The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Wants To Turn Gaza Into The "Riviera Of The Middle East"

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

At a Tuesday press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump said he wanted the U.S. to own Gaza and he would transform it into the "Riviera of the Middle East." What has been the reaction to those statements? This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national security correspondent Greg Myre, and national political correspondent Don Gonyea.The podcast is produced by Bria Suggs & Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Amy in Jeff City, Missouri, where I'm about to go to my swearing in ceremony for the Missouri Bar. This podcast was recorded at 1.35 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, February 6th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show. Well, congratulations. Big day indeed. Yeah. Yeah, very exciting. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Greg Meyry. I cover national security. And I'm Don Gommier, national political correspondent. Earlier this week, during a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump announced an out-of-the-box plan for the Gaza Strip. So Don, walk us through what President Trump said. Right, it was one of those evening press conferences, you know, they usually start with a reasonably scripted opening statement

and then it goes into whatever it goes into. And there was President Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister there, and Trump floated the idea of a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip and turning that war-torn territory into a tourist destination. You have to learn from history. History is, you know, just can't let it keep repeating itself. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad.

This could be so magnificent. Just to be clear, he is talking about relocating some two million Palestinians from their home. And he's saying that it should be done because, and it has been destroyed by this 15-month war. Greg, I think that there are real policy questions about how to help Gaza recover from the war. But how did this land? Well, not well here in the Middle East. Just a complete rejection by the Palestinians. This strikes a very, very sensitive nerve. Most of the people in Gaza, about two-thirds of the residents there, are the descendants of

refugees dating back to the the first big Arab-Israeli war in 1948. So when Trump says talks about uprooting Palestinians and moving them somewhere else, this just is the most sensitive court of all. Palestinians oppose it. Where would they go in the region? No other country is offering to take them. They wouldn't want to be complicit in this, in such an endeavor. So really strong opposition. And again, I can't overstate how strong this feeling is for Palestinians, a sense of, especially the

ones in Gaza, but many Palestinians throughout the region, they've been dispossessed before, they've lost their homes, they dream of going back to those homes, and now they're being told they may be uprooted again with no guarantees that they could ever go back to Gaza. And Greg, we should just note that you're in Damascus, Syria today doing reporting, but you have been to Gaza many times in your reporting career. You sort of touched on this, but what are Arab countries saying about this proposal and what are they offering in terms of helping the recovery of Gaza?

Right. So again, they're absolutely opposed. And the country probably at the forefront is Egypt because if people are to leave Gaza by the ground, which is really the only way out, that would be through Egypt. So Egypt has long had this opposition to taking in large numbers of Palestinians. Again, they don't want to be seen as part of a move to empty out Palestinians from the places where they're living. Jordan is the other place that Trump raised. They have taken in a lot of Palestinians over there. Most of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian descent, but they too are opposed. And these are big American allies in the region. Now other countries, the richer

countries in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, we'd expect them to play some role in rebuilding Gaza. They have given money to the Palestinians in the past. Still, I'd make the larger point, the Palestinians have often felt let down by Arab states. They feel they get a lot of lip service for their cause, but they feel they don't really get what they need in terms of reaching their aspiration of a state. I should add that Arab states, including Syria, where I am now, have taken in large numbers of Palestinians dating all the way back to 1948, and many of those refugees and their descendants are still

here. Dawn, this was an announcement that, as you say, took a lot of people by surprise. Is there any clarity on how this would work? Or was there a rollout with this, where there was a policy process? We understand that there were some discussions at the White House, but not planning meetings, not strategy sessions, but it was talked about

in a what if way, in conversations between the president and some of his staff. But we also saw within a day or so, other members of the administration kind of tamping it down a little bit, saying, well, if there is a US control, that would be temporary. We haven't determined who could live there yet,

but we would hope it would be open to everyone, which presumably would include the Palestinian people. But to say that we have anything close to an official policy proposal that we can study and start really looking at, that would be an overstatement. I do have to say that this seems like a pretty big departure from Trump's America First ideology, the thing that he campaigned on, no foreign wars. And this comes, especially as he's dismantling USAID and other foreign aid infrastructure, but then he's talking about essentially occupying or rebuilding the Gaza Strip. Right. It both contradicts everything he's kind of stood for since he's been on the national stage

