This is a column about Gaza and Donald Trump’s out-of-the-box, shocking little spitball that maybe the U.S. would take the place over and rebuild it into something completely different than the hellhole it is presently.
You’ve seen all kinds of reactions to that by now. One of the best of them, by James McGee, showed up here at the site yesterday. James is exactly right that it took an amazing amount of courage for Trump to offer up that proposal.
Debra Saunders’ treatment of the idea was also very good.
What I’d say is a few things. First, there’s the old admonition: Take Trump seriously, not literally.
Is he talking about buying up Gaza and turning it into Guam? Not really. He’s using language designed to get attention, first and foremost, and to provoke discussion. Trump’s offering/threatening to gobble up Gaza forces those who want to scoff at the idea to offer up an alternative.
And what’s that going to be?
A “two-state solution”? Oh, shut up. That was a dead letter even before Oct. 7, 2023. Now, it can’t under any condition be taken without contempt.
Whether it’s fair or not, and it is fair at this point, the Palestinians are forever going to be perceived as utterly incapable of self-governance or even peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. And I’m not just talking about Israel — lots of people, particularly among the Western Left, excuse things like Oct. 7 as just desserts for the “occupation” by Israel.
Except the Israelis haven’t occupied Gaza for more than a decade. Billions of dollars came in from all over the world in order to give the Palestinians there an opportunity to make something that could be considered part of a “two-state solution.” What did we get for that money?
Terror tunnels. Condom bombs. Rape and murder. Even Americans taken hostage, which, had it not been for the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures of the previous two decades, probably should have resulted in a U.S. invasion to root out Hamas and bring our people home.
At some point, you’ve made your last damn mistake. We’re at that point with the Gazans. The Israelis keep talking about how Hamas is what needs to go, but Hamas is Gaza and Gaza is Hamas. Really, let’s not waste each other’s time with lies and euphemisms here.
And these Arab countries who insist on a “two-state solution”? Again, oh, shut up. Everybody knows the refusal to take in refugees from Gaza is about the refusal to take them in. It isn’t about how taking them in means giving up on a magical “two-state solution.” If Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the rest were actually serious about that, they would have kicked in resources and influence to make sure that Gaza wasn’t a giant terrorist camp. They would have promoted some sort of an alternative to Hamas among the people there.
But they didn’t. Know why? They see the Palestinians the same way the Israelis and the Americans do. They’ll say ANYTHING to avoid having to take them in.
Egypt and Jordan have their own history with those people, you know, and it isn’t a good one. Lebanon’s history is even worse.
Think of it this way: those countries in question are Sunni Muslim countries, and they stood by and let Shi’ite Iran take control of the Palestinians through Hamas, which led to the atrocities of Oct. 7 that anybody could have told you would result in precisely what has happened. That’s how little they want to do with the Palestinians in Gaza that they want to create a “two-state solution” out of.
Honest brokers? Seriously?
Now, the idea is being floated to relocate the Gazans somewhere like Indonesia or Malaysia. Israel is talking about dropping them off in Europe, but that’s a dead letter — any European government agreeing to mass immigration from Gaza at this point won’t last for six months before the public shows up with pitchforks and torches and overwhelming votes to throw the bums out.
The problem with Gaza is the Gazans. Everybody knows that, but nobody wants to solve it. So along comes Trump and he decides the only way around is through. Not only does he say what everybody knows but even the Israelis don’t want to say, which is that the Gazans have to go, but he talks about building a Mediterranean paradise where the rubble now lies.
And all of a sudden the lede is good and buried. They’re all talking about Trump’s New American Imperialism and they skipped right past the meat of the story that couldn’t be uttered.
And then Trump says what’s obvious but also can’t be said: Gaza is uninhabitable. This isn’t about ethnic cleansing, it’s about the fact that there isn’t so much as a stick of furniture left in Gaza City or Rafah at this point. The buildings are all blown up. There’s no electricity (hell, all the electrical outlets are gone, much less the transmission wires) and no running water. The Gazans depended on Israel to provide those things in the first place and stupidly let Hamas start a war with the Oct. 7 atrocities without making a plan for that. They’ve got no food, no water, no shelter…
How is anybody supposed to live in Gaza?
Oh, but the U.N. secretary-general, a global-warming crank named Antonio Guterres, lectured us on Wednesday that we must avoid “any form of ethnic cleansing” there.
Well, what’s his solution? Right. Nothing.
