Israel and the U.S. quickly rejected an Egyptian proposal for rebuilding Gaza, which roughly amounted to reestablishing the pre-October 7 status quo. The Israeli Foreign Ministry criticized the plan because it “continues to rely on the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA — both have repeatedly demonstrated corruption, support for terrorism, and failure in resolving the issue.”

Egypt offered a proposal on behalf of Arab nations after Trump in early February proposed the stunning solution of clearing out Gaza’s entire population and rebuilding it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

The established opinion-setters who have failed to achieve peace in the Levant for the past 70 years called Trump’s plan everything from unworkable to a flagrant violation of international law, but it at least kickstarted the discussion.

In response, Egypt called it “imperative to respect the desire and legitimate right of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip to remain in their land, to which they have demonstrated their unwavering attachment.”

“Well, sort of,” remarked Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Elliot Abrams. “It’s easy to ‘demonstrate unwavering attachment’ when no one gives you the option of leaving (except Donald Trump).”

The Egyptian proposal calls for a six-month transitional government “comprised of technocrats and non-factional figures working under the umbrella of the Palestinian government.” It also calls for a U.N. Security Council study “concerning establishing international presence in Palestinian territories,” including peacekeeping forces — entirely ignoring the complicity of Palestine’s current international presence, UNRWA, in Hamas’s terrorist activities.

In fact, the Egyptian plan “does not mention Hamas and deals with security issues largely by ignoring them. It suggests that if we all just recommit to the ‘two-state solution,’ security issues will magically fade away,” complained Abrams. This “might work on another planet but certainly not in Gaza.”

He concluded that Trump’s proposal for Gaza is “much more realistic than the Arab plan, at least, about current living conditions in Gaza and about the real problem — Hamas.”

As for the accusation that Trump’s proposal would violate international law, George Mason University law professor Eugene Kontorovich argued on “Washington Watch” that international law violations are what created the current situation in Gaza.

“What people need to understand is that the people in Gaza now — the Arabs in Gaza — are actually being held prisoner there. They’re not allowed to leave … by Hamas on the inside and Egypt on the outside,” he said. “President Trump is saying, ‘I’m going to lift the Iron Curtain. I’m going to let people in Gaza go.’ That is a victory for international law. That is a humanitarian policy.”

“In surveys before the war, something like 40% of people in Gaza said they want to leave. Right now, it’s going to be much more,” he elaborated. “But, of course, that [would] remove one of the big impetuses for forcing Israel to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. … That’s why they’re not being allowed to leave.”

“Egypt has an obligation under refugee law to take people who are fleeing,” continued Kontorovich. “Why are they pointing their tanks at the fence to shoot Gazans who would want to leave?”

Kontorovich suggested this was a potential point for the Trump administration to pressure the Egyptian government, since “those tanks are being paid for by U.S. dollars. … We should not be paying them to keep Gazans imprisoned.” In September 2024, the Biden administration granted Egypt $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding concerns about human rights conditions in the country.

One reason why the Biden administration treated the Egyptian government with kid gloves — besides its palpable hostility toward Israel — was the instability of the country, which stands astride global crossroads, made worse by the Houthis in Yemen deterring commercial vessels from crossing through the Suez Canal. “I’ve spent a little bit of time in Egypt. I’ve met with President El-Sisi,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “I would say he has a very fragile government. It’s one of the most chaotic places I’ve ever visited.”

“Nobody’s suggesting that they have to stay in Egypt,” allowed Kontorovich. “They probably don’t want to stay in Egypt. Egypt is just the first place that they would be able to leave through. But they could presumably resettle throughout Europe, throughout Turkey, which is a big fan of the Palestinian cause.”

This is the way global conflicts usually progress, he added. “For example, millions of people fled the Syrian conflict. Millions of people have fled the Ukrainian conflict, in Afghanistan. There was no international plan for where they’re going to go. Some went to one country. Some went to another. That’s the normal way these things work. The key is to allow them to leave.”

The problem is, “no Arab country wants to admit the people of Gaza as refugees in any number,” Kontorovich contended. “Yet Israel was supposed to allow the creation of a country sandwiching Israel from both sides, with eight miles in between, which no Arab state would allow.”

“Is this not an admission that they don’t want the problems that have been created by Hamas in the radicalization of the Gazans?” Perkins asked. “I think it certainly is,” Kontorovich answered. “And I think it teaches us something — so much — about this two-state solution that every supposed Middle East expert said was the solution.”

“A Palestinian state is not just a policy idea. It’s almost like an ideology, a mission,” he continued. “This has become a religion for them. They have made an idol out of this two-state solution, and they’re not going to lose faith in it easily.”

This is why the Egyptian solution — not to mention the Biden administration’s vision — was so untethered to the real conditions existing on the ground. “Regardless of what happens in the world, their prescription is the same. That is to say, it is not responsive to changes in circumstances, to new evidence, to new developments.”

The basic problem with a two-state solution, where Jews and Arabs peacefully coexist side-by-side under different governments, is that there is no Palestinian government that wants peace with Israel.

“A Palestinian state which seeks to replace Israel — as almost every single Palestinian leader says openly — is simply no answer whatsoever,” insisted Israeli government spokesman David Mincer, on “Washington Watch.” “There’s no education like experience, and we’ve lived it. … There have been catastrophic mistakes made in this country: the idea that we can coexist with this terrorist organization right on our borders. … It’s a death cult. It must be destroyed.”

But surrounding Arab nations like Egypt, who refuse to admit Palestinian refugees for fear of admitting a terrorist problem, “don’t want anything that could undermine a Palestinian state, even if they have to keep the Palestinians prisoner to do it,” Kontorovich continued. “The Palestinians have been treated as serfs by the international community. They’re not allowed to ever leave, and they have a hereditary status as refugees, even if they’ve never fled anywhere, even if they’ve been in the same place for generations.”

President Trump has proposed a solution that cuts through decades of rotten propaganda, “a plan that really would be called progressive if it didn’t have the feature of happening to help Israel be safe,” said Kontorovich.

He proposed the Abraham Accords — negotiated during the first Trump administration — as a successful blueprint for how Trump can negotiate lasting progress in the Middle East. “He said that ‘Jerusalem is the sovereign capital of the Jewish nation.’ … He said, ‘it’s true, and I want to live in the universe of reality,’” Kontorovich described. “But pretending it’s not true only encourages the Arabs to have unrealistic demands and unrealistic expectations about the future of Jerusalem. Take it off the table and … what happened? We got the Abraham Accords.”

“President Trump understands that we need to end the conflict here,” Kontorovich concluded. “We have had cycles of mass terror and full-scale war every couple of years. So, the two-state solution is not leading us to a path towards peace, declaring the conflict over, recognizing Israel’s legitimate rights in a way that discourages and disincentivizes attacks on Israel: that is the way to peace and stability. But the U.N. doesn’t really care about that.”

Thus, the U.S. and Israel rejected the Arab proposal to rebuild Gaza into a clone of its previous failed structure because they are living in reality. “The current proposal does not address the reality that Gaza is currently uninhabitable and residents cannot humanely live in a territory covered in debris and unexploded ordnance,” responded Brian Hughes, spokesman for the National Security Council. “President Trump stands by his vision to rebuild Gaza free from Hamas.”