I’m just trying to think of an angle where occupying Gaza would have a tangible benefit
I can think of several, but take my thoughts with a massive grain of salt. If Trump goes through with this, it will piss off countless voters tired of wars. I'm a lot more hawkish that the majority of this thread as well.
This is all based on the idea of "we can't do nothing." That's been US foreign policy position for years. If we just leave X alone, there's a chance it could get worse, or some other country could get involved and re-orient the situation against US interests. There are plenty of people in this thread who
hate this perspective and I don't blame them, even if I personally disagree with it at a policy level. The difference I see with Trump, though, is he is going to do what helps out the US directly, rather than the Obama approach of trying to do what's right by the global community which already hates our guts and takes advantage of us.
Israel and the Palestinians do not trust each other. At all. No meaningful solution will occur because neither side trusts each other to do the right thing. The Arabs don't want Gaza, they don't want the Palestinians (since they have a long history of starting insurgencies in Arab countries), not even Israel wants Gaza (because of the associated military and political costs), and no one else in the world wants to step in and do something because of the previously referenced military and political costs. Europeans (communists) want to use the UNRWA and "rules-based global order" to do everything, but these organizations are staffed by pro-Iranian goons and the money gets stolen. Trump knows that any UN solution will not work because all the Frantz Fanon-loving communists in the UN will bend over backwards to the Iranian-backed Palestinians. Regardless of how anyone feels about the situation, this outcome is not good for the US.
At the current trajectory, there will be nothing but internecine wars between Israel and Iranian-backed Palestinian groups. Iraq was the big funder of pro-Palestinian groups for a long time (the PLO was based in Baghdad until the US invaded) but now it's Iran. Does the US want to keep backing Israel and cleaning up the Middle East when terrorist groups sprout up and attack the West? Does any of this sound like a healthy situation? The alternative of "leave them to their own devices" was what Israel did with Gaza and that turned out horribly (the October 7th attacks). Even the US left the Arabs alone throughout the 90's and all we got for it was 9/11.
Over the past 10 years, however, something
very interesting has happened: the Arabs are starting to get sick and fucking tired of the Palestinians. Arab leaders are tired of the economic disruptions to the region, the displaced populations they have to absorb, the terrorists who operate in their countries (often attacking nearby Arab countries), the political instability caused by pro-Palestinian firebrands, and - most of all - they're pissed off that the
Iranians are backing most of this. Most Arabs are Sunni and the Iranians are Shia. Before this, Arabs did not care because Iraq was the buffer between them and Iran. Now that buffer is gone.
The Sunni-Shia divide is very serious. Catholics and Protestants fling shit at each other every now and again, but Sunni and Shia societies have fundamentally different jurisprudence. Their societies are structured differently. Remember that the majority of Muslim countries take their religion
very seriously, not to mention the extremely high rate of consanguinity in those countries (they marry their first cousins
a lot), and you have a bit of a problem. Sprinkled on top of this are the countless Islamic versions of Messianic cults with leaders who want to be the global caliph responsible for creating a global caliphate... and you get a mess.
I am not certain what Trump plans on doing, if anything, regarding Gaza. He said he was going to sign the tariffs with Mexico and Canada regardless of their diplomacy. Then those countries caved, they negotiated, and the tariffs didn't go through. In my view, Trump is doing the thing of "I will absolutely do this thing unless you give me a better option." He's calling the bluffs of other world leaders.
I can see Trump's line of thought: there is zero progress on the Palestine situation, the Europeans are fucking it up, the Israelis are fucking it up, the Arabs are fucking it up, and while the US sits on its hands the situation gets worse. Islamist groups thrive in that region which is a threat to the US and everyone else because it becomes a breeding ground for recruitment, training, arming (remember all the UNRWA money?), and planning of terrorist attacks. Arab countries are modernizing but the Palestinians are holding them back. It might be better, in the minds of some, for the US to just go in, pacify, and control it unilaterally in lieu of any better plan from the global community. So that's what Trump is planning to do... unless the rest of the world gets its act together and proposes something else.
The main fly in the soup here, and this is my research into the topic coming in, is it will be impossible to pacify Gaza without significant troop deployments. The way you defeat insurgencies is coverage. If you have 50 insurgents operating in a square mile radius, you want a whole battalion there. This huge amount of coverage denies insurgent operational capabilities - there's literally no way for them to do anything because there are soldiers
everywhere. Gaza is 141 square miles. That's a fuckton of soldiers and you also need to get in there and fight the insurgents, which is bloody and risky business. No one wants high casualty counts, but that's exactly what you're going to get.
Again, I have no clue if Trump is serious or if he's just swinging his dick around until the US gets a better option than the ones in front of it. "If you're not going to fix this mess, we will." If enough countries decide they don't want the US to be the one to fix it, they'll have to put up or shut up. No more words, no more slush funds, no more whining.
That's all I got. This long, arduous, and no doubt unwanted armchairing is brought to you by Hey Johnny Bravo.
