Israel Preparing to Execute Trump Non-Plan For Gaza
A little ethnic cleansing coming right up.
AP (“Israel begins preparations for Gaza exodus as Egypt lobbies against Trump plan“):
Israel said on Thursday it has begun preparations for the departure of large numbers of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in line with President Donald Trump’s plan for the territory. Officials meanwhile said Egypt has launched an diplomatic blitz behind the scenes to try and head off the plan.
The Trump administration has already dialed back aspects of the proposal after it was widely rejected internationally, saying the relocation of Palestinians would be temporary. U.S. officials have provided few details about how or when the plan would be carried out.
The Palestinians have vehemently rejected Trump’s proposal, fearing Israel will never allow the refugees to return and that it would destabilize the region. Egypt has warned that such a plan could undermine its peace treaty with Israel, a cornerstone of stability and American influence in the Middle East for decades.
Saudi Arabia, another key U.S. ally, has also rejected any mass transfer of Palestinians and says it will not normalize relations with Israel — a key goal of the Trump administration — without the creation of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza.
Trump and Israeli officials have depicted the proposed relocation from war-ravaged Gaza as voluntary, but the Palestinians have universally expressed their determination to remain in their homeland.
Trump and Israeli officials have not said how they would respond if Palestinians refuse to leave. But Human Rights Watch and other groups say the plan, if implemented, would amount to “ethnic cleansing,” the forcible relocation of the civilian population of an ethnic group from a geographic area.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he has ordered the military to make preparations to facilitate the emigration of large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza through land crossings as well as “special arrangements for exit by sea and air.”
There were no immediate signs of such preparations on the ground.
NPR (“Israel defense minister tells army to prepare to relocate Palestinians from Gaza“):
Israel’s defense minister is telling the military to prepare to implement President Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.
Defense Minister Israel Katz says the military should prepare exit options by land, sea and air so that anyone who wishes to can leave for “any country willing to accept them.”
Katz, however, is already getting pushback from one of the countries he called on to accept refugees. He says Spain, Norway, Ireland and other countries that have criticized Israel’s actions during its war against Hamas should take them in.
“Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse to do so,” Katz said in a statement.
[…]
In an interview Wednesday on Fox News, Netanyahu called President Trump’s proposal for a U.S. takeover of Gaza a “remarkable idea” that should be “pursued.”
“I think it will create a different future for everyone,” Netanyahu said.
Steve Erlanger, NYT (“Trump’s Gaza Plan Has Many Pitfalls, Hamas Among the Biggest“):
President Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to “own” Gaza and move out the Palestinians there to build “the Riviera of the Middle East.” As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Mr. Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.
A former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, put the dilemma neatly. “Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?”
That is an issue Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has always dodged. He has refused to engage on the question of who will rule Gaza after the conflict, largely because it would undermine his governing coalition, which depends on far-right parties that want to resettle Gaza with Israelis.
As outlandish and unworkable as Mr. Trump’s proposal on Tuesday may seem, it is “no less than an historic resetting of decades of received diplomatic wisdom,” said Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. However unrealistic, he said, “it may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings.”
What Mr. Trump described — the forced relocation of two million Palestinians from Gaza to countries like Egypt and Jordan that are fiercely opposed to taking them — is not going to happen, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.
“Trump is a man who doesn’t want new military commitments, and now he wants to move two million people who don’t want to go to places that don’t want them,” he said. “But Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to pick out the real issues and deflect the stupid ones.”
[…]
Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said that in discussions with Jordanian, Egyptian, Gulf Arab and Palestinian colleagues, “no one even wants to discuss this deal, because there will be no readiness of Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I cannot find one Arab country or leader willing to accept the Palestinians.”
Even if nothing comes of Mr. Trump’s proposal, just floating it now is threatening the stability of Jordan and Egypt, two crucial allies in the Middle East with the longest history of diplomatic relations with Israel and, thus, is “strategically incomprehensible,” said Tom Phillips, a former British ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Jordan already is more than half ethnic Palestinian, and for King Abdullah, who will meet with Mr. Trump next week, to accept more Palestinian refugees “would undermine the kingdom and be the end of the king,” Mr. Milshtein said, a judgment echoed by many. Already, many Jordanians are suspicious that there is “a Zionist conspiracy” to annex the occupied West Bank and create a Palestinian state out of Jordan, he and Mr. Phillips said.
Egypt may have more acreage and is in desperate need of American financial aid, but its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a fierce opponent of Islamist radicalism, which he has tried to stamp out brutally in the Sinai, and of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. The notion that he would allow “hundreds of thousands of people supporting Hamas into Egypt” is unthinkable, Mr. Milshtein said.