and in politics, but it is also in line with other things he has said since winning the election in November. Yeah, let's not forget, you know, Trump is not known for being consistent, but this is really something where he has been consistent, talking about keeping the U.S. out of messy foreign conflicts in general, but the Middle East in particular. In Trump's first term, he did the deal to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan, although it was President Biden who ultimately took them out, but that was part of a Trump deal. He wanted to take US forces out of Iraq. There's talk of taking US troops out of Syria now. He wanted to do that in his first term and got talked out of it, but again it seems to be on the table. So this is, you know, again, just absolutely contradictory to what Trump has talked

about in the past, and it's really hard to see what the goal is. I mean, he talks about having this luxury place on the seafront in Mediterranean Sea, but Gaza is again a very poor place with no infrastructure in a very difficult part of the world. So the notion that this could just easily be transformed just defies belief of anybody who spent a significant amount of time in the region. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more on reaction to this proposal.

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And we're back. And Dawn, you went to Dearborn, Michigan this week right after President Trump made this announcement. And that's a city that garnered a lot of attention in the lead up to this last presidential election because it has a large Arab American population. Many people there have family members in Gaza and a lot of people were really mad at the Biden administration. So what did you hear from folks in Dearborn after this news broke. It's impossible to separate this story from the story of the election in Dearborn. Again, Dearborn is a city with the majority Arab American population. The reaction here to

what President Trump said this week, it certainly echoes what Greg is talking about in terms of the reaction around the world. Don, how does the election play into this? What are people telling you? Well, here's the thing about Dearborn. It traditionally votes Democratic. Joe Biden in 2020 won Dearborn by something like 40 points. But this last election took place as the war in Gaza was playing out, and there was tremendous anger at the Biden administration, at the president himself, and at vice president and eventual Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over the U.S.'s continued military support for Israel, the fact that Biden still spoke of how close America

is to Israel, and people who live, many of them long time Democrats, but people who live in Dearborn found that unacceptable. And in the end, Dearborn actually went for Trump over Harris. And a lot of votes also went to Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate and an anti-war candidate. So now, how are people in Dearborn feeling

about what Trump is saying? So this week, I was dropping into coffee shops and the Student Union at the University of Michigan Dearborn and just other places around town. But now let me play something from a voter. His name is Abbas Al-Aweya. He works as a Democratic strategist and he gets frustrated now when people look at what Trump said this week and then turn to Dearborn and say, are you guys happy now?

People are using this moment to say, well, Muslim Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, we told you so, this is your fault, Trump is your fault. Is Dearborn, Michigan to blame for Democrats losing Arizona? Is Dearborn, Michigan to blame for Democrats losing Arizona? Is Dearborn Michigan to blame for Democrats losing Pennsylvania or Wisconsin? Is Dearborn Michigan to blame for Democrats losing any one of the, of every single swing state in this country where, where democratic leadership has failed to operate in a manner that is in touch with the pain that regular everyday Americans are experiencing? No. So he's saying Dearborn stood up for what

it believed in. Greg, you also have some on-the-ground reporting. Tell us about that. Yeah, that's right, Tim. I was at a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus and this was set up back in the 1948 war. And there's a woman there, Khadija al-Ali, and she is 80 years old. She came to that camp when she was three years old. She has been there for 77 years. And she tells the story. She was old enough to have lived through it, but others tell it through their parents or grandparents how they left, they thought that this war would just last

a week or a few months and they would return home, and here they are 77 years later. And so she said she had a message for the Palestinians in Gaza which is simply, don't leave your home. Don't accept a promise that if you leave you'll be able to go back. Palestinians do this all the time. They show you the rusting keys they have from their old homes, these yellowing Landy documents showing where they used to live, places they've never been able to go back and see. And she also said that she just didn't believe anything Donald Trump was saying. Trump was trying to pitch this as a humanitarian gesture to give Palestinians better lives. And she said, well, if Trump was serious about helping

them, he'd help them go back to their old homes, which are now inside Israel. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.