W.J. Astore
Trump’s Fantastical “Takeover” Vision
Now it’s take and take and takeover, takeover
It’s all take and never give
All these trumped up towers
They’re just golden showers
Where are people supposed to live?
Don Henley, “Gimme What You Got” (1989)
Yesterday, President Trump said the U.S. would take over the redevelopment of the devastated Gaza Strip (destroyed mostly by bombs, shells, and bullets made in the USA), turning it into a “new Riviera,” not for the Palestinians, obviously, but for Israelis.
To borrow from Don Henley, Where are the Palestinians supposed to live? Not in Gaza, where their presence would interfere with Zionism as well as Israeli desires to control profits from offshore gas fields. Roughly 1.8 million Palestinians are simply supposed to leave the Gaza “hellhole” (Trump’s descriptor), after which a lot of men with briefcases (and bulldozers) will move in to turn Gaza into a paradise on earth, free of Palestinian “savages” (a word I’ve seen employed often online, and obviously one that echoes how the white man saw Native Americans, whose land was ruthlessly stolen from them as well).
So, where will be the Palestinian “reservation”? Trump has floated Egypt and Jordan, but both countries have expressed no enthusiasm for this scheme. Greenland, maybe?
Trump has the virtue of saying the quiet part out loud. There will be no Palestinian state, no two-state solution. There will be one state, Greater Israel, with Palestinians either killed or ethnically cleansed from their lands. This was the policy of the Biden administration, even if that administration gave lip service to a two-state solution. Trump just states it plainly, like a mafia don intoning: “It’s nothing personal—it’s strictly business.”
Congress, which is owned by AIPAC, may grouse a bit about Trump’s terminology, but look for most members to rubber-stamp this plan, if one can call it that.
I suppose Trump’s admirers might say he’s cut the Gordian knot here—that peace in the region will only be attained when Israel is completely dominant and Palestinians are simply gone for good—but something tells me the fantastical new Riviera in Gaza is another manifestation of “trumped up towers.”
Bracing Views 
Human beings can actually be seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations. And it’s not hard for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions.
In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.
With each news report of the daily death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in 1987.
Furthermore, it’s sadly and even shamefully true that, while some peoples have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time.
Israel’s government and IDF have deliberately used starvation, among other horrors, against Palestinian non-combatants as a part of its ongoing campaign. There have been photos published by legacy news-media of foreign aid trucks with urgently needed food okay-ed by Israeli security yet still made to park idly for days. And it’s not hard for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
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