The New York Times reported on Friday that US President Donald Trump praised the 2020 Abraham Accords that established normalization and formal relations between Israel and four Arab countries as one of the biggest foreign policy achievements of his first term.

Like his predecessor Joe Biden, Trump is seeking to achieve his long-sought goal of persuading Saudi Arabia to join the normalization agreements, “but he may have dealt himself a serious setback. Trump’s proposal to transfer 2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and then rebuild the enclave as a Middle Eastern Riviera has upset those he needs to seal the deal,” the newspaper said.

Trump’s idea of a quick exit from Gaza has been rejected by Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia issued a statement just before dawn after Trump floated the proposal Tuesday evening alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The kingdom has made clear that it stands by its demand for a Palestinian state before normalizing relations with Israel. In a statement on Wednesday, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said the precondition the Saudis have insisted on for the past year is “non-negotiable and non-compromising.” The statement directly contradicts statements by Trump, who told reporters in Washington on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia had dropped its demand for a Palestinian state. One of the most influential members of the Saudi royal family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief, said what the US president is proposing would amount to “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and former ambassador to the United States, told CNN on Wednesday that Trump “will get a lot of criticism from the leadership here” not only about the lack of wisdom in what he is proposing but also the injustice of “ethnic cleansing.”

The newspaper notes that by proposing to “cleanse” Gaza, Trump has earned nothing but suspicion and anger in Arab countries. Efforts by the US administration to ease the situation, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggesting that Gazans would only be temporarily relocated, have failed to calm the countries and peoples of the region.

The Palestinian issue and the Palestinians’ right to establish their independent state are the core issue for the Arabs, who consider the displacement of the Palestinians to be forbidden because it would liquidate the Palestinian issue and tear apart their hopes of establishing an independent state.

Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that Trump has suggested he could persuade to accept Gazans, have publicly insisted that they will never accept a mass exodus of Palestinians. Officials, journalists and analysts in both countries say history speaks for itself: When Palestinians were forced from their homes, they were not allowed to return.

It is also noteworthy that since Israel launched its brutal war on Gaza, the two countries have taken in Palestinians in need of medical care. Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medically and health-related displaced persons, as well as others who have sought temporary refuge from the Strip. Jordan, whose population is mostly of Palestinian origin, is treating dozens of wounded from Gaza, according to the newspaper.

The newspaper quotes Abdel Moneim Saeed Ali, a pro-government Egyptian political analyst and writer, as saying that participating in any forced or permanent displacement of Palestinians from Gaza would be “morally and legally terrifying.” Given the broad support the Saudi public has for the Palestinians, it would be difficult for the government to accept any deal that does not address their aspirations for an independent state on their historical land.

“Public anger in the kingdom over the war, and now over Trump’s proposal to evacuate Gaza, has complicated the prospects of reaching an agreement with Israel that was already difficult to implement,” the newspaper says.

Before Trump took office for his second term, there was some reason for modest optimism that Saudi-Israeli normalization might move forward. A ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement was reached on the eve of Trump’s inauguration on January 20. “The new US president has for years fostered a good working relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, but now some tensions appear to be emerging in that relationship.”