When I read that President Donald Trump proposed a U.S. takeover of Gaza, my stomach dropped. I felt a deep, searing grief. I remembered key moments in history that planted the seeds of tragedy,  wrecking of the lives of millions. You needn’t go so far back as the diplomatic blunders of August 1914. Something much more recent comes to mind: President George H. W. Bush’s decision to station U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia before the first Gulf War.

It seemed a sensible precaution at the time as the Cold War drew to a close. Who among us can say that in 1990 we foresaw what the use of American troops as a tripwire would lead to? That the Wahabi purists enraged by our presence would start a jihad against the U.S., which led not just to the burning towers of Sept. 11, 2001, but to the destruction of two Muslim nations, Afghanistan and Iraq? Who foresaw the deaths of some 600,000 civilians, and ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s almost 1 million Christians? All this comes before even mentioning our own butcher’s bill of thousands of dead or disabled servicemen, and trillions of wasted dollars.

We should all wish to avoid committing the next such strategic blunder that sucks us into futile, interminable war. It wasn’t the platform that got Donald Trump elected. Those of us who supported him should speak up loudly and stubbornly against further U.S. entanglement in the Israeli/Arab tragedy. It’s our duty to raise the alarm, to remind Americans of previous shiny, elite-approved plans by which Yankee ingenuity would press “reset,” and resolve intractable conflicts that benighted foreigners had gotten themselves into. Remember U.S. “advisors” in South Vietnam? U.S. Marines in Lebanon? How about our foreign aid programs in places like Haiti?

The only complex ethnic quarrel in recent years the U.S. actually did succeed in bringing some resolution to did not require the use of our troops. Instead, the conflict between the newly independent Croatia and Serbia, which the Clinton administration helped bring to an end in 1996, got there by tacitly approving large-scale forced population swaps. That is, in plain English, by ethnic cleansing.

It’s a tragic fact, but nation-building in the modern era all through Eastern and Central Europe happened that way—with modernizing or revolutionary regimes homogenizing the baroque, multi-ethnic map that prevailed before 1914. We mostly agree not to talk about the brutal means involved, except when we speak of the Holocaust — a “cleansing” so murderous that it couldn’t be ignored. Almost nobody mentions the cruel expulsions after 1945 of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and other ethnic minorities removed by Stalinist regimes; those crimes are the postwar consensus’s filthy little secret.

If (God forbid) the U.S. really does take on the Sisyphean task of refurbishing the newly flattened Dresden that is the Gaza Strip, will we use the one time-tested and effective, if monstrous, means of nation-building known to modern man — ethnic cleansing?

Reports and leaks and social media posts emerging from Trump and his team leave this an open question. It’s such an explosive subject that few Trump supporters are willing to touch it. Nobody wants to consider the almost inevitable blowback: The use of U.S. troops to permanently remove the indigenous population from the region would enflame a hatred of America among 1 billion Muslims that would last for generations. A new, more brutal and futile “War on Terror” would be the result, leaving Trump’s legacy like George W. Bush’s: a tragedy and a farce.

At The American Conservative, my friend and frequent co-author, Jason Jones, had the gumption to grab this third rail with both hands. On behalf of his nonprofit Vulnerable People Project, Jones has been traveling the region, meeting with Turkish, Kurdish, Christian, and Islamist officials to advocate for desperate, undefended civilians and religious minorities. He has been fighting to get crucial food and medical aid to the perhaps most abandoned group on our planet, the ancient Christian communities in Gaza. The Israelis detest them, Hamas has no use for them, and U.S. Christians abandon them. But should the U.S. directly participate in forcibly removing them, along with their Muslim neighbors? Leave aside the morality of ethnic cleansing in itself and ask yourself: Is it in America’s interests to organize a Palestinian Trail of Tears?

Should Trump insist on further inserting the U.S. government into this quagmire, Jones offers an idea that could minimize the damage, both to our moral fiber and to our prospects of future peace: If the Gazans must indeed be moved out (temporarily or permanently) of a now uninhabitable hellscape, they shouldn’t be shipped to an unwilling Jordan or Egypt, or sent off to swell the disgruntled Muslim communities of beleaguered Spain or Ireland. Instead, the U.S. should resettle these Palestinians with … the Palestinian Authority, just a few short miles away.

They’d be governed by their own people, allowed to partake in elections, and the P.A. (which hates Hamas) would energetically detect and punish real supporters of that murderous organization. There is plenty of land available. The Muslim world wouldn’t object.

But Israel’s current government would object, and object vociferously. The small but influential group of dead-end ethnonationalists in Israel who wish to see the West Bank purged of Arabs and populated by settlers from Brooklyn would pull every string it has to prevent such a sane, humane, and politically prudent outcome. Will Trump stand up to them? If he does, he will grasp the best chance at peace and decent co-existence for war-weary Israelis and Palestinians alike. And he will be putting America first.