CNN (“How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip“):
Trump administration officials are hurrying to catch up to the president’s audacious and improbable plan for the United States to take ownership of Gaza and redevelop it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” trying to wrap their heads around an idea that some hope might be so outlandish it forces other nations to step in with their own proposals for the Palestinian enclave.
President Donald Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion.
At its root, officials said, this suggestion was intended in part to spur action on an issue Trump viewed as moribund, with no other nations offering reasonable solutions for how to rebuild an area that has been obliterated by Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.
However it came about, his unveiling of the idea — which he delivered by reading off notes in the East Room — came as a shock.
One adviser on Middle East issues had not heard the proposal until Trump raised it during his news conference. The official described themselves as stunned.
But others said Trump had run the idea by people in the days ahead of the Netanyahu talks. His Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who visited Gaza last week, returned to Washington with a dire impression of the devastation he witnessed, conveying to Trump and later to reporters a view that it was no longer habitable.
[…]
The president’s comments took several Cabinet members in the East Room by surprise. As Republican leaders watched from Capitol Hill, they too were caught off guard by the remarks.
The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week.
“No,” a senior Republican aide told CNN. “Not a word of this was ever mentioned by the president.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region.
Rubio, who Trump said had been patched in by telephone to his meetings with the Israelis “listening to every single word that we say,” wrote on social media afterward: “The United States stands ready to lead and Make Gaza Beautiful Again. Our pursuit is one of lasting peace in the region for all people.”
It was less clear whether Netanyahu knew precisely what Trump intended to say, but the smile that grew across his face made clear that he liked what he heard.
Reading between the lines, President Trump communicated no plan to anyone on his team and they first heard about it when he told the world because there is no plan. His Middle East advisor told him, in so many words, that Gaza is a shithole and Trump the real estate developer saw an opportunity for turning it into a resort. Netanyahu, who always wanted to get the Palestinians out of Gaza, has seized on the idea and is preparing to execute a mass deportation.
To where? Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is having an impromptu meeting.
AP (“Pro-Trump Arab American group changes its name after the president’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ comments“):
A group that played a key role in Donald Trump’s voter outreach to the Arab American community alongside his allies is rebranding itself after the president said that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip.
Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, said during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that the group would now be called Arab Americans for Peace.
The name change came after Trump held a Tuesday press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
“The talk about what the president wants to do with Gaza, obviously we’re completely opposed to the idea of the transfer of Palestinians from anywhere in Historic Palestine,” Bahbah said. “And so we did not want to be behind the curve in terms of pushing for peace, because that has been our objective from the very beginning.”
Arab Americans for Trump helped lead voter outreach efforts for Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election in swing states such as Michigan and Arizona.
The group, independent from the Trump campaign, frequently facilitated meetings between Arab American community leaders and Trump’s allies, including Richard Grenell, now serving as Trump’s envoy for special missions, and Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany and now a senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
In the 2024 election, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Dearborn, Michigan — home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans — since 2000 on his way to winning the state. Trump visited Dearborn on Nov. 1.
Bahbah said the group had been thinking about changing its name for “a while” and ultimately made the decision Tuesday. But Bahbah had said during a phone interview just prior to Trump’s Tuesday night press conference with Netanyahu that the group’s name was Arab Americans for Trump.
Reuters (“‘I thought we voted for America first’ – Trump Gaza plan divides his party“):
U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal that the U.S. take over the war-torn Gaza Strip prompted confusion and skepticism from some of his fellow Republicans on Wednesday, while others backed his “bold, decisive” idea.
[…]
The idea prompted international condemnation and some dissent from Republicans in Congress, who have largely fallen in line behind Trump’s initiatives such as pausing foreign aid and eliminating thousands of federal workers.
Skeptical lawmakers said they still favored the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians that has long been a foundation of U.S. diplomacy. Some also rejected the idea of spending U.S. taxpayer dollars or sending in U.S. troops to a region that has been devastated by more than a year of war.
“I thought we voted for America first,” Republican Senator Rand Paul said on X.com. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers blood.”
Republicans hold narrow majorities in Congress over Democrats, who rejected the idea outright. “That is ethnic cleansing by another name,” Senator Chris Van Hollen said on MSNBC.
Republican Senator Jerry Moran said the idea of a two-state solution cannot just be thrown out. “It’s not something that can be unilaterally decided,” he told reporters.
Senator Lisa Murkowski said she would not speculate about any possible proposal to send U.S. forces into a region “that has seen enough turmoil.”
“I don’t even want to speculate to that question, because I think that is quite frightening,” she said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson praised the plan as “bold, decisive action to try to secure the peace of that region.”
Johnson said he would discuss the issue with Netanyahu when he meets with him at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.
“I think people understand the necessity of it, and we’re going to stand with Israel as they work towards this goal. And we’ll stand with the President on his initiative,” Johnson told a news conference.
