The Middle East is holding its breath as diplomats across the Arab world scramble to defuse the political and humanitarian powder keg that is US President Donald Trump’s shocking proposal to relocate Gaza’s 2.2 million residents and repurpose the razed strip as a glitzy Mediterranean “Riviera” resort.
Widely condemned as a colonialist fantasy and a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, Trump’s plan has nevertheless been enthusiastically embraced by Israel’s far-right government. But the international backlash has been swift, with Arab leaders and Middle East experts warning that such a move could plunge the region into chaos.
“The overwhelming majority of Palestinians would likely not choose voluntarily to leave Gaza even if they could,” said Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi. “Many feel they have nothing left to lose now besides their pride, steadfastness, and whatever rubble is left of their homes.”
“Expelling them would be a dirty, excruciating, bloody business, full of insurgency and a non-compliant population,” she told This Week in Asia.
Conventional wisdom among regional analysts is clear: Trump’s proposal is a non-starter. Experts predict fierce Palestinian resistance to any forced relocation, likely triggering yet another blood-soaked military crackdown by Israeli forces.
But the fallout would not stop at Gaza’s borders. Egypt and Jordan, the two countries Trump has identified as potential destinations for displaced Palestinians, have made it clear that hosting millions of Gazan refugees is simply not an option.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, during a February 11 meeting with Trump at the White House, offered to take in 2,000 Palestinian children with cancer for medical treatment – a symbolic gesture of goodwill. Egypt, meanwhile, has reportedly allowed around 15,000 Gazans to cross its border in recent months. But neither nation has agreed to any large-scale relocation plans.
‘Recipe for disaster’
Relocating thousands more Palestinians into Egypt’s neighbouring Sinai peninsula would be “a recipe for disaster”, said Cairo-based analyst Shahira Amin.
Such a move may “spark an uprising” against long-ruling Egyptian President Abdel Fateh el- Sisi and could destabilise his government, said Amin, a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
She said most Egyptians were supportive of the Palestinian cause and would see their mass displacement as “a betrayal on the part of the Sisi regime, should it cave in under US pressure”.
The plan would also risk radicalising refugees and setting the stage for future conflict, jeopardising Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. “If rockets are fired into Israel from Sinai, Israel would certainly retaliate with counter-attacks, dragging Egypt into a war,” Amin said.
That would not bode well for the Gulf monarchies either. “Any scenario in which there is state collapse, chaos, or widespread turmoil in either Egypt or Jordan would pose an enormous threat to the stability and security” of neighbouring Arab states, said Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based risk consultancy.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain had been “very firm in their opposition to Trump’s deranged ethnic-cleansing plan for Gaza”, he added.
Marks agreed that Trump’s presumptuous proposal was seen throughout the Arab world as an “unrealistic ethnic-cleansing fantasy with profoundly disturbing potential”.
“Virtually no issue touches hearts and motivates passions across the Arab world like the plight of Palestinians,” she said.
“That’s especially true now, after so many Arabs throughout the region have spent the past 16 months watching Israel wage what they strongly believe became a genocide against the Palestinian people”.
Jordan and Egypt are both heavily dependent on the US economically and militarily, meaning any threats made by Trump to cut aid would hit hard, Marks said.
“These regimes are damned if they do and if they don’t,” she said, adding that their very survival “could be existentially threatened by opposing or facilitating Trump’s Riviera ethnic-cleansing plan”.
Searching for alternatives
Arab leaders are now racing against the clock to propose a viable alternative. Egypt is set to host an emergency Arab summit early next month to address the crisis, with hopes that a more palatable solution can satisfy Trump’s ambitions, safeguard regional stability – and avoid what by most legal definitions would be a war crime.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” said Barbara Slavin, a distinguished Middle East fellow at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, of the Gaza scheme. She believes that Arab states will “try to cobble together a plan and convince Trump that he can get the credit for it”.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is expected to play a pivotal role, with speculation that he may raise the issue during talks in the country between the US and Russia over a Ukraine war deal.
Slavin floated the possibility of a compromise. “It would have to entail some new and improved, non-Hamas Palestinian technocratic government, Arab peacekeepers, and temporary housing for Palestinians while rubble is cleared,” she said.
Despite publicly backing Trump’s plan, even Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu likely recognises the dangers of implementing it, according to Slavin. “Even Bibi understands that a mass expulsion of Gazans … would be enormously destabilising to Jordan and Egypt and possibly force them to end their peace treaties with Israel”, she said.
If implemented, Trump’s Gaza plan would be a “tremendous propaganda gift to the Iranians”, Slavin said – especially after the string of strategic setbacks Tehran and its “Axis of Resistance” allies have suffered since the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023.
Iran and its Axis partners “are simply too weak” to wage war on the US and Israel over the plan, Slavin said. Attacks by Tehran-allied groups such as the Houthis in Yemen could result, “but it wouldn’t be World War III”.
And though some Israelis “might welcome” the mass expulsion of Palestinians, she said “many would see it as an echo of what happened to so many European Jews in the 1930s”.
The repercussions could reverberate far beyond the region, however. Forcibly expelling Gaza’s population would not only fuel anti-American sentiment, but also embolden terrorist groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and destabilise US allies across the Arab world.
Such groups “have always used catastrophes … like the one we are seeing in Gaza as opportunities to forward their ideological and strategic interests”, said Abdul Basit, a senior associate fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies’ International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore.
Basit predicted that militant groups would seize on the displacement of Palestinians to recruit new members and radicalise a generation of young Muslims – just as with the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this century.
Isis sympathisers have already weaponised Trump’s comments, observers say. “The pro-Isis online sphere was quick to capitalise on the comments and … disseminate propaganda about it,” said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, a British consultancy focused on disrupting online terrorist threats.
The mass displacement of Gazans would not only allow militant groups “to look at this displaced population as a group from where they would like to recruit”, but also paint various Middle Eastern powers as “failed and weak leaders of the Muslim world”, Basit said.
The ripple effects could also reach the West, where heightened polarisation and Islamophobia risk further fracturing Europe’s multicultural societies. Basit said the continent’s rising far-right movements would likely leverage the turmoil to “entrench their anti-minority sentiment” and target Muslims.
A gift to US rivals
Meanwhile, China and Russia are poised to exploit any fallout from Trump’s Gaza gambit. Analysts predict that it would drive Arab states closer to Beijing and Moscow, undermining US influence in the region.
Going ahead with the plan would be “an own-goal of mammoth proportions that would reverberate for a very long time”, Slavin said, describing it as a “massive gift to China”, which could position itself as the sole defender of international law.
After the world has watched Washington’s virtually unconditional support for Israel’s 16-month campaign of destruction in Gaza, forcefully expelling its remaining population, as Trump has proposed, “would only further damage” the international standing of the US, said Cafiero of Gulf State Analytics.
China and Russia are “well positioned to take advantage of such heightened tension”, he said – and more than willing to step into any rift in relations between the US and Arab world.
As Egypt’s emergency summit on March 4 approaches, the world waits to see if Arab leaders can craft a diplomatic lifeline – or whether Trump’s incendiary Gaza scheme will push the Middle East closer to the brink.