In or around November 2016, in the days after the first election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, one of my favourite writers cracked a joke that still sometimes makes me chuckle. “If you think this is all a little undignified”, he wrote, “just wait until a few years after he leaves office for the last time, when all the living Presidents are invited to the grand opening of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, Casino, and Golf Resort”.
I thought about that joke a lot yesterday, reading and listening to some of the reaction to the American President’s plans to turn the Gaza strip into something more akin to the Las Vegas strip, hopefully replete with casinos, American-style titty bars, and an enormous holographic sphere. Say what you want about the man, but he’s a real estate developer first, last, and always.
Anyway, it was a classic example of what Trump supporters always say about the man: Take him seriously, not literally. This test was largely failed in Ireland, as Sinn Fein were straight on the blower to the media with a Press Release about how the new Irish Government must take strong action or something to make sure that Gaza was not deleted, and the Irish Times started intoning gravely about world peace, and Morning Ireland led with the story in the tones usually only reserved for the death of someone truly blessed, like Nelson Mandela or Mary Robinson or Jeremy Corbyn.
It is, I think, a safe bet that the United States will not take part in the forcible evacuation of the civilians of Gaza to other regions in the middle east or to anyone else, and that Gaza will not become Las Vegas on the Med. The cost to the United States simply does not justify the reward, which reflects some of the true tragedy in all of this.
There’s a bigger point, though: Trump’s instincts on this are not actually bad. What’s arguably worse are the instincts of the Palestinians and their supporters who seem to believe and accept that building a Medditeranean Riviera, or whatever Trump called it, could indeed only happen with their removal.
I heard a lot of things yesterday in response to Trump’s plan. You know what I didn’t hear? A single prominent Palestinian or Pro-Palestinian voice saying “hang on, we can have this Mr. President – but for the locals. We’d love to work with you to make it happen”.
There’s something very depressing about that, I think. In that not even a Palestinian supporter – not even someone truly committed to the welfare of the Palestinian people – appeared capable of envisaging a Riviera on the Med populated by, and benefitting, Palestinians. The implicit understanding appears to be that the two options are: 1) Palestinians stay, and continue their endless and fruitless war with the Israelis for decades into the future or 2) The Palestinians are ethnically cleansed from Gaza, and Trump makes a desert and calls it peace, before observing that Vegas, too, was built in the desert.
I use the phrase “ethnically cleansed” advisedly, incidentally, because that is indeed what POTUS is proposing: That Gaza be cleansed of its current population in favour of a more peaceable, pro-Israeli, and pro-American crowd. Those who already live there, like the biblical ancestors of the same Israelis they fight against, would be cast into Egypt to wander around the wilderness for decades, seeking a new home.
Of course, western countries have a long history of similar ethnic cleansing after wars. Around this time last year, I was in the wonderful Polish city of Wroclaw (they pronounce that “Vrot-Slav”, by the way) which was, until 1945, the wonderful German city of Breslau. Every German in it was told, at the end of that war, to pack up their bags, leave their homes, and march west. Meanwhile, Poles evicted from modern day Ukraine and Belarus were moved in, in their stead. This displacement was accompanied by a sustained campaign of rape against German women in what is now Poland, by victorious soviet soldiers. The whole affair – along with much of the German territory in the east – was an act of ethnic cleansing that won the approval of most of the world. Victor’s logic. All this took place, it is worth remembering, within living memory.
The tragedy here is that in theory, none of this should be necessary or even worthy of consideration because it should not be an either/or. It is only an either/or because of the perverse incentives that the conflict creates for those who support the Palestinian cause to maintain Gaza as – and I’m sorry now to be blunt – an absolute shithole.
Trump’s casinos-for-Palestine campaign cannot work with Palestinians present for one very simple reason: That a successful and wealthy and rebuilt and commercialized Gaza strip full of gainfully employed Palestinians profiting from fat American tourists with fat wallets would actually put an end to the Palestinian cause. The cause requires Gaza to be, regardless of what the actual circumstances are, “an open air prison”. The cause requires deprivation and poverty. The cause requires the romance of the Al-Qassam brigades, or whatever lefty-speak for Hamas is, these days. That in short is why it didn’t occur to anyone yesterday, on the pro-Palestinian side, to say “why can’t we do this, but keep the Palestinians?”
A lot of this, of course, comes down to religion. Many westerners, I think, make the mistake of listening to phrases like “free Palestine” without listening to what Palestinians refer to when speaking to each other. Because then, usually, it is not “free Palestine” but “liberate Al-Quds”, meaning the Holy City of Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock.
A commercially successful and independent Gaza, with a moderate Government, rebuilt into the Riviera of the Middle East, with prosperity for all Palestinians, simply is of no interest to too many Palestinians, and their supporters.
That’s why it will never happen. And frankly, that’s a tragedy. As he often does, I think Trump has hit on a key point, in an almost accidental way.