[…]
Representative Tim Burchett, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he supported Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. should develop valuable Gaza waterfront property.
“I think Americans and capitalism have a real opportunity to cause some real change in the world, and that would be a perfect example of that,” he told Reuters.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he favored “bringing peace and stability and security to that region,” but that every idea would have to be thoroughly vetted.
Well, this will certainly cause some real change in the world.
********************@
Ladies and gentlemen, your liberal media speaking truth to power (or perhaps not).
But remember, kids, the war was never about genocide or ethnic cleansing. It was only about Israel’s Sacred Right To Exist, and anyone who suggested that Netanyahu had a different agenda was expressing antisemitism at its most vile.
This is the biggest boost anti-semitism has ever had in this country. And if the above accounts are true, Netanyahu caused it. He scored an own-goal on his team’s net. The smirk on his face throughout was that of a man who knew what was being unleashed and didn’t care.
I managed to watch a portion of the announcement and the press conference on Youtube. Trump’s mental and physical deterioration since November is clear. His thin sing-song toddler voice as he recited from memory was one indication, as was his clinging to the top of the podium. Did he even realize where he was?
@wr: Those who thought that the policy of ethnic cleansing was limited to just a few extremists and level heads were in control were stuck in the past. And they were unrealistic in their belief those Israeli statesmen were just biding their time and would sweep Netanyahu and his cronies from power once the war was won. While those level heads exist in Israel, they have no power in these matters. Israel is moving to restore a religious fanatics’ conception of Judea and Samaria and will do so by ethnically cleansing millions of people from their homes.
That’s the reality. And honestly, that was apparent at the onset.
I’m off to the grocery store to see how the price of eggs is doing after this news.
What happened was that Trump, like a toddler presented with a shiny ball, latched on to the last stupid idea floated just before the press conference, before anyone else could talk him the other way around. And now the sycophants are struggling to make a patently stupid idea sound like genius while others are huddling around, trying to concoct a story to save face. And still others are working the opposite, trying to burn everything down.
@Daryl: Eggs futures are still running high, at least until the FDA and USDA remove approval for farm testing and tracking of bird flu. FWIW, Texas was an early innovator in the space of not looking for things they didn’t want to act upon. It’s the Ostrich school of public health.
I can think of nothing more eloquent to say than: barf.
Since Israel is responsible for turning Gaza into the ruin it is today, then Israel should take any and all Gazans who wish to leave. It’s only fair.
@Not the IT Dept.:
People keep saying this (and I remember people saying this about him in the first term). While clearly he is getting older, I am not seeing some major decline.
How is he different from those ridiculous COVID press conferences?
He is an ignorant, self-absorbed, shallow man who listens to too much cable news (which is self-consciously telling him what he wants to hear). And he thinks the world is simple and so his simplistic ideas are fine.
All this talk of his obvious decline comes across to me as a combination of letting him off the hook and just turn-abouting what was said about Biden.
@Kathy: Or, if Trump really thinks that Gaza is worth the investment, offer to bring all the Palestinians to the US. And pay them to do so.
Let’s really do this thing all the way!
I am agog at the sheer hubris and stupidity of this, and that this is being treated as a sane idea, by ANYONE, is unreal.
If Speaker Johnson thinks that a land grab + colonization + ethnic cleansing will drive peace in the region he’s a moron. More likely, he’s one of these religious nuts who wants the destabilization this will cause as a means of driving the second coming.
Absolute madness.
@Steven L. Taylor: I was about to write the same thing. Our press should be asking how many Palestinians are going to be settled in the US.
Hamas butchered Israelis. They started this, or are we pretending that never happened? Would we be here without Hamas’s attack? No.
All the way through the naive and misdirected – and now suddenly absent – protests, I insisted there was no solution – no decent solution. And I warned about a hundred times, while everyone was yelling, ‘genocide’ that it was not genocide but might well become ethnic cleansing. I thought it obvious that if Israel felt completely abandoned they would be liberated and would double down, and had the power all on their own to march 2 million Gazans into the Sinai.
Did I anticipate that the US president would be the one to actually call for ethnic cleansing? Not quite, it’s hard to anticipate what crazy people will do, but it was obvious that attacking Biden would help Trump, and that Trump would be much worse. Neither Arab Americans for Trump, nor the protesters, had the imagination to see how much worse things could get. The Middle East is where things can always get worse.
Gazans are now in a much, much worse situation than they were before October 7. I imagine that if you polled Gazans and gave them a choice between pre October and present circumstances, they’d be happy to return to what is now the good old days. Hamas started a war they were doomed to lose, and the victors of that war have just gotten the green light to be vicious to the losers.
