If nine out of ten people in the Gaza Strip have lost their homes, and some of those homes might not be rebuilt for more than a decade, even forgetting the rest of the infrastructure required to support a community, where are these people supposed to live in the interim? In tents? In the rubble?
Whether you think President Donald Trump is crazy like a fox or just plain crazy, there’s one thing we can all agree on: No one alive right now, be they well over a hundred years old, has ever seen any foreign policy even close to this bold in its aspirations and execution. How bold is it? It’s not even confined to the planet Earth, seeking to set the American flag on Mars as part of a refreshed Manifest Destiny as he outlined in his inaugural address. Even before taking office, the President-elect had set his sights on what he perceived to be a combination of national security threats and incursions in the Western Hemisphere, taking aim at Panama for more closely partnering with China to administer that world-famous canal in recent years and at Greenland as an essential bulwark against Russian submarines and other potential calamities from our adversaries. Simultaneously, he has joked more than enough times to take him at least somewhat seriously about Canada becoming the 51st state. In that sense, we were all warned, whether enthused by these ideas or repulsed, but still, I don’t think anyone was prepared for the President’s bold, possibly insane, vision for the Gaza Strip after the Israel Hamas war has ended. “The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” President Trump said at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area, do a real job, do something different.” In full real estate mogul mode, he continued to claim Gaza, located on the beautiful Mediterranean Sea had the potential to be the “Riviera of the Middle East,” “You build really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying.” My lovely wife and I were cooking dinner while this press conference was on. She peeked into the family room, turned around to me and said, “The headline claims the US is going to take over Gaza? What are they saying on CNN?” We would find out the next morning, when Stephen Collinson practically exploded in indignation in a supposed “analysis” of the plan, if one can call a few statements of vision anything resembling a plan.
He began by calling it “the most outlandish idea in the history of US Middle East peacemaking,” before embarking on an increasingly wild string of speculations, substituting what he thinks the President said in his anti-Trump imagination versus what was actually said. “Trump’s comments – delivered throughout the day, first at an executive action signing ceremony, and later alongside Netanyahu in the Oval Office and at a joint news conference – were a landmark moment in the history of US peacemaking in the Middle East. To see an American president endorse what would be the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their home, in an exodus that would subvert decades of US policy, international law and basic humanity, was breathtaking.” “Breathtaking” is a description I can agree with at least, and to be completely honest, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it as an actual policy rather than a statement of vision, especially as a reformed believer in our previous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. By any accurate reckoning, our track record for nation building, especially in the Middle East, is not good, not even close. Atrocious might be a better word. President Trump himself has previously said that we’ve completely wasted trillions of dollars over the past two decades with no return. As he put in 2019, “Across the Middle East, we have seen anguish on a colossal scale. We have spent $8 trillion on wars in the Middle East, never really wanting to win those wars. But after all that money was spent and all of those lives lost, the young men and women gravely wounded — so many — the Middle East is less safe, less stable, and less secure than before these conflicts began.” In other words, there’s reason, a lot of reason, to be skeptical of the notion that we can turn the Gaza Strip into a beachside paradise. At the same time, there is also no reason to believe the strip can continue to exist as it does now, if a region that has been mostly destroyed by almost a year and a half of war can even be said to exist in any real sense. According to Al Jazeera, some nine out of ten residents have already been displaced. As they reported last month, “A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas is set to take effect on Sunday, January 19, after an agreement was announced on Wednesday to end Israel’s devastating 15-month assault on the Gaza Strip. The three-phase agreement includes a temporary ceasefire, the release of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners, and the return of displaced Palestinians, though many homes in Gaza have been destroyed.” They continued, “Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 46,707 Palestinians and injured 110,265 – an average of 100 Palestinians killed every day over the past 467 days. Gaza has an estimated population of around 2.3 million people, half of whom are children. There has been a six percent reduction from that population since the war began.” Of the remaining 94%, “Some 9 out of 10 Gazans have been displaced – and many of them have had to move multiple times since the war began…According to analysis by US-based researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek and Corey Scher, overall at least 60 percent percent of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed.” They repeated, “Around 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced, making it among the highest recorded in modern conflicts and, for many, their neighbourhoods have been completely eradicated, including essential services such as hospitals and educational facilities. That is not to mention the collapse of vital infrastructure such as sanitation systems and electricity services.”
