President Donald Trump will apply pressure on Gulf states to bankroll the US’s takeover of the Gaza Strip amid frustration among advisors that the oil-rich allies haven’t coalesced behind the deal or made a counter-offer, a senior US official told Middle East Eye.
“The message is, ‘you don’t get what you want any longer from the US just for free’,” the official said on Wednesday.
The Trump administration’s plans for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE to obtain waterfront property rights in a reconstructed Gaza Strip and for their construction firms to be awarded contracts to build apartment towers there would be in return for funding the “relocation” of Palestinians and Gaza’s reconstruction, the official, who was briefed by one of a handful of Trump advisors consulted on the plan, told MEE.
However, it is no small matter that international law dictates those territorial rights, and the US does not control the property rights for Gaza’s waterfront or its maritime boundaries.
Trump’s press conference on Tuesday, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stunned allies and foes alike, including ordinary Americans.
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The world was left guessing whether or not a president who campaigned on ending foreign American entanglements was serious about taking over Gaza or merely setting himself up for negotiation with Gulf states for the enclave’s postwar future and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, normalisation of ties with Israel.
Trump has been calling for weeks for neighbouring Arab states, Jordan and Egypt, to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. His own State Department has warned him that Egypt will not be swayed.
Likewise, Saudi Arabia has struck a hard public line on what it would take to get them to provide funds for Gaza’s reconstruction.
Asked in an interview in January if Saudi Arabia would fund Gaza’s reconstruction, Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UK, said, “To reconstruct a Palestinian state, yes. To reconstruct a territory that the Israelis might just destroy again in a matter of years, I don’t think that would be a sensible thing to do.”
Real believers
Trump said on Tuesday that after emptying Gaza of Palestinians and taking a “long-term ownership position” of the territory, the US would turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
“This might lead to a negotiation, but I take Trump seriously. He and his people really believe this is the best path forward. I’m not surprised they are upset the Gulf is not on board,” Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior US intelligence official now at the Atlantic Council, told MEE.
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But it may be the cold shoulder it received from the US’s Arab Gulf partners that is grating the White House the most. Trump insisted on Tuesday that his vision would be “paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth”.
Emirati analyst Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, who has close ties to the UAE’s ruling Nahyan family, wrote on X, “We have just heard the most stupid idea come out of Washington DC regarding Gaza”, after Trump’s speech.
The plan was shot down by Saudi Arabia, which rushed out a statement early on Wednesday morning that rejected any efforts to displace Palestinians from their land. It also upped Saudi Arabia’s demand that an independent Palestinian state be created before it normalises diplomatic relations with Israel.
Shock therapy?
The language, which said the Saudi position was nonnegotiable, marked a step up from previous statements that called for a pathway to a Palestinian state as a prerequisite to a deal.
“The Gulf isn’t pumping any cash into the Gaza Strip in the absence of a serious conversation on a two-state solution and, secondly, the fate of the current ceasefire,” Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration, told MEE.
“Shooting off statements alongside Bibi Netanyahu is not the best way to conduct diplomacy towards Riyadh and Abu Dhabi,” he added.
Anna Jacobs, a Middle East expert at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC, said that Gulf states had made it “crystal clear” to Trump that his statements on Gaza were a non-starter. “They are not going to pay for the forced displacement of Palestinians,” she said.
The outpouring of criticism included the Arab League, which called Trump’s proposal a “recipe for instability”.
The US president’s advisors spent Wednesday walking back some of his more stunning statements.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump’s speech “was not meant as hostile”, describing it as a “generous move – the offer to rebuild and to be in charge of the rebuilding”. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Palestinians would only be “temporarily relocated” from the enclave and that Trump did not commit to deploying American troops.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said that, far from moving the needle in negotiations with the Gulf states about funding Gaza’s reconstruction, Trump may have caused them to harden their positions.
“If the idea was to shock the Gulf into action, I think it backfired,” he told MEE. “Trump may think he created space to make concessions, but he made it harder for regional leaders to make a deal”.
