Trump Plan ‘Shook System’ of Arab Views on Gaza, Former IDF General Says

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza has “shaken the entire system” of regional thinking on how to approach the Palestinians, a former general in the Israel Defense Forces said on Thursday.

Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Effie Defrin told reporters at an event hosted by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) that Trump’s plan to rebuild Gaza while Palestinians are housed in third countries has scrambled the approach of Arab leaders throughout the region.

“He actually shook the system. He shook the box,” Defrin said. “The entire region is shaken now, and it’s good. It’s good for the cause. Because for more than seven decades, eight decades, we have repeated the same mistakes and same solutions to the old problem without any progress.”

One sign of how far the acceptable range of discourse on Gaza has shifted since Trump took office came at the UAE-hosted World Government Summit in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday when Yousef Al Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, said that he does not see any alternative to Trump’s plan.

“I don’t see an alternative to what’s being proposed. I really don’t,” the Arab diplomat said. “So if someone has one, we’re happy to discuss it, we’re happy to explore it, but it hasn’t surfaced yet.”

Defrin described how different Arab states have reacted to the potentially explosive political fallout from a plan for the United States to “own” territory they have long insisted should be part of a future Palestinian state.

“The Jordanians are trying to walk in between the raindrops without getting wet,” Defrin said.

During his visit to Washington on Tuesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II demurred on the Trump plan, saying that it was premature to endorse any plan before the Arab countries agreed to a forthcoming, Egyptian-led counter-proposal.

“We will be in Saudi Arabia to discuss how we can work with the president and with the United States,” Abdullah said. “Let’s wait until the Egyptians can come and present it to the president, and not get ahead of ourselves.”

The Egyptians are likely to be much more “blunt” about insisting that the Palestinians of Gaza remain within the coastal enclave with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi saying “from day one” that Egypt “won’t accept even one Palestinian refugee,” according to Defrin.

“They love the Gazans so much, they built a very nice concrete wall, six meters high, right behind our fence—between the fence between Gaza and Egypt,” he said.

Questions about the future of Gaza hinge on whether Hamas releases the three hostages scheduled to be exchanged on Saturday under phase one of the ceasefire plan and whether they release the remaining 14 phase-one hostages over the course of the following week, according to the terms of the negotiations.

Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Yaakov Amidror, speaking at the same JINSA event on Thursday, said that should the ceasefire collapse, the resumption of the war in Gaza would look nothing like the previous rounds of fighting.

“It would be all out,” said Amidror, who served as Israeli national security advisor from 2011 to 2013. “There would be much less constraint than in the past.”

Amidror said he believed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have to balance the demands of the Israeli public with what is possible within his governing coalition in negotiating phase two of the ceasefire with Hamas and the release of more hostages.

“The prime minister will have to find a fine line,” Amidror said. Some “65% to 75% of Israelis from all aspects of the political spectrum believe that we should continue negotiations.”

“I think it is more about what the prime minister can do within its own coalition, in which there is a strong wing declaring that they will not allow any negotiations about a second [phase],” he added.

Originally published by JNS.