After WW2 the Americans imposed a benign occupation, while the Soviets imposed Stalinist totalitarianism in their zone. But even the Soviets didn’t ethnically cleanse East Germany. What Israel and Trump are cooking up is evil and shameful, a crime against humanity. This is no longer war, this is unnecessary and unjustifiable cruelty. The religious fanatics in Israel, egged on by religious fanatics in the US, and a stupid, cruel POTUS, are preparing to do something truly biblical.
@Steven L. Taylor: While clearly he is getting older, I am not seeing some major decline.
Well, as I said, the sing-song thin voice and his clinging to the podium. It’s a general lack of energy to his movements. And his words when he took questions: who’d live in this new Gaza? “The world’s people, people of the world.” What the bleep does that mean?
If you’ve ever had a relative who declined rapidly once they reached their 70’s and 80’s, all this looks very familiar as deterioration increases.
The only time he perked up to something approximating the pre-2024 Trump was when he talked about development in Gaza. That’s the kind of stuff he could probably reel off in his sleep, he’s pitched it for so many decades.
@Michael Reynolds: Pretty much. I get the instinct from Netanyahu, at least, as this is perhaps the only way to prevent another October 7. But it’s likely to upend half a century of peace at the nation-state level.
Trump is simply, with audacious language, proposing a return of Gaza to pre-Hamas time when there were luxury resorts along the Gaza waterfront.
There were luxury beach hotels in Gaza. When Israel pulled out they were a destination resorts even until 2011 where Jimmy Carter lounged when he declared Hamas “as a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people” but when Hamas and other Islamist started attacking, Westerner tourists dropped off. But they still had them until the recent war for those accepting of an Islamist compliant experience.
See the videos by British writer Simon Webb.
If Gaza is indeed, as some assert, a giant concentration camp, then who made it so?
‘The truth about Gaza that you will not see on television or be told about by the newspapers’
on his channel History Debunked
Trump’s idea has a proven history so the only real impediment is Hamas and other Islamists
The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.
Trump, Musk, Netanyahu, Putin, etc.
Monsters Inc.
Want more proof that Trump is seriously losing it? Check out this BBC article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9xgj2429o
“”The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Trump said on Thursday. He reiterated that the idea would mean resettling Palestinians, and that no US soldiers would be needed.”
Ron Filipowski skeeted Trump’s entire Truth Social post on the matter and it is far more incoherent than the BBC article. Well worth reading for the almost total walk-back from yesterday as well as his assertion that Chuck Schumer is Palestinian – not a supporter of Palestinians but an actual Palestinian. (Schumer is an American, of course, and his forebears came from what is now the Ukraine.)
RF’s skeet: https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lhj5lmo24k2q
@Steven L. Taylor:
It’s the 25th amendment, the impeachments, the Mueller probe, and even the election. Any day now the rapist will blunder bigly and be removed, voted out, consigned to the compost heap of history, etc.
That will never happen as long as people insist on deferring to him to the degree they have to this day.
He just said he wants to do ethnic cleansing and take over a territory that doesn’t belong to America, and see what even those who oppose his idea on his side are saying, or rather what they’re not saying.
No one’s going to come and save us.
@Michael Reynolds: I said at the very beginning on Oct 7th, that the outcome is binary: 1) A Palestinian state made out of West Bank and Gaza in which the West Bank settlers would have to be removed or 2) a Greater Israel where the Palestinians would have to be granted full citizenship rights. I did not envisage a pogram or a Trail of Tears. Lack of imagination, I guess.
No country wants the Palestinians. The Jordanian Army drove out the PLO in 1970. I don’t think the Jordanians have forgotten. The entire West Bank and Gaza have become a much larger version of Guantanamo where they are kept prisoners with no hope of exit.
I for one would welcome President Vance should that happen. The Democratic party was founded by a president from Appalachia. Or perhaps you think you can get JD as well, then President Johnson
So trump didn’t consult the secretaries of State or Defense before he made his announcement, even though it would be a major diplomatic initiative and also a complex and likely protracted military operation. He didn’t feel the need to consult Rubio or Hegseth. That’s not what they are there for. Rubio, having given up his Senate seat for this job, does not want to get fired and will try to lend credibility to whatever trump says or does. Hegseth is way out of his depth, and was always going to be just a yes man passing trump’s orders on to the DoD professionals.
@James Joyner: “I get the instinct from Netanyahu, at least, as this is perhaps the only way to prevent another October 7.”
If you listened to Hitler in the early 30s you’d get the instinct that the only way to prevent the Jews from destroying Germany was to annihilate them. I’m sure both of them were sincere.
