Hosting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House on 4 February, President Trump proposed that Gaza’s two million Palestinians should be relocated to countries like Egypt and Jordan. The devastated seaside enclave can then be cleared of unexploded munitions, cleaned up and rebuilt to ‘end the bloodshed and killing once and for all’. The ‘symbol of death and destruction for so many decades’ and ‘a hellhole for people living there’, could become ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’. Left unclear was whether the depopulation would be temporary or permanent and if the US would take it over backed by troops. Trump’s comments drew immediate opposition from Hamas, Arab states and several US allies. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the search for solutions in Gaza must abide by international law and avoid ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Perhaps Trump was just musing out loud a real estate developer’s visions of converting ‘a pure demolition site’ into luxury seafront apartments, echoing speculative comments a year ago from son-in-law Jared Kushner. Maybe Netanyahu had communicated the views of hawkish cabinet colleagues to resettle Gaza with Israelis. Or Trump was flush with triumph at the success of coercive threats against Panama, Mexico and Canada to gain concessions to US demands. Was it driven by humanitarian considerations, economic development opportunities or a bold move on the region’s geopolitical chessboard? Regardless of motives and whether serious or spurious, the relocation plan will have real-world consequences owing to the sheer geopolitical weight of the US in world affairs. Forcible relocation will not happen and is unlikely to be attempted. But Israel’s army has already been tasked to prepare a plan to facilitate any residents who wish to leave Gaza to do so.

Palestinians are unique in the fetishisation of their refugees, sanctified by the creation of Unrwa as a humanitarian relief delivery organisation solely for Palestinians. No other refugee crisis has festered like this for decades. The India-Pakistan partition riots in 1947 killed one to two million people and produced a flood of 15 million Hindu, Sikh and Muslim refugees which, scaled to present populations, would be 60 million today. Another ten million fled East Pakistan for India in 1971. Nearly a million Jewish refugees were successfully resettled in Israel after its establishment in 1948. Yet the problem of Palestinian refugees has only become worse.

Einstein’s apocryphal definition of insanity was to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. All existing approaches to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict are stale and exhausted. Who gets excited any more over yet another roadmap that gets trapped in the doom loop of war, ceasefire, humanitarian relief and reconstruction aid? Trump is bold, audacious and willing to try something out of the box that’s actually anchored in the immutable realities of Palestinian rejectionism, Hamas terror and the existence of Israel. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot, the two-state solution expired a long time ago. In yet another departure from the interminable diplomatic holding pattern, Trump broke from the linkage between Palestinian statehood and Arab-Israeli normalisation. Funding to Unrwa has been cut, sanctions imposed on the ICC for its ‘illegitimate’ targeting of Israel and the US has withdrawn from the Human Rights Council and the World Health Organisation.

US politics has become sclerotic and dysfunctional in part because attempts to govern are suffocated by red tape, green tape, complex and extensive regulations and activist lawyers and judges on a mission to frustrate government initiatives, even if they have a solid electoral mandate. Learning from earlier mistakes when the Washington blob thwarted his ambitious agenda, Trump’s leading cabinet picks this time – Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy (now pursuing his own political ambitions), Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem – are people who’ve been successful in their own right, courageous in standing up for their beliefs and willing to challenge orthodoxies.

Historically, seismic shifts from the existing order to a new one come at the end of major wars, including the establishment of the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations and the United Nations after the Napoleonic, and the first and second world wars. Absent such a tectonic-plates-shifting war, the post-1945 order has grown increasingly misaligned with the changing military, geopolitical and economic orders. A new normative settling point is needed but there is no mechanism to bring it about. This is the ‘market opportunity’ that Trump is seeking to exploit as the world’s disruptor-in-chief by leveraging the full weight of US geopolitical, market and financial power to settle bilateral disputes and international conflicts on US terms and in accordance with US interests. Trump is an America First primacist, not an America Alone isolationist, prepared to use all the levers of power to bend naysayers to his will. The attempt to deal directly with Kim Jong-un in Trump’s first term didn’t go anywhere. At least he tried, not winning but not losing either. He did achieve major breakthroughs in the Middle East like the Abraham Accords and the assassination of Major-General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike without embroiling the US in another war. With the audacious Gaza plan Trump has shaken the tree of Israeli-Palestine conflict and the network of international institutions to see what falls.

Just to be clear, these are not new thoughts provoked by Trump’s disruptive antics. I had begun exploring such ideas after coming to the conclusion that efforts to reform the international system had reached the point of exhaustion. In a paper published in 2023, I concluded that confronted with ‘the ossified hard place of an increasingly illegitimate and ineffective existing Security Council, and the immovable rock of a reform-proof Security Council’, countries ‘should give up on the UN’ in favour of a new organisation ‘more fit for purpose in addressing and solving today’s challenges and threats’.

Netanyahu told Trump: ‘You cut to the chase… This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.’ Trump could say to the Palestinians what he said to black and Hispanic voters in expanding his appeal to them, ‘What have you got to lose?’

Trump’s vision may prove elusive and the plan may not materialise, but taboos have already been broken. And the Overton window opened.