It’s Super Bowl Sunday and President Donald Trump is on Air Force One en route to Caesars Superdome, New Orleans, where the Kansas City Chiefs will face off against the Philly Eagles looking for a three-time record successive win. He takes questions from a media huddle on board. 

It hasn’t escaped these journalists that the three Israeli hostages released in Gaza as part of a temporary ceasefire on Saturday were emaciated shells of their former selves. Trump compares them to death camp survivors of the Holocaust in WW2. Anyone viewing their release also didn’t miss the psychological torture Hamas meted out up to their final handover to the Red Cross.

Trump is asked then whether his plan for the Gaza Strip still stands.

He says, “We will buy and own Gaza. We may give it to someone else to rebuild but Hamas will never return”.

It’s a controversial plan indeed, paradigm shifting, a totally fresh approach to the problem of Israeli-Arab peace. And it hinges on the question: Who owns Gaza today?

So here’s a quick history:

1947—The Gaza Strip forms part of the post-WW1 UK “British Mandate”.

1948—Given to “The Arabs” to build an “Arab State” alongside a “Jewish State”. Arabs said NO.

1949—After the Arabs invaded the new State of Israel and lost, Egypt took it over as a “Military Protectorate”.

1956—Britain and France told Israel to take it over in a war intended to return the Suez Canal to Britain and France. US demanded all move out. Gaza went back to Egypt.

1967—After Egypt kicked the UN out of the Sinai, Israel pre-emptively attacked Egypt: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq lost that war. Israel took over Gaza as a Military Protectorate.

1969—Egyptian Yasser Arafat took over the PLO and infiltrated Gaza from Jordan. Arafat became the Palestinian mouthpiece. Gaza remained an Israeli Military Protectorate.

1993—Israel offered Gaza to the Palestinians and 95% of the West Bank for a PALESTINIAN STATE. Arafat said NO. Arafat again said no to peace in 2000. Yasser Arafat died worth approximately $4 billion inherited by his daughter.

2005—Israel removed all Jewish settlers and its military from Gaza. It remained an Israeli Military Protectorate but administered by the Palestinian Authority.

2007—Still an Israeli Military Protectorate empty of Israelis, Hamas waged a civil war against the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and took over. Hamas spent billions of dollars in aid money building a military tunnel and rocket complex under the entire Gaza Strip. Unsurprisingly, Hamas’s leaders became billionaires too.

2023—Hamas invaded Israel killing 1,200 people, kidnapping 251 children, women and men resulting in Gaza being destroyed by Israel.

2024—Hamas’s pre-October 7 senior leadership are dead.

2025—Gaza is still an Israeli Military Protectorate at war with Hamas. The Western world agrees that “Hamas can have no role in a future Palestinian state”.

But Trump takes this further:

He says there is no role in the world for a future Palestinian state. He tells the media that Palestinians do not want to stay in Gaza.

He says they will be happier moving to countries where they can stop living in fear of entities like Hamas. He prefers that they settle within the Middle East of course, but says that is not necessary. He says that they will embrace their new wealthier lives and new homes for a better future.

A lot of issues go unspoken by the media here, top among them is that Hamas with the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also operate in the West Bank.

The military and diplomatic options then abound before we ever consider how Gaza becomes rebuilt as the Monaco of the Levant, and Israel widens its borders to incorporate Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).

I’ve written prior that the entire Levant Mediterranean coast is a tourist goldmine waiting. Yet, I’ve always presumed that wiser heads in the Palestinian community would have made peace with Israel to bring it about: instead they sent Hamas.

However, I’ve never considered Israel subsuming the West Bank whole, though it too currently controls that land as a Military Protectorate. All peace discourse till now has revolved around a Two-State Solution as that offered in 1993.

Trump’s plan will require a geopolitical negotiation of an epic unseen since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 that settled WW1 and ironically, laid the stage for a British Mandate promising Jewish and Arab states.

Yet, given the reality of Hamas’s kamikaze assault on Israel October 7 2023, and the subsequent annihilation of its military and political leadership by Israel, the shape of the future Middle East has irreversibly changed.

Hamas destabilised Syria—and Bashar al-Assad’s regime is now gone. Hamas destabilised Lebanon—and Iran’s Lebanese Hezbollah is now operationally gone. Hamas destabilised Iran—and Iran’s international terror facade, the IRGC, is now shattered. Anarchist support for Hamas has weakened governments in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Spain and the UK: it led to the US election of Trump. Hamas’s hubris exposed a corrupt UN—and the UN’s only refugee agency working for one people, Palestine’s UNRWA, is all but gone.

Hence Trump says that the concept of Palestine is gone too. It is now a realistic proposal. Why?

Israel owns the Gaza Strip today. They can give it to the United States of America if they wish.

Then there’s the biggest factor of all. “Palestinian” is not a nationality.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: Rubble by Alejandro Barba, public domain, via Unsplash.