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When I last wrote about Gaza in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s re-election as President, I perhaps naively surmised that Trump might reprise his February 2017 meeting in Washington with Netanyahu when he advised him to “step back a little bit” on Israeli ambitions to increase settlements on the West Bank, by urging restraint on Gaza.
Quite the opposite it would seem. For as the world now knows, President Trump used the press conference following his private meeting with his chum “Bibi” to make some rather unexpected proposals.
You can watch the whole thing below and even if you have the sound turned down Netanyahu’s body language itself – and in sharp contrast to February 2017 – would have told you a lot.
Trump began by stating his aim to “restore peace to a very troubled region” before outlining a plan that some might think is a recipe for doing anything other than that. Trump began by describing Gaza as a “symbol of death” and an “unlucky place for a long time.”
Netanyahu, who has contributed to making it a much unluckier and deadlier place to live over the past year and more, leaned in to hear what Trump’s solution to this conundrum might be. That was, in effect, to deport the “1.8 million people who live in Gaza,” thus ending their run of “bad luck.” Move them away from the “demolition site” to appease the man standing beside him whose armed forces turned it into a demolition site.
And to put the paper hat on it, the United States will take over the Gaza Strip and “do a job on it.” In creating this economic miracle out of the bomb site, Trump promised that it will “create jobs for the people of the area.” Which people? He had just said they were all going to be dispersed into camps somewhere else.
Ironically, before he took questions on Gaza, Trump referred to his government’s success in removing illegal and unwanted immigrants. Does he – or rather his script writer for it was noticeable that the President was far more script reliant than is his normal practice – believe that Jordan or Egypt will be doing cartwheels over several millions more Palestinians arriving? Or that European states including Ireland will be happy to accept them, aided of course by American foundation-funded NGOs.
President Donald J Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu of Israel hold a news conference in the East Room of the White House
During the questions and answers section one reporter did take Trump up on who would be the beneficiaries of the fabulous redevelopment of the Palestinian-free Gaza Strip. Well, it would be a “beautiful place,” for “World people” apparently. “I envision world people living there, The world’s people.”
Palestine for All. Sounds familiar.
NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell asked both leaders if the Gaza plan was simply the “taking over of a sovereign territory” or perhaps just a cover for the further expansion of Israel. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu addressed that fully with Bibi content to respond that perhaps the Trump plan might take the whole question to a “higher level.”
Free of the inconvenience of the people who have lived there, Gaza could become “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Perhaps with casinos and who knows perhaps a new location for Love Island or some other crap. It reminded me of Russell Kirk’s warning in the 1950s that the expansion of American capital globally without cognisance of the values and the respect for culture that ought to define conservatism would lead to a “hell of universal vulgarity.”
Speaking of which he responded to a perfectly valid question from an Afghan woman journalist – which even cloth ears here could hear perfectly – by responding that he could not understand her but that she had a beautiful voice and a beautiful accent. One suspects the Prez is more familiar with the works of Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise than the doyen of American traditional conservatism.
For some, Trump’s middle eastern plans smack of those of his predecessors; Obama, Bush and Clinton. No one denies that Saddam and the others who were the ostensible targets of the “regime change” wars were bad eggs. It is also beyond dispute that the consequences, ongoing, of the American wars were a disaster.
That is especially true for the people who were and are, if they have survived, living in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan and other countries who have been part of the collateral damage. Sometimes it is as well to leave well enough alone.
If the Americans were that concerned about human rights and freedom they would be actively attempting to overthrow the vile regime in North Korea. Hell, they would be actively attempting to overthrow the vile regime in Beijing, built – as Goethe said of the Rule of Genghis Khan – on “souls devoured without measure.”
Trump himself recognised the error of America interfering wherever it pleased at the very end of the press conference when he said that “We should never have gone in there” and helped to create and perpetuate the mess. Well then.
Apart from all of the global strategizing, there appears little account is to be taken of the Palestinians themselves. Of course it is true that their official leaderships have served them badly. Utterly corrupt on the one hand in Fatah and the PLO; Islamist extremists on the side of Hamas. The latter have shown that they have no compunctions when it comes to suppressing their rivals and subjecting all aspects of civil society from the media to trade unions to women’s groups to state suppression.
The solution – according to Israeli extremists and now seemingly the US – is to dismantle any semblance of self-rule and autonomy and disperse the Palestinians into more refugee camps, or to Europe. We hear endlessly of the past suffering of other people – sometimes as an excuse for bad behaviour on their part.
You can only plan to effectively destroy a people if you believe that they are lesser people than yourself and your kind. As did those who murdered Jews, enslaved black Africans, and sought to destroy the Irish people. Soulless people as it were.
Well, the Palestinians have souls. Clearly some people think that they might not, just as once some people thought that the Sioux and Arapaho might not have had souls if they stood in the way of the expansion of the American dream.
The Palestinians too it seems can have a reservation with a casino and a beachfront but maybe not where they were born and where their ancestors have lived from time immemorial. We do not need the pre-Christian parts of the Bible to know that. That’s the text that seemingly Trump is also pondering to see whether Israel should have all of the land mentioned as their own in the parts of Christian scripture they like – before we became all soft when Christ came to remind us of our fallen nature.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock /Anas-Mohammed. Palestinians inspect their destroyed homes, after an Israeli airstrike, amid ongoing heavy fighting between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, on August 7, 2024.
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