Matein Khalid
Trump’s vision of Gaza as a “riviera of the Middle East” at his press conference with Netanyahu, whose IDF warplanes, drones and tanks just butchered 45,000 Gazans is as deranged as it is surreal. Trump views Gaza as a New York real estate development opportunity as if he was gentrifying Spanish Harlem or the Bronx. I can imagine his zest at the idea of Trump Towers and Trump branded golf courses sprouting up all over the Med waterfront with construction financed by GCC petrodollars, security provided by the US Marines and branding royalties to enrich the Big Guy.
It is politically impossible for Congress to authorize battalions of American troops to a land haunted by 75 years of war, military occupation, terrorism and intense anti-US hatred since almost all the bombs and shells that turned Gaza into rubble were manufactured in the land of the brave and the home of the free – the US of A.
The messiah of MAGA must surely know that sending troops to the Middle East violates a core political conviction of his political base. The same anti-war revulsion that he himself voiced when George W. Bush went to war in Iraq and Obama escalated the “forever war” in Afghanistan. I now begin to wonder if cognitive decay in the Oval Office was a Biden affliction alone. Hopefully, Trump’s Gaza proposal was just an “art of the deal” ploy to unnerve Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Ayatollahs before Tariff Man goes kinetic on Israel’s enemies.
Who knows? Trump might even award Steve Witkoff, a New York property developer, the rights to build condos and launch offplan projects in Gaza. Diplomats and politicians have only gifted tragedy and horror to Gaza, so why not give a real estate developer a chance to forge peace? There is only one problem, the 2-million traumatized and badly abused Palestinians who still live in Gaza and who know that if they leave the enclave, Israel will never allow them to return.
It is unrealistic to expect President Sisi of Egypt to accept millions of Palestinian refugees since Hamas has a de facto Ikhwan DNA. King Abdulla of Jordan, whose education, health and human welfare budget was just gutted by Trump’s diktat to freeze US aid/UNRWA funds cannot welcome 2-million Gazans into his embattled kingdom.
In fact, the US brokered peace treaty with Israel expressly forbids mass population transfers to Jordan, the dream of ultra right-wing Zionist zealots from Jabotinsky to Ben-Gvir. These are the same nut cases who believe that God gifted Palestine to the Jews 2-millennia ago, just as He gifted London to the Romans since the legions and centurions of Emperor Claudius built Londinium on the River Thames. This Zionist claim is laughable, pure geopolitical chutzpah since Palestine was never a land without people for a people without land, with all due respect to Theodor Herzl and Lord Arthur Balfour.
If Trump ever wins a Nobel Peace Prize, it will not be for a Gaza Riviera. Try Beirut!
Also published on Medium.
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