Hello and welcome to The Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about the Middle East. My guests are the president of Iraq, Abdul Latif Rashid, and Andrew England, the FT’s Middle East editor. President Trump has astonished the Middle East and the world with his proposal that the US will, quote, take over the Gaza Strip.

But given the disastrous history of American intervention in the Middle East, is there any chance of Trump’s Gaza plan happening? For many Americans and Arabs, the Iraq war remains a bitter memory and an object lesson in the folly of western intervention in the Middle East. When I met President Rashid of Iraq a couple of weeks ago, I found he took a different view.

No, we don’t think it was a mistake because the entire population of Iraq want to get rid of the regime and we seek the help and assistance of international community, including European countries Britain, France, Germany. And at the same time, it’s as far as we are concerned, getting rid of Saddam Hussein or overthrowing Saddam was absolutely necessary for Iraq and for the region.

We’ll be hearing more from the Iraqi president a bit later in the show. But we’re starting this week with the Trump proposals on Gaza. I start my conversation with Andrew England by asking him if he thinks Trump’s idea has any chance of getting off the ground.

No. You’ve got to assume not. I mean, it seems a completely crazy idea. I mean, firstly, you’d be in violation of international law. Just forcibly resettling Gazans, which Trump was talking about even before he announced taking over Gaza, would be in violation of international law and seen by many in the region as ethnic cleansing. It would recall memories of 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced when Israel declared independence and there was a war.

To Arabs that was a catastrophe. So just that element is very hard to see. And then if you talk about the US taking over the Palestinian territory, potentially putting US troops on the ground, as Trump said he would if necessary, it brings up echoes of the US’s disastrous intervention in Iraq in 2003. Logistically, how would you do it? Who would pay for it? The Arab world, western allies, the global south would be up in arms. It just seems absolutely crazy.

No, not this. We had picked up hints that after the election, Trump was talking to Arab leaders about the possibility of resettling Palestinians from Gaza. But it wasn’t really taking that seriously. I mean, again, you’re dealing with Trump, this unpredictable guy who says a lot of things. What’s real, what’s not? Does he really understand the nuances of the Middle East, the complexities of the Middle East?

Is he always negotiating a deal or thinking about a deal? So people didn’t really take it seriously. And then in the last couple of weeks, he started talking about the need to clean out Gaza. Horrible language. And again, Arab states rejected the idea. They reject any notion of the forcible displacement of Palestinians that has so many scars in Arab history.

The legacy is so toxic in Arab history of Palestinians being displaced from their land. And essentially, you know, that’s the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict is over land and people being displaced. So there’s no way they could countenance it. So obviously, we can’t dismiss it. But he is a character, a leader who is belligerent.

He’s a bully, and he does use strange negotiating tactics where he looks to raise the stakes and then perhaps try and use that to broker the kind of deals he wants. I think what was so extraordinary, you know, did this at the White House in front of the world’s cameras with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side.

What do you think Netanyahu thought? I mean, obviously, you had to be polite about it and said, you know, out-of-the-box thinking, but he must think this is crazy even. I mean, he may have his own plans. He certainly has people in his cabinet who would like to annex Gaza or bits of it. But the idea that America would take it over and kind of turn it into a beach resort is bizarre.

Well, absolutely. But it is kind of interesting. You watch Netanyahu. He was almost trying to hide the smirk on his face. Look, I think from the beginning, Arabs and Palestinians have been concerned that Netanyahu and his far-right government — and this is the most extreme government in Israel’s history — wanted to make Gaza uninhabitable after Hamas’s horrific October the 7th attack in 2023. And they would want to push Palestinians across the border into Egypt. Now, the Israeli government would deny that, but that’s been the concern.

I mean, look, for years there’s been talk in Americans and Israelis, you know, Gaza could be Dubai, it’s on the Mediterranean coast. It just needs developing this kind of thing. You know, if you’re a far-right Israeli politician, you don’t envisage that, including Palestinians. We have to remember Gaza is this tiny, narrow strip on the Mediterranean. It’s one of the most densely populated places in the world. For 14 months, it’s been bombed from the land, sea and air pretty much every day since Hamas’s attack on Israel. It’s a totally shattered wreck.

So let me then play devil’s advocate. So Trump is right when he says it’s a totally shattered wreck. And I have heard conservative Arabs say in private, well, maybe, you know, they’d be better off if they moved to Egypt, although that is a completely toxic idea in the sort of Arab discourse. But aren’t the alternatives also a bit unreal? I mean, I saw Keir Starmer saying the two-state solution. I mean, we’ve been saying that for 45 years. Do we think the other proposals, the traditional proposals are really that much more realistic than what Trump’s going on about?

Well, I think we have to start and remember that Palestinians, Gazans, they see this territory as their home. These are people who’ve built their lives there. They’ve been there for generations. Many are descendants of those that were displaced in 1948. They will want to rebuild. They don’t want to be constantly resettled. You know, there’s hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living overseas.

And it’s one of the most sensitive points of the whole Arab-Israeli conflict because they want the right to go home. Of course, some Gazans will want to move and would want to try and build a new life outside of the territory, but a hell of a lot of people, they would want to stay. They do see it as the home. Now, it’s going to take a humongous effort to get anything close to a two-state solution across the line.

But then we have to ask ourselves, what are the alternatives? Because OK, you clear out Gaza. What do you do with the occupied West Bank? What do you tell the Palestinians? What does that do for those who want to pursue a militant ideology against Israel, like Hamas, who say they are fighting for the rights of the people who’ve lost their land, who justify their attacks, their killings, etc, because of the occupation? There’s no way that you’re going to be able to secure the peace that Israel wants, desires justifiably, and the Palestinians want if Palestinians are constantly pushed off the land. And no one is addressing the root causes of this conflict.

I think you’re going to have a string of Arab leaders and foreign ministers heading to Washington. We know that the Qatari prime minister is going there this week. The Saudi foreign minister is going. King Abdullah of Jordan is going next week. I think they will try and talk sense into Trump. I think Trump will come back at them and say, OK, you need to take responsibility for Gaza.

You need to ensure that Hamas never rules again. You need to foot the bill for the reconstruction in Gaza. Then there’s a question of whether there can be any movement on the American plan to have Saudi Arabia normalise relations with Israel, which has always been the grand prize for Netanyahu because of Saudi Arabia’s significance in the Muslim world. And for Trump, if he wants a grand bargain for the Middle East, and he talked about this in his first term and he’s talked about it again this time.