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From Mirage To Mayhem: Trump’s Gaza Vision vs. The “Greater Israel” Agenda

By Editor on 2nd October 2025 • ( 0 )

From Mirage To Mayhem: Trump’s Gaza Vision vs. The “Greater Israel” Agenda

Beneath the talk of hostages and ceasefires lies a bid for control of Gaza’s untapped gas. Trump’s plan pits Washington’s energy ambitions against Israel’s Greater Israel dream, while Palestinians denounce it as occupation in new clothing.

After nearly two years of devastation in Gaza, US President Donald Trump’s freshly released 20-point peace plan has once again thrust the enclave into the geopolitical spotlight. Unveiled this week alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the blueprint promises an immediate ceasefire, hostage exchanges, and a demilitarized Gaza under transitional international oversight.

Chaired by Trump himself and featuring former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as a key figure on the “Board of Peace”, this body would supposedly steer “redevelopment” until the Palestinian Authority reforms sufficiently to assume control. The proposal has elicited cautious applause from Arab leaders in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo, who see in it a potential pathway to regional stability.

Yet, beneath this veneer, the plan resurrects a spectre supposedly long buried in the annals of Anglo-American foreign policy: the notion of Western stewardship over Palestinian lands, complete with economic zones primed for Gulf investments and, implicitly, access to untapped offshore gas riches.

This is no mere diplomatic flourish. As a matter of fact, Trump’s vision echoes his own earlier statements, dating back to February 2025, when he bluntly declared that the US should “take over” the Gaza Strip” and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” with America somehow “owning” the territory outright.

By May, amid a Gulf tour heavy on energy deals, the American leader doubled down, floating the idea of a US-led “freedom zone” with Palestinians resettled elsewhere while Washington dismantled Hamas infrastructure and rebuilt it with luxury resorts and job-creating hubs. Not surprisingly, since February, critics have been labelling such proposals ethnic cleansing, though Trump has typically brushed it off as pragmatic deal-making.

These statements align with underreported US intelligence assessments highlighting Gaza Marine gas field — estimated at 1.1 trillion cubic feet of reserves, potentially worth $4 billion in total revenue — as a strategic asset amid Europe’s scramble for non-Russian energy.

Thus far, Israel has blocked Palestinian exploitation of the field, citing security risks, but Trump’s plan cleverly sidesteps full annexation by Israel, instead paving the way for an Anglo-Saxon-flavored administration that could funnel revenues through international channels, thus benefiting US firms and allies like Egypt, which eyes pipelines to its LNG terminals.

One may recall that such Western meddling in the Holy Land is hardly unprecedented — and far from benign. In 1946, Zionist militants from the Irgun, led by a young Menachem Begin, detonated a bomb at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, then the British Mandate’s administrative nerve centre, killing 91 to drive out the British Mandate. This terrorist act, part of a broader insurgency against colonial rule, exemplifies the deep-seated Zionist aversion to foreign tutelage over what they viewed as nascent Jewish territory.

Fast-forward eight decades, and Trump’s blueprint — complete with Blair’s endorsement — revives that ghost. For Tel Aviv’s far-right, who have long championed a “Greater Israel” encompassing Gaza’s biblical corridors, this smacks of Western neocolonial overreach. Bezalel Smotrich, the hardline Religious Zionism leader and finance minister, has already signalled unease, warning against any dilution of Israeli sovereignty. Albeit cautiously welcoming part of the proposal, he denounced what he describes as “entrusting our security to foreigners and illusions that someone else will do the work for us.”

No wonder Netanyahu has vowed to “finish the job” if Hamas balks, a reminder that Jerusalem believes to retain the military upper hand, even as it relies on over $150 billion in cumulative US aid since 1948.

Yet, despite all the potential for collision, there is plenty of room for some convergence, for the time being. Trump’s plan complements his February ambitions by outsourcing the messy optics of direct US occupation to a Blair-led British-American consortium, while ensuring demilitarization milestones that would safeguard Israel. The IDF’s phased withdrawal — tied to hostage releases within 72 hours and the release of 250 Palestinian prisoners — meets Netanyahu’s red lines, including no Palestinian statehood and retained security perimeters.

In what appears to be a response to charges of ethnic cleansing, the document explicitly states no one will be forced to leave, though voluntary emigration to Jordan or Egypt is “encouraged”, which aligns anyway with Israeli far-right fantasies of a depopulated enclave ripe for settlements. Expert Michel Chossudovsky, in his June analysis, already captured this tension succinctly: Trump’s (initial) push to rebrand Gaza as a US territory somehow — complete with casinos and mansions funded by Gulf petrodollars — aims squarely at commandeering Gaza Marine’s gas, thus sidelining Israel’s “Greater Israel” maximalism in favour of American energy dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, as I’ve written before.

Trump’s plan is less about peace than about resource control, and it thereby risks undermining Tel Aviv’s ideological project. It has sparked outrage in Ramallah too, decried as a “farce” that perpetuates occupation under a new guise.

This project echoes the ill-fated neocolonial occupation of Iraq, which devolved into a $2 trillion fiasco and ended up empowering Iran — precisely the Tehran bogeyman Netanyahu now pressures Trump to confront.

Here, too, Tel Aviv’s itch for an anti-Iran war clashes with Washington’s war-weary calculus; Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff may have brokered the January 2025 ceasefire, but leveraging Israel’s UN vote against Ukraine aid exposed how the current American presidency is relatively bent on rebalancing the American-Israeli relationship. This complex enough relationship is further complicated by the intricacies of the so-called “Israel Lobby” and espionage/kompromat allegations, with the defence sector also being a power player in this equation.

In this cauldron, convergence on security and resources might cover underlying rifts, but the collision looms: a US-flavoured Gaza erodes Greater Israel’s biblical claims, potentially igniting far-right domestic revolt in Tel Aviv — not to mention sidelining Palestinian leadership.

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.