Donald Trump’s Gaza proposals are the equivalent of a negotiating nuclear bomb

A lot of people, ranging from sensible American patriots to hard-left Hamas supporters, are in a tizzy because Trump said the U.S. will take over Gaza and remove the entire Gazan population. I’m not worried. I think this was the brilliant opening in a negotiation with the Arab nations surrounding Israel and with the Gazans themselves.

Here’s what Trump proposed:

The first: that the U.S. would take over the territory. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” Trump said in a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’ll own it ... We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal ... the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The second: that Gaza’s entire population would relocate to other countries. “ We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this, and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and, frankly, bad luck,” he said.

Image made using AI and a YouTube screen grab.

The first proposal sounds insane because Gaza is a tar baby, and no one, especially an American president, should get us stuck to that one. The second requires coercing surrounding Arab nations, who want the so-called “Palestinians” as much as they want the plague. Both have the potential to destroy their countries.

CNN spoke for many hysterical leftists in dismissing both ideas:                          

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.

Trump followed up with the most imperialist reflex yet of a second term in which he’s already threatened to annex the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada. He envisaged a real estate deal whereby he’d assume responsibility for Gaza and mastermind a job-creating urban regeneration project. He called it an American “ownership position.” A better phrase would be colonialism for the 21st century.

[snip]

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.

His brainwave, however, is on brand for a second Trump term that has seen the president utterly unconstrained by the law, the Constitution or anyone around him stopping him from doing exactly as he wants.

Trump, you see, is an insanely stupid megalomaniac genius. And no, leftists aren’t bothered by the oxymoron that sees “insanely stupid” and “evil genius” tied together.

In fact, as Trump himself said, he is a very stable genius. Scott Adams, after thinking the matter over, gets it:

I hate that sleeping on this changed my opinion.

First reaction:

Hell no. I hate everything about this.

Current opinion:

Trump just ended a permawar between Hamas and Israel by informing them they will no longer have a common border. . . one way or another.

It's not a bluff. But it will have the effect of "sharpening" the thinking of everyone in the region. I'd expect some frantic counteroffers.

In his inimitable way, Trump is generating new options in a land that had none. And he's doing it by presenting himself as the "common enemy" to both sides. (Here I am assuming Israel's government is choking on this idea too.)

The last thing I want is the USA owning Gaza. But if it's also the last thing all the countries in that region want, something productive could come out of it.

That’s exactly right. Everyone in the region is worried that Trump, who has spent his first two weeks ripping apart the Deep State in America, is just crazy enough to do what he says.

Keep in mind that the local Arab nations (e.g., Jordan and Egypt) have ensured that the people in Gaza and the West Bank stay radicalized and as far away from them as possible. Doing so helps them retain their credibility in the eternal Muslim battle to reclaim the land “from the river to the sea” and keeps their own people’s attention away from internal mismanagement and abuse.

Meanwhile, the Muslim occupiers in Gaza (most arrived in the last 200 years) don’t want to find themselves as subordinate people in other Muslim-Arab countries. Indeed, for all they know, Trump will ship them to El Salvador’s brutal, overcrowded, gang-ridden prisons.

Suddenly, the stakes are too high for the Gazans and for the surrounding Arab nations.

During his first term, Trump made inroads with the people occupying Gaza and the West Bank by taking things off the table when they were intransigent during negotiations rather than attempting to bribe them with ever more “stuff” (all at Israel’s expense). This time around, he’s not going to be Mr. Sort-of-Nice. This time, he’s dropped a nuclear bomb on the negotiating table and said, “I’m crazy enough to use this.”

No wonder Bibi looks happy for the first time in a long time.

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