Why is it ethnic cleansing when you evacuate a population from a place that’s uninhabitable? Are the residents of Pacific Palisades being “ethnically cleansed,” too?
What Trump has done in ginning up all these cranks and hypocrites is to show how pathetic and useless their arguments are. These clowns have been babbling the same BS for literally decades and things have gotten worse rather than better — to such an extent that now it’s literally not possible to produce the non-solution they’ve been promoting literally all of our lives.
If you’re Israel, what’s your response to, say, the Egyptians swearing that taking in any Gazans would be a surrender of the “two-state solution”? I’ll tell you what mine would be.
It goes like this: “Hey, that’s all well and good, but here’s the news: we’re still pretty steamed about Oct. 7, and we’ve won this war and control this territory, and if we aren’t going to keep it for ourselves then we’re not going to provide water or power to anybody who lives there that we don’t like. That’s on you to do.”
Egypt has no facility to do that. Nor do they have any desire. So how is anybody going to live in Gaza until billions of dollars worth of reconstruction money shows up to make it habitable again?
The laws of war are what ought to apply. And those laws work like this: start a war with somebody who’s very adept at kicking your ass, and get your ass kicked, and you probably lose your country.
And you should.
As for Trump’s classic American-real-estate-developer idea for Gaza, again: take it seriously, not literally.
Go look at a map of that part of the world, and forget what you know about Gaza — or, alternatively, assume that what you know is no longer true and it’s a blank slate.
It’s a pretty good spot, actually. Like the folks in real estate say: location, location, location.
Trump’s talking about a riviera, and those actually are some pretty nice beaches — or they would be if somebody did a massive cleanup. But what’s more important is this: it’s right at 110 miles between Rafah and the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal.
You put a U.S. naval base and naval air station or Air Force base there, and we now firmly command and control the shipping lanes between Europe and Asia.
The Egyptians may have the canal, but at that point, shipping moves through it because we say so. To a whole lot greater extent than is currently true.
That base would also project power all over the eastern Med, the whole Arabian peninsula, and northeast Africa. The Houthis? There would be no more Houthis. There would be no more Somali pirates. And no more delays or casualties in the shipping lanes between the Indian Ocean and the Med.
Which, by the way, might be worth collecting a fee for. Trump, or whoever would be president when that idea stood up, could talk to Cairo about that.
Would there be force protection issues? Well, with the current population of Gaza, no doubt. The point is they wouldn’t still be there.
This is very out of the box. Trump made his fortune by doing things that were out-of-the-box. Building a Singapore-style showplace in Gaza might be too far out to be realistic, but something short of that might not be.
Like for example if there was a multinational corporation of sorts that involved private American capital, Far East money, Gulf States and Saudi money, and so forth, that hired up a multinational security team to keep the peace and defend it and then rebuilt Gaza along the lines Trump was talking about. And then you had a good-sized U.S. naval facility and a big commercial port run by an American company sitting right there next door to the Suez Canal.
Oh — and there’s a pretty tidy little offshore natural gas play off the coast of Gaza, that nobody currently wants to try to develop for obvious reasons. If the U.S. Navy was securing those waters and the commercial port had a liquefied natural gas export terminal, now some American company is exporting LNG to Europe from Gaza and offsetting some of what the Russians currently sell.
Not to mention Israel is working their own natural gas play. They are moving natural gas to Jordan now. Maybe they’d like access to an LNG export terminal. The Egyptians are already in that game as well.
There’s a lot of potential in Gaza. Sure, it’s generally without the Gazans, and certainly without the Gazan mindset in which all that’s important is starting futile wars with Israel and then delighting in the negative, bloody, and disgraceful consequences of such stupid behavior. But those problems aside, Trump isn’t wrong in thinking about what could be.
I’m making no predictions about any of this. And it isn’t an idea I’m particularly endorsing. I was pretty relieved when Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that there is no commitment afoot for American troops to head to Gaza for nation-building, or U.S. taxpayer dollars to go there for such a purpose.
But what Trump has done is offer a completely different paradigm from the one which has abjectly failed to date.
Who are these people to dismiss it? Let’s hear their ideas if his are so offensive.
We’re looking around our own country right now, and everything seems new again. We’re free of an awful lot of shackles of our own. Why not demand the same in that region, where all of the approaches of the “experts” have tried and failed?
Let the man cook. We’ll see what comes of it.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
This Stuff Isn’t All That Hard, You Know