President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak during a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)
WASHINGTON (Tribune News Service) — When Secretary of State Marco Rubio makes his first official trip to the Middle East as the top U.S. diplomat on Sunday, he’ll be pushing the region to come up with an alternative to President Donald Trump’s controversial plan for the Gaza Strip.
While attending the Munich Security Conference this weekend and on stops in Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the coming days, Rubio will stress that nations in the region should present a new proposal if they have concerns about the U.S. taking over Gaza and displacing its residents, a State Department spokesperson said, declining to be named to outline the U.S. approach.
Rubio will encourage regional leaders to use out of the box thinking and assemble a coalition of partners to present a new plan that brings real change for Palestinians, the spokesperson said, after more than a year of war that leveled much of the Gaza Strip after the Hamas assault on Israel.
“Hopefully they’re going to have a really good plan to present to the president, but right now the only plan — they don’t like it — but the only plan is the Trump plan, so if they’ve got a better plan, you know, now is the time to present it,” Rubio said in a radio interview on Thursday, adding that partner countries must do more than just pay for reconstruction but confront Hamas on the ground, as well.
Trump’s repeated suggestions for Gaza — that the U.S. take ownership of the land, redevelop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” move Palestinians to new homes in Egypt and Jordan, and not let them return — has outraged many across the Middle East and beyond. It has been rejected by Arab and Western leaders, with many experts saying it violates international law and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
While Rubio is asserting that Arabs don’t have a plan and that Trump’s new idea is the only one that exists, the region has long wanted to solve the conflict through the establishment of a separate Palestinian state.
The so-called two-state solution was also a cornerstone of the detailed postwar plan for Gaza that Joe Biden’s top diplomat, Antony Blinken, discussed on a dozen trips to the Middle East, with the then-secretary of State saying he would “hand off that plan to the Trump administration to carry forward.”
“The region has put forward a plan, and that’s a two state solution,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington. “Now that plan is not acceptable to Israel. They’ve made that clear. And for that reason, it’s also kind of a dead issue, it seems, in the United States as well.”
In a meeting with Trump this week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II said he reiterated his country’s “steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,” calling it “the unified Arab position” and adding that achieving a “just peace on the basis of the two-state solution is the way to ensure regional stability.”
Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. wants to normalize ties with Israel as part of a broadening of the first Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, has also recently emphasized its long-standing commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state and opposing the displacement of its people is “non-negotiable and not subject to compromise.”
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