@Michael Reynolds:
No. One awful regime, Hams, committed atrocities against another, Israel. The Israeli’s basically took their cues from Assad in Syria for their response. Both of these powers are vile racist regimes who justify atrocities by dehumanizing their opponents. As I say, there is no point in the US taking sides. From the outset I saw that the Israeli goal was to drive 2 million Gazans from their land, and then turn to the West Bank and start working on that. Simultaneously, Hamas is a vile, religiously fanatic cesspool.
Israel, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, has some strategic and tactical value for us and we should treat it pretty much like we treat those anti-democratic regimes. Hamas has only negative value to us and we shouldn’t deal with them at all.
The only exception to this would be to try to cultivate a path forward to peace, as we did in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and a few other places.
@James Joyner:
Yes, for those still pretending that the negligence, extremism, and depraved incompetence of Netanyahu and those around him didn’t lead to October 7.
So, no, not the only way. Netanyahu’s resignation would also help prevent another October 7. Because Israelis are going to face more attacks now, not fewer.
And I guess to hell with the remaining hostages?
@Michael Reynolds:
Small point: some parts did get scraped clean.
East Prussia, Silesia, Eastern Pomerania: all were “ethnically cleansed”, and not gently either.
@Eusebio:
No, because no ingenious design would come from consultation between three unqualified, amoral lightweights, one of whom is a drunken DUI hire Fox News host. What for? Trump didn’t need to waste time, he just went straight for WW3.
Still looking for those Genocide Don protests. Or, maybe “Uncommitted” doesn’t have the fuel: the eggs section at my local grocery store was empty this morning. No need to lower egg prices if there’s no eggs at all, amirite?
Trump perks up when he thinks he can make a buck off of something. There has never been a president more beholden to a “what’s in it for me?” philosophy. Recall how his mind reeled at soldiers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives on D-Day. As to Gaza, he isn’t imagining “someone” developing the area into resorts, he is imagining the Trump Org doing it (or at least branding it) and raking in cash from all those “world people.” As it is with all simplistic ideas, there has been no consideration of the potential effect on others. When President Donald J. Tourette speaks, the cleanup crew springs into action.
@JKB:
No he is not. He was quite open in indicating the plan would entail mass relocation of the current population.
That is an impossibility without Egyptian co-operation, and Egypt will not co-operate with this idiocy.
Not sure how Trump is any worse than Blinken and co’s little Eichmann routine. He’s just saying the quiet parts loud about how human Palestinians really are in the scheme of things. The scheme is completely unworkable, but if it were, Biden would have been doing it, albeit in a way to flatter the psyches of the ones scheduling the trains.
@Steven L. Taylor:
When the whole “sane washing” thing got started, I would occasionally go to rollcall.com to look at the actual transcripts and routinely found that Trump’s utterances were much more meandering and nonsensical then reported in the press, and that the recorded excerpts were the most coherent of the session.
I won’t read too much into this, but the Rollcall transcript site is down right now. But here’s something I posted a few weeks ago:
Pro-Trump Arab American group changes its name after the president’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ comments (AP)
Anyway, please shop at Costco.
@Modulo Myself:
I’ve noticed many on the fringe left settling desperately on this fable in the past 24-36 hours. And why not?
Rashida Tlaib, the Dearborn Mayor, et al have to lie to themselves, to avoid the painful implications of their complicity in empowering Trump-Netanyahu II. One sees this psychological defense mechanism in therapy often, with clients who’ve made strategic errors that backfired against their own desires. Grief, denial, anger, “I’m the only one without fault,” etc.
@JohnSF:
The goal during parts of the Israel offensive seemed to be to drive the Gazans to mass along the Egyptian border, and then create a panic that caused a stampede. It was a small win/big win in Israel’s calculations: Either the Egyptians started gunning down the Gazans, killing many thousands, or the border gave way and the Israeli army would drive the Gazans through en masse and then reseal the border.
@Eusebio:
Happily supported, naturally, by the American public. (The “America First” movement being of no consequence).
I don’t know why I am even here in this thread, this whole idea and the discussion of it are so absurd.
@JohnSF:
Ben-Gvir will have a plan to “relocate” these millions into graves or urns or something similarly horrible.
Or maybe Musk can relocate his teen techbros into designing some floating Mediterranean island, away from mucking up sensitive government code and rooting through Americans’ private financial data.
Gazans’ loss, Americans’ gain?
Also, anecdotally, I hear some would-be Canadian conservatives are now supposedly having second thoughts about their planned votes in the upcoming election. Apparently, a few polls are moving in Liberals’ direction, what with Canadians observing the messes Republicans are making down here. You’re welcome, Canada.
@DK:
One sees this psychological defense mechanism in therapy often, with clients who’ve made grave errors that backfired against their own desires. Grief, denial, anger, “I’m the only one without fault,” etc.
