For decades, the Middle East and North Africa have been regions in which United States (U.S.) politicians and policymakers have consistently focused their attention. With the reelection of Donald Trump, U.S. foreign policy has once again prioritized an imperialist desire to control the region. This sentiment is most evident through Trump’s recent proposal that the U.S. should “take over” or “own” the Gaza Strip and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”—an initiative that would amount to ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, according to the New York Times. Although Orientalist tropes such as this have remained a common theme in Western politicians’ depictions of the Middle East and North Africa, this land grab proposal marks a blatant manifestation of how the Trump administration wishes to dominate, restructure, and obtain authority over the Orient.

By describing how Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism demonstrates the West’s biased views of those in the East, it becomes clear that Trump’s past and recent foreign policy proposals align with this ideology. Said’s seminal text, Orientalism, is essential for understanding Western policies toward the East because it helps highlight how systems of representation work to maintain power structures that favor the Occident, or countries within Europe and America. These systems of representation are exhibited through ideas and stereotypes that have been rearticulated and renewed for centuries. These stereotypes are based upon European depictions of the Orient, or any person or group of people east of Europe, as lazy, gullible, mysterious, or deceptive—descriptions that work to supply the Orient with a specific “mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere,” according to Said. By positioning itself as contrary to the backward characteristics of the Orient, Western culture was thus able to gain a semblance of strength and superiority.

Such knowledge production by the West has stripped the Orient’s ability to authentically represent itself, leading to the adoption of binary conceptions of East versus West, us versus them, and Orient versus Occident, reducing diverse communities to monolithic and unchanging categorizations. This limited thinking fails to take into account that each individual has different lived experiences that influence the way they function in the world, just as every other ethnic group. As discussed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of borderlands, cultures can and do transform each other, and the results of this transformation tend to vary widely and change throughout time. Despite this, the Orientalist viewpoint has remained successful at sustaining itself because these social structures are able to simplify complex social problems into understandable concepts that emotionally resonate with individuals and reinforce their sense of belonging to the in-group.

A clear example of this is when the Bush administration constructed the conflict-supporting narrative for invading Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein obtained weapons of mass destruction and posed a grave threat to domestic and foreign security. In the administration’s argument, the conflict was framed as one between “civilization and barbarism,” where war was presented as the only means to achieve safety. In turn, these narratives have served as mechanisms for maintaining structures of power, hegemony, violence, and domination.

Since Trump first entered the political sphere, Orientalist language has remained central to his bid for presidency. From the early days of his first campaign, Trump bolstered anti-Muslim rhetoric with his proposal of the travel ban and focused on the idea of “Islamodiversion,” also known as the process of blaming Muslims to divert the inevitability of bad economic and political policies, a strategy that was also used against the Latinx immigrant community, as noted by researcher Mohsin Hassan Khan. Trump’s administration echoed these judgments, with Steve Bannon arguing that “Islam is not a religion of peace and the West is at war with Islam,” reinforcing civilization divides.

While this hateful discourse is not a new occurrence, it is important to recognize that Trump’s Orientalist stance has taken on a presumptuous and unprecedented tone, especially in light of the Israel-Hamas conflict. With Trump’s new proposal that Palestinians should permanently relocate to Egypt or Jordan, followed by U.S. control and reconstruction of the land, we can evidently see the Orientalist logic at play. In his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump stated that the Gaza Strip has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and that those who live there have been “very unlucky,” while at the same time failing to recognize that it was U.S. taxpayer dollars that facilitated Israel’s mass oppression of those in Gaza. By describing the conflict as one in which Palestinians are dangerous or simply “unlucky,” Trump is able to legitimize the privation of their equal treatment and deny their calls for self-determination with the aim of pursuing U.S. national interests.

Despite the breach of international law that this proposal would entail and the questionability of its implementation, Trump’s rhetoric is paving a dangerous pathway for extreme right-wing Israelis to justify the expansion of their borders, further harming the possibility of a two-state solution. Beyond the immediate effects this policy could have on the Israel-Hamas conflict, Trump risks creating instability within the Middle East by infringing on the sovereignty of countries such as Jordan and Egypt, negatively impacting the already fragile regional order and possibly triggering a wider war.

As demonstrated by Trump’s proposals, Orientalism continues to serve a pivotal role in the West’s policy construction toward the East. This patronizing way of thinking has long had dangerous implications for the Middle East, especially after World War I, in which France and Britain used this logic to arbitrarily restructure borders and dominate the region. In a similar manner, Orientalist thought continues to be harnessed to expand U.S.-Israeli control over the land at the expense of the demands and wishes of other Arab countries.