President Donald Trump apparently thinks Gaza is like Boston’s old West End.
You know, go in, take it over, kick everybody out, knock down all the buildings, and replace them with the Charles River Park high rise, luxury apartments and toney establishments for the well-to-do.
It happened in Boston in the 1950s, which was one of the first and worst urban renewal projects in the country.
I do not know much about Gaza, which has a population of around 2 million, but I do know something about the old West End where some 20,000 people once lived.
My two brothers and I spent our early years living on the top floor at 73 Poplar Street and, before the destruction began, moving to a three decker in the country — Somerville — which then had trees and open spaces.
The rent at Poplar Street, I recall, was $25 a month which my father paid in cash in person to the landlord who never wobbled out of our flat without a shot of raki, or maybe two, that my father would provide.
Consider yourself lucky if you can get an apartment at Charles River Park for $3,000 a month, without a shot.
The West End back then, between World War II and the Korean War, was an integrated neighborhood made up of poor working-class families before the word “integration” ever became fashionable.
Immigrant Irish, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Albanians, Lebanese, Lithuanians, Jews and Blacks all lived together in relative harmony in brick tenement buildings, not unlike the structures today on the Cambridge Street side of Beacon Hill.
The streets meandered like in the North End. It was a walkable neighborhood — nobody had cars anyway — with the banks of the pre-Storrow Drive Charles River nearby, where we played.
It was not paradise, to be sure. But it was a livable community for the working poor.
Had the neighborhood remained intact it would today look like Beacon Hill.
Back in the early 1950s people who lived there called the West End a neighborhood, but developers and accommodating politicians called it a slum.
If it was a slum, the people who lived there did not know it.
Unlike Gaza, where apartment buildings and other structures were turned into rubble by the Israeli Defense Forces following the Oct 7. Hamas massacre, the tenements in the West End were turned into rubble by the politicians and developers.
Some said that the politicians and developers purposely made the neighborhood worse by shortchanging it on rubbish collection and other services, for instance, justifying their demolition strategy.
What they did to the West End was a crime. What made things worse was the Big Lie. They told the people who lived there that they could move back once the neighborhood was demolished, and old housing replaced with new and affordable apartments.
That did not happen. The people who moved into the new and expensive high-rise apartments were doctors working at the adjacent Massachusetts General Hospital, or lawyers and other professionals.
Trump has called Gaza a “big real estate site,” and wants to give it the West End treatment so it can become the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
But unlike the West End, Trump has made it clear that once removed, the replaced Gazans would not come back to new homes.
“I think that it’s a big mistake to allow people — the Palestinians, or the people living in Gaza — to go back yet another time, and we don’t want Hamas going back,” Trump said.
They would theoretically find refuge in new communities in neighboring Egypt and Jordan, the way the old West Enders found new homes in Somerville, Medford and elsewhere.
However, neither the Egyptians nor the Jordanians want the Palestinians in their countries.
And they certainly don’t want the Hamas terrorists hiding among them.
Persuading another country to welcome the Palestinians displaced from Gaza would put Trump’s deal-making skills to the ultimate test.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
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