Lmao, okay. You’re talking about people with families in Gaza, whose relatives were killed by an America-supported military. Have a bit of dignity. Most Democrats in power either considered Palestinians to be expendable or were forced to keep quiet and cheer on the criminal indifference of the Biden administration. They couldn’t even speak up when doctors were talking repeatedly about kids being executed by snipers. Own up to reality here.
@Modulo Myself: Biden and Harris were better than Trump on every issue, including Gaza. Full stop, period.
Anyone who is still lying about that but thinks I’m going to take seriously lectures from them about “reality” must be smoking really good crack.
Everybody knows what America has done to black and queer folk, or the occasions the Democratic Party has failed us time and yet again. And yet 85% of black voters and 86% of LGBT voters still got our asses up on Election Day 2024 and voted to stop fascism. *That’s* dignity. It’s called voting for progress, not perfection. And doing what’s best for the greater good.
We owe nothing to self-absorbed fake allies who couldn’t be bothered to stand in solidarity with us, but now demand we lie and self-censor to make them feel better.
I don’t think so. Get Jill Stein to do it. Stop playin’ in my face.
@JohnSF:
I was talking about the “Riviera of the Middle East” idea. And wasn’t Beirut the riviera of the Middle East before the Muslims gained the upper hand in the late ’70s?
Can’t say I’m a fan of the relocation idea but that too is to mostly get the other Arab countries to keep quiet lest they have to explain why they won’t take Palestinians.
Most of the talk about Gaza over the last year had been about returning it the Hamas-run hell hole of pre-October 7th. Trump is pushing the conversation to what Gaza was and could be again before the Islamists.
@DK:
Yeah, it’s puzzling that ‘we don’t owe shit to you while we kill your relatives’ wasn’t received as a message of solidarity.
@Modulo Myself: It’s not puzzling that Uncommitted and Arab Americans For
TrumpPeace sold out their relatives to a far worse fate under Trump-Netanyahu II, and are now refusing to tell the truth about any of it. Self-aggrandizing myopia has consequences.America is lucky black folk don’t sit around waiting to “receive messages of solidarity” to vote right, or to contribute our talents and industriousness to this God forsaken land’s cultural, socioeconomic, and educational advancement. We did that, every state in the union would look like the worst parts of drab Russia.
@MarkedMan:
Any Israel support for a 2 state solution collapsed with Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s peace proposal at Taba in 2002. After that the “liberal” position on a Palestinian statehood became a fringe position, the vast majority of Israelis’ took a position that ranged from, I don’t want to hear about the Palestinians to advocating ethnic cleansing or apartheid.
Since that time, Israeli governments have been increasingly conservative and hardened on this issue. Bibi has only been waiting for an excuse, that Hamas and the felon provided.
Has there been any national group that has been as poorly served by their political leadership than Palestinians? The PA is corrupt and Hamas are terrorists.
@Sleeping Dog:
Is this why no Arab or Muslim country wants them or is assisting them, despite the lip service?
@JKB:
I guess it bears repeating: the countries in question don’t really have to explain, since it’s obvious why they’re not thrilled with the idea of taking in huge numbers of Palestinian refugees. Egypt has a history of attacks by Islamists on the regime, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Al Qaeda, as you might remember, had its origins in Egypt’s prisons, and treated the Egyptian government as a primary “near enemy.”
Back in the Seventies, Palestinian militants tried to overthrow the Jordanian government.
The Saudi monarchy is hyper-vigilant about Islamists attacking them.
Syria is a mess, still recovering from the civil war. The first priority of a country in ruins is to rebuild itself, not to take responsibility for millions of additional refugees. Adding Hamas to the mix of factions wouldn’t help matters. Ditto for Lebanon, which is also in no shape to take in the population of Gaza, and Hezbollah, who probably wouldn’t be thrilled with sharing territory with Hamas, even though they share common enemies.
Oman? Yemen? Same problems. Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain? Also highly unlikely. What are the incentives, versus the obvious risks?
And ultimately, none of these parties want to be seen as abetting Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
“The Arab nations” is just shorthand for being blind to Middle Eastern realities. And we haven’t even talked about the logistics of moving, housing, feeding, and caring for the Gazans. Or who’s paying for all this.
Hard power is great to have, but it doesn’t erase these realities. You’d think that would be the obvious lesson of recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (or, at a smaller scale, Libya, for that matter.) The other lesson, of course, is that people who don’t grasp these complexities, or don’t want to be bothered by them, are the very worst people to put in charge of any “bold” Middle Eastern initiatives.
@JKB:
MGGA
What could possibly go wrong?
I wont object to Gaza being returned to its prior state, whether it be a Riviera or just a place having a few nice hotels and a functional community. I just dont want the US spending its money and the lives of its soldiers to try to achieve it. The GOP plans for nation building in the Middle East have never worked out well so I dont expect it to do so this time either. They wont be “welcoming us as liberators”.
