A Place Called Gaza

Last week, President Trump waxed eloquently about turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” It wasn’t the first time Donald Trump or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, looked covetously at Gaza.

"The United States will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too," Trump promised. He said America would own Gaza, a strip of land on the Mediterranean approximately 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide and twenty-five miles long.

The idea is, of course, preposterous, but it does raise an interesting question or two. For instance, what would become of the existing Gazan population while all the reconstruction was taking place to turn Gaza into a modern beachfront community or, perhaps, the new tourist mecca President Trump and his son-in-law envision?

Not a problem, according to President Trump. The neighboring nations would take in all the displaced Palestinians from Gaza. Well, not if you ask the neighboring countries who immediately rejected out of hand Trump’s grand plan to end the Gaza conundrum. He later said any Palestinians could return to Gaza if they chose to once the rebuilding was completed.

President Trump said the United States would seek to improve Gaza economically and add unlimited construction jobs from the local population until the project was completed. “You know, Gaza is interesting,” President Trump said. “It’s a phenomenal location. It’s on the sea, has the best weather, and everything’s good. It’s like some beautiful things could be done with it… it’s very interesting. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons there, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out."

President Trump believes that Gazans' lives will improve so much once they are moved to a better place while the enclave is being rebuilt that they will never want to return, but he hastens to add that he would allow them to return if they wanted to. President Trump didn’t say how the United States would come to own Gaza. It is doubtful that anyone other than Prime Minister Netanyahu would hand the enclave to President Trump.

The President’s son-in-law and former advisor, Jared Kushner, has long been interested in Gaza. A report he prepared five years ago, called “Peace to Prosperity,” described Gaza's unique and exciting characteristics. “Over forty kilometers of coastline in Gaza along the Mediterranean Sea could be developed into a modern metropolitan city overlooking the beaches, drawing from examples like Beirut, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, and Tel Aviv,” the report said.

President Trump’s vision requires transferring the population of the Gaza Strip elsewhere so that the United States or its surrogates can rebuild Gaza. The troubled strip of land would, presumably, be converted into a modern, welcoming landscape with new communities, luxurious beachfront hotels, and modern homes. Of course, the project would require many years of demolition and reconstruction.

According to Trump, the removal of the entire population of Gaza to other places would ultimately and drastically improve the lives of the Gazans who currently live there. Of course, the non-voluntary or forced removal of entire populations from one place to another has a name. It’s called genocide.

But before Gaza can be converted to a Middle East Riviera where residents and tourists could dine on Ratatouille and Bouillabaisse, there’s the nettlesome problem of the 2.1 million Palestinians who currently live there, crowded into a massive ruined ghetto, and who are, for the most part, showing little interest in the Trump-Kushner vision for Gaza.

The better but still unidentified places to which President Trump envisions moving the entire population of Gaza for ten or fifteen years while the enclave is being rebuilt are, of course, not identified. Nonetheless, Trump believes the lives of the displaced Gazans will improve so much that they will never want to return.

Within the population of Gaza are hardened Hamas terrorists who the local Gazans elected to run the place nearly 20 years ago and can’t get rid of them now. Gazans, back then, saw Hamas as a welcome alternative to Fatah. Before the 1993 Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah band of terrorists had waged terrorist attacks on Israel for years on end. Today, Hamas runs Gaza as they have for twenty years since winning an election there, after which they canceled all future elections and turned the crowded enclave into a militant fiefdom from which to attack Israel.

That said, no one should assume that Gazans have no interest in finding a better life elsewhere. While Hamas and its sympathizers suppress any notion that Gazans might be receptive to making a home elsewhere, a recent TV report in Gaza referenced a pre-war survey that found that about a third of Gazans would leave if they could. Given the current bloodshed and turmoil in Gaza, it is safe to say that far more than a third would probably jump at an opportunity to leave the embattled enclave to find a better life elsewhere. According to the same TV report, some Gazans even embrace Trump’s relocation plan.

While few, if any, elsewhere in the Arab world voice support for the Trump relocation plan, Israel is certainly receptive. Gaza has been a generations-long nightmare for Israel. For more than seventy years, terrorists have used Gaza as a base from which to attack the Jewish nation. President Trump says his removal and transfer plan will so improve the lives of Gazans that they will never want to return.

For many in Israel, Gaza without Gazans would be a welcome reprieve from decades of Fedayeen attacks in the 1950s to the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, which left 1200 Israeli men, women, and children dead. Relatively speaking, twelve hundred Israelis murdered in one day in Israel, a nation of about ten million, is roughly the equivalent of nearly 34,000 Americans being murdered in one day in the United States, a land of approximately 337 million.

One might ask how America would respond if 34,000 Americans were murdered in America on one day by one enemy. Better not to ask.

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Recent podcasts have featured my commentary on Liz Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” as well as my commentaries regarding:

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Brian Kemp and Those Republicans of Georgia,

The Trump Indictments,

The Fox Corp Settlement,

The CNN Trump Town Hall,

The Hunter Biden plea deal,

The New American Cult of Personality,

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Rikki Klieman, Attorney, Network News Analyst, and best-selling author;

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Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation;

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway;

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon;

AI Data Scientist Lawrence Kite;

Ryan Clancy, Chief Strategist of No Labels;

Former Senator Barbara Boxer;

Former Senator Joe Lieberman;

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