.S. ally.

With money from the Gulf states, or even Israel, Sisi can afford to absorb Palestinians and might even volunteer to take all of Gaza—the average salary in Egypt at present being the equivalent of $5,000 per year. He can then leave Jordan’s King Abdullah responsible for the rest of the Palestinians in the likely event that Trump, as he did in his first term, encourages Netanyahu to annex the Jordan Valley, or goes a step further and acknowledges Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

Since the CIA has long treated the Hashemite Kingdom as a key asset, we can expect within the next week The Washington Post’s David Ignatius to publish an article based on intelligence sources—i.e., U.S. and Jordanian spies—concocting a story about Trump’s rationale for “destabilizing Jordan.” The reality is that the Jordanians, with U.S. help, put down a Palestinian rebellion in 1970. The country of a little more than 11 million is already estimated to be two-thirds Palestinian, the rest Jordanian tribesmen, and it’s hard to see how adding another 500,000 Palestinians will make it harder for Jordan’s notoriously effective security services to contain their neighbors, especially if the offer includes a few dozen more Black Hawk helicopters. After all, no one will expect the Jordanians to allow Hamas to build a giant tunnel-city stuffed with rocket factories beneath their encampments while giving them billions in foreign aid to pay for it all.

Again, the key players here aren’t Jordan and Egypt but the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council states, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and of course Qatar. Trump might make Saudi largesse in resettling the Gazans a pre-condition for the much-hyped prospect of normalizing relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. Given the fact that Israel regularly attracts nine- and ten-figure investments from Silicon Valley’s biggest funds, the reality is that the Saudis have little to offer Israel except for money applied to exactly this type of local purpose. Moving millions of Gazans who have repeatedly attacked their Israeli neighbors out of what is now a shattered war zone is a sensible investment in the kind of stability that helps rich people get richer.

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The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.

After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? 15 years? 20? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?

Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand-castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s ceasefire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.

The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American President.

Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.

Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American President, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.