Also, as others noted he hadn’t discussed this with his Secretary of Defense or State before announcing this. Why would he? Hegseth has no pertinent abilities to run DoD and is just there to say yes and look good on camera. Rubio knows he gets replaced if he disagrees with Trump. At this point it looks there is literally no one in a position of authority close to Trump to tell him he might be wrong.
Steve
@JohnSF:
When the global wheat price spikes, Egypt gets large government-threatening riots. Trump has previously shown a willingness to screw American farmers. Holding US wheat exports out of the global market will spike the price.
@DK:
One of the reasons.
Despite Nassar’s promotion of pan-Arabism and western filters that see anyone from the middle east being either Jews or Arabs, the residents of the middle east make far finer distinctions. Of which, DK, I’m sure you’re aware. The Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese, don’t want the Palestinians for reasons that are similar to why a large portion of Americans oppose immigration.
For the time being, Netanyahu is very happy to let Trump run with this. He’s happy to be the Prime Minister who decimated Hamas and dealt severe body blows to Hezbollah and Iran too.
On the issue of the October 7th War, it seems clear to me that Hamas never thought Netanyahu would retaliate by completely destroying Gaza, killing over 40,000 Palestinians, and displacing about two million Palestinians. I’m sure their calculation was that the West would not stand for what actually happened. That after an expected retaliation, there would be strong pressure to settle up to get the hostages released, and then back to guerilla war as usual.
What a colossal miscalculation and tragedy.
@Sleeping Dog:
Absolutely true. It’s often the case that both sides in the Middle East are atrocious. The “reason” that Saudi Arabians are carpet bombing civilians is because there really are fanatical terrorists among them. Assad massacred whole cities and gassed the civilians fleeing because many if not most of those leading the fight against his kleptocracy were religious fanatic terrorists. Going back to my youth, the Irish Republican Army regularly bombed London and other British holdings, traded arms with other terrorist groups, and had corrupt members who were little better than murderers, armed robbers and extortionists. Meanwhile the British Government used their soldiers to keep the Catholics in walled ghettos and assisted the religious fanatics (Orangemen) paramilitaries in beatings, murders and myriad other criminal intimidations.
In the case of Saudi Arabians vs the Yemeni terrorists there is one side (the Saudis) whose strategic value to us is fairly high, but there isn’t anything of strategic value the Yemeni terrorists offer to anyone. With Syria and their terrorists, it’s just a double whammy of bad. In both cases there are no people on either side who a) have any kind of real power and b) are willing to make compromises for peace. On the Irish front things were pretty bad, but there were some legitimate power bases that did want peace and were willing to make compromises to get there. The US engaged in that effort.
Perhaps the best (but not by any means perfect) corollary is apartheid era South Africa. Their most organized resistance, the ANC, was openly communist and aligned with the Soviets, and preached the destruction of the entire West. Because of this (and the gold!) Ronald Reagan and other members of the Republican establishment were praising the SA leadership to the skies, and some establishment Democrats were bleating about how we could help bring about change by leveraging our special relationship, while in fact SA was becoming more and more repressive, formally enacting the apartheid laws, making them ever more restrictive, creating the Bantustans, etc.
The point is that in nearly all ethnic wars, there are rarely any good guys, but a seemingly endless supply of civilians to be massacred. (And yes, the civilians rarely have the information, insight or perspective to allow them to judge whether their side actually has their best interests at heart, and are usually dehumanizing those on the other side, reframing atrocities as “proportional response”) They all have no hope of ending short of compromises – or virtual genocide. If the only civilians who don’t deserve to be massacred are ones not under the thumb of fanatics, criminals or racists then 80-90% of the worlds population is legitimately on the block.
@Michael Cain:
The wheat riots would be trivial next to the revolt against mass transfer of Palestinians.
And the Saudis and Emiratis can subsidise the wheat.
@JKB:
Vance is NOT from Appalachia despite what your cult tells you to believe.
Heil MAGA
Heil Trump
@JKB:
Not to be picky but, Vance is from Middletown, Ohio.
And later matriculated at the hard scrabble working class academic climes of Yale Law School.
@al Ameda:
Where he benefited from…Diversity efforts.
Some evangelicals are saying this is the Peace Treaty that the Anti-Christ will make with Israel.
They also claim Israel has been preparing the Red Bulls for years.
I personally laugh at this, but they are dead serious.
@JKB:
To be honest, I cannot recall Gaza ever being regarded as the Riviera of the Levant.
Neither under the British Mandate, nor under Egyptian occupation (1948-67) nor under Israeli direct rule (1967-2005).
