If You Want Another 9/11, Take Over Gaza

Or let the Israelis depopulate it.

Last night, Donald Trump suggested that the United States plans to “take over” and “own” Gaza, “level the site,” force Palestinians to “resettle permanently,” and deploy U.S. troops as necessary to pacify the territory so it can be developed by international investors. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, this is consistent with an “America First” foreign policy.

If any part of what the president said is true — and there is a good chance that he means it — it is the best possible thing that he could do to provoke another 9/11. In fact, he could spend the next four years livestreaming himself from the White House burning the Quran and painting portraits of the Prophet Muhammad and it wouldn’t even come close. Every jihadi in the world just cackled and started cutting their next recruitment video.

Osama bin Laden made it clear that he attacked the United States because he believed it was occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places — the Arabian Peninsula — and dominating and weakening Arab states “to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.” This was not only a staple of his English and Arabic-language propaganda, but also the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission report and the 2004 report of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board on communicating with the Muslim world.

Political scientist Robert Pape, who assembled and maintains the world’s only database on suicide terrorism, found that in every suicide terrorist campaign between 1980 and 2001, the terrorists’ central objective was to expel a foreign government occupying their homeland. According to Pape:

[S]uicide terrorism […] can be sustained over time only when there already exists a high degree of commitment among the potential pool of recruits. The most important goal that a community can have is the independence of its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence or control. As a result, a strategy of suicide terrorism is most likely to be used to achieve nationalist goals, such as gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland territory and expelling foreign military forces from that territory.

The global jihadist movement has thankfully been delegitimized and fragmented over the past decade as the United States has abandoned the “heavy footprint” occupation strategy it pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed its way to (modest) counterterrorism success. The Obama and Trump administrations allowed local actors on the ground to defeat the Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria, while assassinating key terrorist leaders and disrupting transnational networks from over the horizon; this steady degradation of militant capabilities caused pan-Islamist ideology to lose its allure and led many regional terrorist franchises to disaffiliate themselves from al-Qaeda and ISIS.

But a new “crusader” occupation of the Middle East (as Bin Laden would have put it) — and one that involves the displacement of even more Palestinians than the Nakba — may be exactly what it would take to reinvigorate and re-internationalize the jihadist movement. As the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence found in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate on Trends in Global Terrorism, after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraq “[had] become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

It is common to hear that hatred of Israel and the United States is already at a fever pitch in Gaza and the Muslim world, and there is nothing that they could do to provoke more fighters to take up arms or heighten the jihadi threat. But this is obviously false, or else the Gaza War would be over by now. According to U.S. intelligence, Israel has killed nearly as many Hamas fighters as there were on October 7, 2023, but for every fighter who’s been killed, another has joined to take his place. Even U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt — no fans of Hamas — have publicly opposed Trump’s plan because they don’t want to radicalize more members of their conservative populations.

It is hard to overstate exactly how bad it would be for the United States to commit — or at least permit — the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Expelling the population would require potentially years of urban warfare by Israel or the United States, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and engendering unprecedented resistance from the local population and the Muslim world. Affiliates of al-Qaeda and ISIS that have focused on local disputes over the past several years may return to attacking the American homeland. Thousands of jihadists might descend on the Sinai Peninsula — or wherever the Palestinians are expelled to — as they did on Iraq after 2003. More Americans could die at home and abroad than did on 9/11.

The only thing about Trump’s plan that is reassuring is that it is so far removed from reality that it is doubtful whether it will actually come to pass. But the odds are nevertheless worrying. When Trump’s envoy met with Israeli officials last month to discuss the issue of expelling the Palestinians, the Israelis told their country’s Channel 13 news service that they “got the impression that the Americans are serious about this idea, that it’s not just talk.”

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Most likely, the United States will give a green light to the Israelis to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza but continue to support it only from afar. No matter what happens, however, we can be sure that even if the president supports policies that would get thousands of Americans killed, he only does it because he believes in putting America First.

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