Illegal plans for Gaza

President Donald J Trump likes teasing out the unmentionable, and the Israel-Palestinian situation was hardly going to be any different. With a touch of horror and the grotesque, he offered a solution to the issue of what would happen to Gaza at the conclusion of hostilities. In a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared that the United States “take over and own the Gaza Strip”, in the process promising to “create an economic development that will supply an unlimited number of jobs and housing for people of the area.”

The strip, one of the most densely populated stretches of territory on the planet, would be reconstructed, redeveloped and turned, effectively, into a beach resort, “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Here was the double battering being dished out to an impoverished, tormented, tortured population: not only would any aspiration of political independence and Palestinian sovereignty be terminated, it would reach its terminus in the form of tourist capitalism and real estate transactions.

This development idea in Trumpland is not new. In October 2024, the then Republican presidential candidate told a radio interviewer that Gaza could be “better than Monaco”, provided it was built in the appropriate way. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, conceded at an event held at Harvard in February last year that “waterfront property” in Gaza “could be very valuable”. Israel, he proposed, could “move the people out and then clean it up”.

The logistics of the plan remain inscrutable. Trump does not envisage using US troops in the endeavour (“No soldiers by the US would be needed!”), but Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz has already ordered the military to draft plans for Palestinians wishing to “voluntarily” leave. With heaped upon praise, Katz thought the plan would “allow a large population in Gaza to leave for various places in the world” via land crossings, sea and air. He also suggested that the Palestinians find abodes in such countries as Spain and Norway, countries critical of Israel’s war efforts. For those countries not to accept them would expose “their hypocrisy”.

Netanyahu, for his part, saw Trump’s Gaza plan as “completely different”, offering a “much better vision for Israel”. It would open “up many, many possibilities for us.” He was particularly delighted by the notion that Gazans could leave. “The actual idea of allowing Gazans who want to leave – I mean, what’s wrong with that?” he told Fox News. “They can leave, they can then come back.” Informed cynicism hardly permits such a view to be taken seriously, and a number of Israeli politicians would simply see such departures as a prelude to rebuilding Jewish settlements.

On Truth Social, Trump insisted that Palestinians would be duly “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” Where in the region he does not say. He also makes no mention of Hamas as an obstacle, a group Israel has failed to eliminate despite various lofty claims.

Excerpted: ‘A Thief’s Mentality: Trump, Real Estate and Dreams of Ethnic Cleansing’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org