Nor is it remotely likely to become such in the wake of large scale expulsion of the Palestinians.
Who are the likely clientele?
Arabs? Europeans?
Both in the aftermath of such an act are more likely to have imposed sanctions on Israel.
Russians perhaps?
Or some adventurous Indians, or Chinese, or Africans?
Maybe there is a suitable untapped market for long-haul travel to be found in the US, but I have my doubts.
The whole concept is simply unworkable.
The main obstacle to finding a resolution for Gaza that marginalizes Hamas has been Netanyahu’s self-serving refusal to have an opening for any concrete discussions of viable “day after” planning, and insistence on “maximal force” operations.
As for Lebanon, “Muslims gaining the upper hand” was not the primary reason for the civil wars.
Lebanon under the post-1943 order always had a division of power: a Maronite Christian President, Sunni Prime Minister, Shia Speaker, Army Chief of Staff Druze, etc
The civil wars largely stemmed from an influx of Palestinians post-Six Day War and the Jordanian expulsion of the PLO. Plus growing Syrian interference.
And the shifting demographics, with the Shia becoming the largest Muslim group.
It’s rather complicated, as the Middle East often is.
@JohnSF: For F*ck’s sake, who in their right mind would stay at a hotel, full of strangers from all over the world and low paid staff from all over other parts of the world, built on land that had been forcibly taken from a people with maybe the highest ratio of terrorists to civilians in the world? Perhaps a pool full of vacationing Israeli politicians, American Businessmen, and Saudi billionaires might seem an inviting target?
@Jen: The Speaker isn’t a moron, only a toady. But if his home church is dispensationalist, he may well be caught up in some weirdo notion that he is “furthering the Kingdom.” And, to the extent that I follow his ramblings, I think he’s pretty clearly identified with the Dominionist cohort that holds sway among evangelicals. Not a good combination, in any event.
@MarkedMan:
You put it more bluntly, but rather accurately.
Except that I’d put the likelihood of Saudis on site as a little above absolute zero.
Russian oligarchs, perhaps?
I think we have to ask “What would the Founding Fathers do?”
We have a proud tradition of moving indigenous populations westward over the Appalachian Mountains, and we have a lot of underpopulated land there, including a spare Dakota.
I had previously suggested it as a new Israeli homeland, with the suggestion that we can ship some topsoil from Israel to a spare Dakota to fulfill the “God gave this land to the Jews” in the most technical way possible. And I’m still open to that, if they would prefer. (Obviously, though, we would not want to move both the Palestinians and the Israelis there — one or the other, not both.)
Alternately, we could take a new approach to ethnic cleansing — buyouts of the Palestinian people. A lot of countries would be more willing to accept Palestinians if they weren’t refugees as much as they were nouveau rich. We could probably get the TechBros on board if we make an app, and say we are going to “disrupt the ethnic cleansing industry.” We might also use Blockchain and/or AI for something in the process.
I will note that neither of these ideas is any less realistic than any other plan to move the Palestinians in an unspecified orderly process.
@MarkedMan:
Not to mention that Trump seems utterly unaware that the EU is a customs union and single market.
Italy is not going to exit the EU for a small percentage of its trade that is with the US.
@Gustopher:
Get shitfaced drunk and consider a letter of humble apology to King George?
Really? It looks more like “Hungry Hungry Hippo.”
@Daryl: Diversity programs for whites are always acceptable. It’s called “meritocratic.”
Okay, now I am starting to get suspicious. Rollcall’s transcript site is still down, or rather, it is there but there is nothing in it anymore.
@just nutha:
Bingo. In practice, MAGA’s “meritocratic” dodge is cover for bigotry-centric policy.
We can see throughout the entire 1st Trump administration and again at the start of his 2nd, the utter lack of meritorious bona fides.
Boneheads over bona fides is how they rock.
“Some other countries will build beautiful homes for the Palestinians and then build a new Riviera in Gaza, which America will own without having to pay for it” is not a plan. It’s not even the concepts of a plan. It’s a doddering old man totally disconnected from reality playing “Let’s pretend”.
See also: Canada will become an American state, 30,000 “illegals” will be sent to Guantanamo, tariffs will fund the federal government like they did 120 years ago, an Iron Dome will be built over the entire nation, etc.
al Jazeera reporting on the Intercept’s reporting:
https://aje.io/c4x2ox?update=3494300
(The intercept put up a dick bar demanding an email, but based on what I could see this seemed like a reasonable summary. But… The Intercept)
I would be hard pressed to find a way to increase actual anti-semitism than having Jewish groups compile lists for the Trump Administrations revenge squad using the “any criticism of Isreal is anti-semitism” standard. And the bounty thing seems awesome.
@Gustopher:
Bari Weiss probably has a list handy from her student days!