The US Has Outsourced Its Gaza Policy to Israel - Bloomberg
Thursday, September 4, 2025 8:45 PM
Friends + Interlocutors,
Here’s a refreshing item in today’s Bloomberg which is certainly a member in good standing of the mainstream or establishment media. The article is well-balanced, nicely written and factual, unlike the harebrained opinions spouted in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal or on Fox News. What’s interesting to me is that it comes basically to the same conclusions I have been fixated upon for so long.
I guess it takes a genocide or mass murder to finally get the mainstream media folks to wake up, take notice and face reality about Israel and the U.S.—what I call the Tel Aviv-Washington Axis. It won’t, however, make any difference to the Washington politicians and officials in power. The Israel Lobby hammer-lock will remain in place. Money and influence peddling prevails. It’s a scandal that keeps on growing.
On top of that it seems that Trump has lost his way and is floundering. He may have overworked himself, or he may be depressed by the lack of success in foreign affairs. His foreign policy is based almost entirely on intimidation and threats. India, for one, is not taking it. And China has all the cards to outplay him. As for Israel, it has always been in the driver’s seat long before Trump. So Trump is fast becoming irrelevant like Papa Joe Biden before him.
Patrick
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-09-04/the-us-has-outsourced-its-gaza-policy-to-israel?cmpid=090425_morningamer&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=250904&utm_campaign=morningamerThe US Has Outsourced Its Gaza Policy to Israel
Bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views suggest that the Trump administration has no plan for the Palestinians, except to let Netanyahu do whatever he wants.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
It’s circulating in Washington in the form of a presentation in the style that you’d expect in the world of real-estate development, the natural habitat of Kushner, Trump and Steve Witkoff, the president’s “special envoy” to the Middle East and other places. In a draft seen by the Washington Post, the Gaza Strip would pass into an Orwellian-sounding GREAT Trust (for Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation). This trust would beautify that land of misery into a gleaming hub for tourism, tech and commerce.
The wrinkle is that most of the roughly two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, one way or another, would have to leave. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his right-wing cabinet members have already bandied about this idea, as they prepare another military onslaught to occupy most or all of the strip. The Israeli government has apparently considered deporting the Palestinians to such places as Libya, South Sudan and Somaliland, none of which has been called a Riviera. Some of the historical echoes are disturbing.
The GREAT draft emphasizes that any relocations would be “voluntary,” an adjective it deploys liberally. The Palestinians, the plan suggests, would not be forced but encouraged to depart, with incentives such as $5,000 in cash and promises of food for a year. Palestinian landowners might get a “digital token,” whatever that may turn out to be.
I ran the proposal by Shibley Telhami at the University of Maryland, an expert on American policy in the Middle East who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations. “This particular and insane Riviera idea sounds like a glitzy way to sell ethnic cleansing,” he told me. As he analyzes America’s overall policy in the region, he added, he is for the first time in his career “scratching my head, honestly.”
If there is a coherent American strategy somewhere, it’s well hidden. Trump “doesn’t know much about much,” Telhami says, which invites various people to mess with his mind. Those range from Mike Huckabee, the Evangelical and theologically pro-Israel American ambassador to Jerusalem, to Netanyahu, who appears to have mastered the art of simultaneously flattering, ignoring and manipulating Trump. “Netanyahu is getting what he wants with him,” Telhami told me, “just as [Russian President] Putin is getting what he wants with him.”
That’s already been evident in contiguous conflicts, such as those in Syria and Iran. Trump, for instance, wanted to avoid bombing Iran while negotiations, led by Witkoff, to limit Iran’s nuclear program were ongoing. But then Netanyahu went ahead anyway. When the Israeli strikes proved successful as well as telegenic, Trump ordered his B-2 bombers and other aircraft to drop American ordnance too.
In Gaza, meanwhile, Israel has restricted food supplies for much of the year, either creating or allowing a situation which a professional body backed by the United Nations officially calls a “famine.” Trump seems to agree: He’s called the situation “real starvation stuff ... and you can’t fake that.” But Huckabee hews to the Israeli government’s line and blames everything on Hamas. The net effect on US policy is to keep Washington aligned with Jerusalem: Breaking with other members of the UN Security Council, the US has rejected the famine label.
In the same way, the Trump administration resists the label “genocide,” even as more politicians (even among Trump’s MAGA base) as well as jurists and scholars adopt it — most notably the International Association of Genocide Scholars itself. And whereas more of America’s allies — from Australia and Canada to France, Malta, Portugal, Britain and possibly Belgium — plan, at this month’s UN gathering, to join the 145 nations that already recognize Palestinian statehood, the US is heading in the opposite direction, denying or revoking visas to keep Palestinian leaders away from the UN General Assembly. In July, Washington boycotted a UN gathering of dozens of nations that renewed the call for a peaceful settlement of the conflict with a two-state solution.
This American signaling should in theory be puzzling, because the two-state solution has been the official US policy goal for decades, and the Trump administration has technically not dropped it. (It admittedly came close when Huckabee mumbled something to that effect.) Nor has it gone unnoticed, of course, that several members of Netanyahu’s cabinet believe in annexing both Gaza and the West Bank, and that Netanyahu has consistently done whatever you would do to make a Palestinian state impossible. The US seems to be letting him get on with it.
This resulting policy vacuum is causing no end of confusion and distress throughout the executive branch, as Shahed Ghoreishi described to me. He was a press officer in the State Department and in January, after Trump took his second oath of office, became the point person for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From that moment on, he tried to issue statements that reflected the administration’s policy and put it in its best light, even drafting X posts on behalf of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
His best efforts finally broke down on three consecutive days in August. It started on a Sunday, when Ghoreishi was planning to offer simple “condolences” after an Israeli air strike killed four journalists from Al Jazeera. During the clearance review, that statement was deleted, which seemed “odd to me.”
The next day, Monday, he was drafting a reply to a question from the press about those Israeli plans to deport Palestinians to Africa. Ghoreishi wanted to say that “we do not support forced displacement.” That line too was deleted, which was bizarre. Is the US now in favor of forced displacement?
The following day, Ghoreishi was working on a statement about an earlier trip by House Speaker Mike Johnson to the West Bank, as the territory is called in international law. Then he saw one of Huckabee’s advisers in Jerusalem editing the shared document and changing “West Bank” to “Judea and Samaria,” a biblical name used by Israeli settlers. With backing from his colleagues at Foggy Bottom, Ghoreishi cut the line out.
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A few days later, just like that, Ghoreishi was fired, without explanation. Even as I pestered him, he refused to side with Israelis or Palestinians in the underlying matter. But he stressed his worry about morale at the State Department, where he and his colleagues kept hearing during the clearance processes that they should defer questions to the government of Israel. In effect, he told me, US policy “became that we no longer answer the question” and instead “green-light every Israeli policy.”
As Israel prepares another massive incursion into Gaza for the purpose of seizing and holding essentially all of it — with a goal of removing the Palestinians in ways yet to be explained — this American stance is no longer tenable. Trump promised his base to make “peace through strength,” not to let rogue allies make wastelands and call them peace. If Trump has a policy, and strength, the Gaza Strip right now is a good place and time to prove it.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
