Riviera of the Middle East
President Donald Trump’s strange Gaza proposal: Look, every journalist gets a choice in terms of how they choose to cover the Trump years. He says some absolutely crazy stuff, over and over again, and it’s frequently unclear how much is rooted in reality, what he’s actually pursuing, what he’s even capable of pursuing, or if he’s just spitballing or staking out a negotiating position, recognizing that the actual resolution will be far from the initial offer. I’ll let you know right off the bat that I think some of his weird wish casting is unlikely to happen and that choosing to be maximally apoplectic about it—like many journalists were for the duration of his first term—feels like a waste of time. Your mileage may vary, and you may feel like I’m improperly calibrated on this front (I welcome feedback). But my aim is to inform, and getting too incensed about something that’s unlikely to happen runs counter to that goal.
Anyway, last night Trump said that the United States should take over the Gaza Strip, forcing all Palestinians to leave. He was hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House when he made these remarks, suggesting that Gazans be moved to places like Egypt and Jordan to escape the devastation in the strip rained down by Israel in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” said Trump, sounding like a real estate developer, saying that under the United States’ watchful eye, it could someday become “the Riviera of the Middle East” (after all unexploded munitions are dealt with).
This is sort of the opposite of Trump’s first-term commitment to extract the U.S. from entanglements abroad and seemingly also in conflict with his attempts to roll back America’s role in doling out humanitarian aid via the dismantling of USAID.
Of course, Trump’s concept does not stand up to scrutiny or seem likely to happen. Jordan, Egypt, and other nations in the region wrote last week that the “transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land” would “undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people” while threatening regional stability. There’s no actual mechanism by which Trump’s strange resettlement plan could actually happen. He said he’s open to putting U.S. boots on the ground there to help with rebuilding, but he appears to have very little support in Congress, from the American public, or in the region.
One thing many apoplectic pundits are ignoring that will be worth paying attention to in the coming months is that Hamas is reestablishing power in the Gaza Strip. “The morning the cease-fire in Gaza went into effect, masked members of Hamas’s military wing drove through the streets of Gaza in clean, white pickups, carrying Hamas flags and automatic rifles,” reported The New York Times last month. Israel’s military campaign in the Strip—which attempted to root out the terrorist group and resulted in many civilian fatalities along the way—was not wholly successful, and Palestinians who can return to their homes may now be free of bombs exploding overhead but not the horror of terrorist rule. It’s a tragic situation with no easy answers; the “riviera” doesn’t look likely to rebound any time soon.
One beautiful silver lining:Â Lindsey Graham is a dove now! “We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” the South Carolina Republican senator said in response to Trump’s comments. “And I think most South Carolinians are probably not excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza.” You truly love to see it.
So how are those buyouts going? There’s still a day to go before the deadline presented by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, but so far about 20,000 federal employees (of the two million–strong work force) have accepted the buy
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