This week, President Donald Trump doubled down on his controversial proposal that the United States take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip and “level it out” to clear ground for real-estate development. Trump’s vision involves the temporary removal of the territory’s roughly 2 million residents, whom he has promised will be “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes.” Under his plan, America will “be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site” before “develop[ing] it”; after this, Gaza residents will be allowed to return to the “Riviera of the Middle East” if they wish. “I can tell you about real estate. They’re going to be in love with it,” Trump declared.
“Such projects tend to produce more practical problems than they solve.”
Population transfers are not unheard of in modern politics. Leaving aside normative questions of who has the right to “own” Gaza and the ethics of forcing millions of people from their homes, the brutally pragmatic logic for such an approach seems straightforward enough—not unlike separating two children who can’t behave in class. But among the many examples of forced migration, there is a startling absence of “successful” cases. Indeed, looking to the past reveals that such projects tend to produce more practical problems than they solve.