When Donald Trump reassumed the presidency of the USA of America in January, everlasting New York Occasions overseas affairs columnist and Orientalist extraordinaire Thomas Friedman took to the pages of the US newspaper of report with some advice: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Center East if You Dare.”
And whereas punitive imperial makeovers have lengthy been US coverage in stated area, Trump has now taken Friedman’s problem and run with it to an entire new degree, announcing on Tuesday that the US would “take over” and “personal” the Gaza Strip, the place Israel’s genocide has formally killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – though the true dying toll is undoubtedly far higher. A lot of the enclave has been diminished to rubble.
Irrespective of that Trump seems to be unclear as to the place on the worldwide map the Gaza Strip even is, as evidenced by his latest ludicrously misguided claim that the US was sending tens of 1000’s of {dollars} “to Gaza to purchase condoms for Hamas”.
Talking on the White Home after assembly with visiting genocidaire-in-chief, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump declared: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we’ll do a job with it, too. We’ll personal it.”
In response to Trump, this “long-term possession place” over the razed coastal enclave would principally entail forcibly displacing the majority of the resident Palestinian inhabitants to “different international locations of curiosity with humanitarian hearts”, such that Gaza is perhaps reworked into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Lest anybody query the prospect of the US illegally appropriating a territory 10,000 kilometres (6,214 miles away), Trump assured his viewers: “All people I’ve spoken to loves the concept of the USA proudly owning that piece of land, creating and creating 1000’s of jobs with one thing that will probably be magnificent.”
Anyway, who stated ethnic cleaning wasn’t magnificent?
And if there are people who assume in any other case, effectively, Trump has not discarded the potential for deploying the US navy to rectify the state of affairs: “So far as Gaza is anxious, we’ll do what is critical. If it’s essential, we’ll try this.”
After all, it’s not significantly surprising {that a} billionaire former actual property tycoon – overlord of the long-lasting Trump Tower in New York Metropolis – may detect profitable enterprise alternatives in a picturesque Mediterranean seaside territory that has conveniently simply been flattened by the Israeli military with dedicated assistance from Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.
Maybe Gaza Metropolis may at some point host its very personal Trump Tower?
Within the meantime, Trump’s tyrannical method to the Gaza Strip is of a chunk with the barbaric egotism he has prolonged to many different elements of the world, as effectively. Along with taking it upon himself to rename the Gulf of Mexico because the “Gulf of America”, Trump has additionally threatened to seize the Panama Canal and to annex Canada and Greenland, utilizing navy power if essential.
This isn’t to say, clearly, that Biden and his fellow Democrats haven’t pursued their very own monstrous insurance policies – equivalent to, , aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide within the Gaza Strip.
However Trump’s proposed land seize in Gaza is an particularly egregious manifestation of Orientalist psychosis, an train in redrawing the map of the Center East by spontaneous fiat. The displacement of Palestinians to make room for the upcoming “Riviera of the Center East” would appear to easily be a continuation of genocidal behaviour – at the very least as per the Genocide Conference’s definition of genocide as “acts dedicated with intent to destroy, in entire or partly, a nationwide, ethnical, racial or non secular group”.
Although emptying Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants would represent complete destruction on just about all of the aforementioned grounds, Trump has decided that “the potential within the Gaza Strip is unbelievable” – as lengthy, naturally, because the Palestinians don’t return: “I don’t assume folks ought to be going again to Gaza … I heard that Gaza has been very unfortunate for them. They dwell like hell. They dwell like they’re dwelling in hell.”
And but one straightforward approach to resolve the hellish state of affairs would have been to chorus from creating it within the first place. Even earlier than the onset of all-out genocide in October 2023, the US spent many years facilitating Israel’s common bouts of mass slaughter, terrorism, and normal oppression in Gaza. Now, Trump has reversed Biden’s superficial moratorium on the supply of sure heavy bombs to Israel, which gained’t do a lot by way of assuaging “hell”.
Depart it to US imperialism, in fact, to supply a helpful non-solution to an issue it helped spawn – and to Donald Trump to supply the quickest-ever treatment to an intractable disaster that has occupied the higher a part of a century. As an additional benefit, the hubbub over Trump’s proposed conquest of the Gaza Strip distracts from present serious problems within the US itself, together with the nation’s unabashed conquest by super-sketchy billionaires.
Trump has proclaimed that he wish to “simply clear out” Gaza, a mission whose charmingly fascist ring is music to the ears of Netanyahu and his ilk. And as Trump undertakes to remake the world map in a single fell swoop – thus “bringing nice stability to that a part of the Center East, and possibly your entire Center East” – we must always have anticipated nothing much less from the self-defined “very stable genius”.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
