J.E. Dyer
The Optimistic Conservative, Feb. 6, 2025
“I emphatically don’t think he is writing guarantees for Israel’s behavior. The guarantee he’s writing is that Israel’s stake in the question is under our protection. No one’s going to hijack the disposition of Gaza out from under Israel.”
This article is obviously a follow-up to the press conference held by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu on Tuesday, 4 January 2025, in which Trump made a series of remarkable statements about the situation in Gaza and the role he envisions in it for the United States.
The treatment won’t be about predicting the future of negotiations, because that’s not the point to take away from Tuesday’s statements. It would also be an unnecessarily hazardous move. To quote from something I wrote on Tuesday, “There are no ‘experts’ on what’s happening right now.” Trying to speak as one is unwise.
As supporting documentation, here is a video of the presser containing the passage on Gaza and Trump’s proposal to move “all the Palestinians” out of it and have the U.S. “take it over.” (The Gaza section starts at the 5:30 mark.)
Here is one of many media reactions, most of which prophesy in one way or another that Trump’s concept, to the extent we can divine its details, won’t work.
At the head of the New York Times article is this intro slug: “President Trump’s proposal to transfer millions of people out of Gaza was hailed by the Israeli right and condemned by Palestinians. Some experts say it may be a negotiating tactic.”
Trump’s main move
And the quoted passage below is from a separate forum in which I wrote it as a comment on the NYT article linked above.
I love the intro slug, like there are experts – who have the matter wrapped up with a little bow – on the frequently recurring phenomenon of global leaders proposing to move millions of people, with terrorists embedded in their numbers, to re-homing elsewhere [checks notes] as a negotiating tactic.
Trump is definitely using tariffs as a negotiating tactic, which he’s been doing since Day 1 of the 45 term. So it can legitimately be analyzed as potentially a negotiating tactic, when he makes moves in other matters that people weren’t expecting and can’t see a practical implementation of. ….SOURCE