To help me parse the serious-not-literal meaning of the Gaza plan, I called up two true experts who sit in different places on the political spectrum and always have sharp insights: Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama Administration, and Michael Oren, who was his counterpart, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, from 2009 to 2013.
Both first went to the tactical. Oren said Trump was “creating a ladder” for various hostile parties “to climb down.”
“He can say to the Saudis, ‘OK, I won’t invade the Gaza Strip but you’ve got to give up your demand for Palestinian statehood,’” explained Oren, who went on to serve as a minister in Netanyahu’s government and hosted Trump during his 2017 visit to the region. “He can say to Hamas, ‘OK, I won’t relocate all of Gaza’s people but you’ve got to give up control of the territory.’”
Shapiro, who until Trump’s inauguration was deputy assistant defense secretary for the Middle East, used the same metaphor for a different constituency.
“At the simplest and most utilitarian and shortest-term level, it might create a ladder for Netanyahu and his coalition to go to Phase Two of the agreement,” Shapiro said, referring to the precarious Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage-release deal. “Tell Smotrich, ‘You can’t say no to Trump because he’s giving us this golden opportunity.’ Maybe he bought them some space by putting out this cockamamie proposal.”
Smart points all, but I pushed them to go deeper on “seriously.” Again they said much the same thing, if in different ways: That Trump’s blow-up-the-box approach is actually on point, because the box — the two-state solution — has proven empty.
“It is correct that a lot of the old ideas have failed and don’t seem to be going anywhere, and that repeating ideas that have failed and aren’t going anywhere doesn’t make sense,” Shapiro told me.
“If you’re trying to be disruptive and generate new ideas, and get some of the Arabs to come forward with ideas,” he added, maybe throwing out something outlandish can help. “Just rip the cover off and look at the whole thing differently than they have before.”
And here’s Oren: “The nostrums for these last 30 years — two-state solution, we have to nurse Palestinian statehood — is not what he’s about. They haven’t worked; don’t get me started, they haven’t worked.
“I think what we can say is that he’s serious about changing the discourse,” Oren added. “He has changed the discourse.”
The problem with the seriously not literally framework, both of these veteran diplomats warned, is that it’s not just about how journalists or members of the American public regard Trump’s statements. It’s about how Hamas, for example, takes them.
The risk of putting out “this cockamamie proposal,” Shapiro said, is that it makes Hamas “pull out” of the ceasefire deal — or, worse yet, “puts targets on the backs” of American private security officers currently on the ground in Gaza helping screen Palestinians for weapons as they return to their destroyed homes.
For Oren, “the problem with the Trump plan is not getting America involved in rebuilding Gaza” or even the prospect of relocating the Palestinians.
“The big problem is Hamas — Hamas still has the guns and the hostages,” Oren said, adding that hostage families “were very, very upset” by Trump’s surprise announcement. “What are you going to do about the guns when they’re holding the hostages?”
He’s asking literally — and seriously.
