Donald Trump actually thinks he can recast Gaza as Mar-a-Gaza, which most definitely wouldn’t be the target, until the end of time, of the 2 million people sent to the corners of the world so that the rich and famous could bask in the glow of a luxurious Middle Eastern playground on their homeland.
“The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth,” Trump posted to his Truth Social vanity site on Thursday, walking back the efforts by his handlers to walk back his proclamation from earlier in the week that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” with the line “we’ll own it” thrown in for emphasis.
All it would take is displacing the 2 million people who call Gaza home.
No big deal there, right?
Trump, on Thursday, signaled that he would leave that minor detail to others – Israel would provide the military force, and he wants other Middle Eastern nations to take care of the resettlement, “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes.”
ICYMI
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the committee’s former chair, addressed the Trump plan in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, calling it, in a word, “wacky.”
“All that would do is let off the hook wealthy countries in that region, like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, who want to help on the on the rebuilding,” Warner said. “Let alone what it would say to the rest of the world about the 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza. This is the height of irresponsibility.”
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, echoed Warner’s assessment of the idea, going with the words “demented” and “deranged” in the place of “wacky” in his assessment.
“We’re not taking Gaza away from Palestinians, and we’re not taking anybody else’s land either. That’s for starters,” Kaine said. “Anybody who believes that the U.S. should be more militarily engaged in the Middle East must have been sleeping for the 25 years. Between 2001 and now, the U.S. efforts in the Middle East to nation-build, to think we could come in and solve everybody else’s problems for them, what did it lead to, other than the death of U.S. troops and contractors, the expenditure of trillions of dollars and massive destabilization of the region.”
And despite Trump insisting in his 6 a.m. social media post that “no soldiers by the U.S. would be needed,” the history in the region makes clear that you can’t just displace 2 million people from their homeland, forcibly resettle them in other countries, as they watch you turn their homeland into a playground for the world’s elites, and expect their reaction to be, we’re cool with all of this.
For a hint as to how we can actually expect displaced Palestinian Gazans to react, see: the recent history of the Middle East, 1948-present.
It will be hard for the rich and powerful to sun themselves on the beaches of the Mediterranean and sip their mai tais on rooftop lounges while dodging the hails of bullets from machine guns and the body parts strewn all about from attacks launched by suicide bombers.
Don’t book Mar-a-Gaza on Trivago just yet, is what I’m getting at there.
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Chris Graham
