Boris Johnson joked before a conference Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate would be a “fantastic place” to resettle the Palestinians he has threatened to evict from their homeland.
The former prime minister of the United Kingdom then used the comparison to shoot down Trump’s proposal to seize and take over Gaza and force its population to move to neighboring Arab countries, something human rights experts have said would amount to ethnic cleansing.
“I actually happened to be giving a speech in Florida the other day and I looked at the beach at Mar-a-Lago and I thought: ‘This is absolutely a fantastic place if you wanted to resettle millions of people from the Middle East, absolutely beautiful,’” Johnson told the World Government Summit in Dubai.
But he then noted that Mar-a-Lago belongs to someone, just like Gaza does: “It’s not gonna happen because somebody else owns it. And Gaza is in, in law, owned and occupied by people who have a right to be there.”
Mar-a-Lago
Quizzed by CNN International anchor Richard Quest, the former Conservative Party standard bearer—who attended Trump’s inauguration last month—said he is “sympathetic” to many of the president’s policies and considers him capable of “strong leadership.”
He also suggested Trump’s Gaza plan—which a top United Nations official slammed as illegal under international law—might be an effort to get people to reconsider the prospects of the Palestinian enclave, whose population was bombarded for 15 months by the Israeli military in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
The sustained bombardment, currently paused by a ceasefire agreement, led to tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths and the destruction of two-thirds of Gaza’s infrastructure.
“It’s not for me to try to analyze what the president is saying,” Johnson told the audience in Dubai. “But I think he’s inviting everybody to say, ‘Look, this place plainly does have great potential. It does have a wonderful location.’”
Trump appeared resolute Tuesday in his determination to claim the territory and transform it into what the real estate mogul-turned-politician billed as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it,” he said in the Oval Office, seated next to U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan, who flatly rejected Trump’s proposal and said his opposition—and that of the entire Arab world—was “steadfast.”
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