Regarding the future of the region, Al Jazeera claimed, “Some experts estimate that it will take at least a decade to remove the 42 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza.” Clearly, at least in mind, this is what President Trump was reacting to. If nine out of ten people have lost their homes, and some of those homes might not be rebuilt for more than a decade, even forgetting the rest of the infrastructure required to support a community, where are these people supposed to live in the interim? In tents? In the rubble? Even assuming they would be willing to do so, how are they going to provide for themselves under these conditions when there is no economy to speak of, not even essential services like garbage removal or running water? While the rest of the world, including the previous administration under President Biden, has been blithely talking about the need for a two state solution, they’ve been ignoring the reality that there is nothing left from which to carve out a Palestinian state, speaking wishful thoughts rather than actionable ones. If we were to take that point of view to its logical conclusion, that leaves two options. Either we leave the Gaza Strip as a war zone, a broken, desolate, and destroyed place, and allow the residents to fend for themselves somehow, or we subsidize them forever, leaving them to a subsistent existence, begging for their food, medical care, and other necessities from other countries. Further, even this subsidy approach ignores the inconvenient truth that the current government and non-governmental organizations that serve the Gaza Strip are notoriously corrupt, siphoning off most of the funding and material goods long before it gets to the people that need help. Additionally, it has long been considered a red line that Israel itself cannot occupy the Gaza Strip for obvious reasons. If you accept that and I certainly do, who else is there that can do the job as President Trump said? For that matter, I’m not even sure we can do it, having been proven wrong before in other Middle Eastern countries, but at the least, I can respect President Trump for speaking realistically about what has happened on the ground and where these people stand, and I can appreciate the boldness of his willingness to step in and reimagine the strip as something that might be a true destination, one of the envies and marvels of the world.
Sadly, this didn’t prevent Mr. Collinson and others from miring themselves in the art of the impossible, attacking President Trump for things he didn’t say and might never have even contemplated. After declaring the idea “absurd for multiple reasons,” he insisted without evidence that a forced relocation is required, comparing it to crimes of past tyrants, despite that millions have already relocated. “If the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy led such a forced relocation, he’d mirror crimes of past tyrants and create an excuse for every autocrat to launch mass ethnic cleansing programs against vulnerable minorities.” He attributed the vision itself, bizarrely, to a “brainwave” that is “on brand,” a “president utterly unconstrained by the law, the Constitution or anyone around him stopping him from doing exactly as he wants.” Like many others, Mr. Collinson bemoaned the fact that the Palestinian people appear to be an afterthought with no control over their own future, “there’s an important missing element — any sense that the Palestinian people would have a choice in their own destiny.” He continued, “The president’s obliviousness to the aspirations of Palestinians and his assumption that they’d prefer a modern housing development elsewhere showed a stunning naivety about the causes of the conflict.” Left unsaid: These same Palestinian people have been living under a theocratic regime for almost two decades, one they voted into power themselves, and one that launched the most brutal and deadly attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. I’m a pretty firm believer in self-determination, but no one can seriously believe we can simply hand power back to people that stone women in the streets and throw gay people from buildings, much less send them palettes of cash, with no strings attached? Incredibly, this appears to be what the prior administration truly believed. Once again, it seems to me at least that President Trump has recognized, correctly, that the time for self-determination is long past, was ended irrevocably on October 7, 2023, and it’s not coming back until after the area is rebuilt. As he put it when asked whether they should have the right to return, “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.” The reporter replied: “But it’s their home, sir. Why would they leave?” Except it’s not. There aren’t any homes left. They’re living in “makeshift shelters” even according to Mr. Collinson. As hard as it is for me to say it, the unavoidable conclusion of all this, one which President Trump and President Trump alone is bold enough to say: The Palestinians have no future except what we give them. The President is planning or at least hoping to give them a bright one. Does a vision get any bolder than that? Earlier, I mentioned the Panama Canal, which was spearheaded by Teddy Roosevelt against massive opposition even in his own government. The French had already failed. The task was thought to be impossible. Roosevelt, however, considered it vital to the future. Whether or not President Trump proceeds, Teddy himself would be proud because we haven’t seen anything like it since.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 