Trump's Fever Dream of Gazan Suzerainty
Four times Trump said the U.S. will "own" Gaza, as he plans to expel around two million people from their homeland. His dream is the world's nightmare.
At a February 4 press conference with war criminal and accused fraudster, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump made a decided endorsement of both U.S. imperialist overreach and ethnic cleansing. Repeating four different times that the U.S. would take “ownership” of the Gaza Strip, Trump stated, “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too.”
Like a man who’s been asleep and then woke up in a daze of confusion, he said the Palestinian residents of Gaza have been “really very unlucky.” Gaza has “been an unlucky place for a long time.” While Trump spoke of the horrendous violence Gaza’s people have suffered, being “shot at and killed and destroyed,” he never indicated that the shootings and bombings and destruction was the work of the man sitting to his right, and of both his and the Biden’s administration’s policy to arm Israel and even fight some of Israel’s battles.
Trump clearly stated he intends to send “the [1.8] million Palestinians living in Gaza” to “various locations” in other unspecified countries. (The MME transcript I have linked to failed to show Trump said “1.8” million, but see video at the accompanying link [timestamp 6:18].)
Some have thought Trump citing a figure of 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, when pre-October 7 population figures showed well over two million Palestinians living there, meant that Trump was admitting to some 500,000 dead Palestinians in Israel’s genocidal carnage. Maybe. Perhaps that’s the number Trump has been briefed on. But it’s also possible Trump just pulled the figure out of his ass. In any case, Trump’s plans amount to the international crime of ethnic cleansing, and the documented amount of Palestinians killed in Gaza has risen to over 60,000!
Trump elaborated on his febrile plot. The Palestinians to be expelled from Gaza “can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back [to Gaza] and do it again.”
Trump’s vision for Gaza is bizarre, the product of a mind molded by American game shows and the kinds of false promises the U.S. government has been making to oppressed people it seeks to dispossess for hundreds of years now.
We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so — this could be so magnificent. But more importantly than that is the people that have been absolutely destroyed that live there now can live in peace in a much better situation because they are living in hell. And those people will now be able to live in peace. We'll make sure that it's done world class.
It will be wonderful for the people. Palestinians, Palestinians mostly were talking about. And I have a feeling that despite them saying no, I have a feeling that the king in Jordan and that the general president [Sisi] — but that the general in Egypt will open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done, and people can live in harmony and in peace. [LINK]
Trump’s new Secretary of State, former senator Marco Rubio, was quick to promote his boss’s scheme, proclaiming grotesquely, “Make Gaza Beautiful Again.”
“Gaza MUST BE FREE from Hamas,” Rubio posted to the social platform X. “As POTUS shared today, 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.”
“A lasting peace” delivered by the homicidal and increasingly sadistic IDF forces and American 2000-lb. bombs! The only thing lasting here is that when you are dead, you stay dead, and the Palestinians have suffered dispossession and death at U.S. and Israeli hands for far too long now!
A day after Trump’s crazy news conference, on February 5, The New York Times reported that “top Trump administration officials” have “walked back elements of President Trump’s proposal to ‘take over’ Gaza and drive out the Palestinian population, insisting that he [Trump] had not committed to using U.S. troops to clear the territory and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.”
Saying he hadn’t committed to using U.S. troops is not the same as committing not to use them. The U.S. also has contractors and foreign allied troops to do its dirty work. The idea that such massive “relocations” — ETHNIC CLEANSING! — would be “temporary” is too ridiculous to even take seriously. In fact, Trump’s proposal has been rejected by nearly every world leader who has heard of it.
Al Jazeera highlighted the views of a 72 year old man in Khan Younis, who they felt represented the view of the Palestinian-man-in-the-devastated-Gazan-street, so to speak.
“This is the talk of a madman,” Abu al-Saeed says. “And as we Arabs say: ‘If the speaker is a madman, let the listener be sane.’ This man knows nothing about homeland, struggle, defiance, pride — or Palestine.”
Dismissing Trump’s comments as absurd, Abu al-Saeed shakes his head. “That’s the best fantasy ever dreamt up by a world leader,” he says, shifting between disbelief and laughter. “Any sane person who knows Palestinians understands that leaving our homeland is like death itself. Did Trump really think we’d pack up and go after all this?”
Yet Trump’s words, as delusional as they seem, augur more pain and suffering for the Palestinian people. At the February 4 news conference with Netanyahu, Trump was asked if would “support Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria areas [the West Bank — JK], which many believe is the biblical homeland of the Jewish people?”
Trump responded, “we haven't taken a position on it yet. But we will be — we'll be making an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.” I will go out on a limb here and predict that Trump, who already green-lighted Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, will give his administration’s approval of annexation of the West Bank. Expect all hell to break loose after that!
The Trump administration has flooded the societal and political discourse with a cascade of executive orders seeking to reshape U.S. government policy in the mold of his reactionary America First, anti-immigrant, pro-business beliefs. There are some on the left who think part of what Trump is doing will help undo the depredations of the center-right Democratic Party administration that preceded him. They are hoping in vain!
The ongoing debacle that is U.S. politics continues. There are no leaders from the camp of the bourgeois political parties that have anything to offer the average American. Trump even admits that his economic policy of initiating tariff trade wars will hurt the voting public.
But perhaps nothing shows the mutuality of the U.S. main political parties than their abject support of the genocidal Israeli government. While it’s true that some Congressional Democrats are now highly critical of Trump’s ethnic cleansing and “development” plans for Gaza, in fact these same Democrats in their vast majority have supported sending munitions, including “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs”, to arm Israel’s genocidal attacks in Gaza. They arose as a body to cheer Netanyahu’s speeches in Congress. They have voted to condemn as “anti-Semitism” any criticism of Zionism and its crimes.
The Democrats, in short, cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and if they complain about Trump’s plans now it is only because they fear that the backlash the orange-skinned president’s plans will incur might hurt the Zionist cause.
Donald Trump is not a very intelligent man. But he is highly cunning. He has leveraged the typical tropes of American racism, nativism and jingoism to put himself back into power, and he knows he needs to move quickly to implement as much of his program as he can. But in Palestinian Gaza he has met a challenge that even his narcissistic grandiosity cannot conquer, or politically contain.
Trump is like a drunken teenager who has the keys to the car and a bunch of equally drunken obsequious followers egging him on. He truly believes in his crackpot schemes. He cannot understand why the world would not celebrate his genius. “I can run that red light,” he imagines. But when he does, the reverberating crash that is bound to come will shake American, if not world politics, in ways that we cannot yet imagine.
It’s not just Trump who appears to be sleepwalking into disaster. All of America seems asleep, or paralyzed. When reason sleeps, all forms of irrational hatred, violence, and avarice spring into action. “The dream of reason produces monsters.”
Great column. Thank you.
"There are no leaders from the camp of the bourgeois political parties that have anything to offer the average American" hits the nail on the head.
Meanwhile, no drill baby drill taking place or likely to, inflation still too high, real estate market in tatters, deepseek upturned the hype driven stock market.
Trump trying his best to distract the average Joe from the fact that the US is doomed, and doing quite well at it.