Thomas Friedman, the eternal New York Times foreign affairs columnist and Orientalist extraordinaire, resigned as president of the United States of America in January with the oath-taking advice “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.”
Trump has taken Friedman’s challenge and taken it to a whole new level by announcing on Tuesday that the US will “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, where nearly 62, 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s genocide since October 2023, despite the fact that the actual death toll is undoubtedly much higher. The majority of the enclave’s remains are now rubble.
No matter how obscurely does Trump appear to be regarding the location of the Gaza Strip on the global map, as demonstrated by his most recent absurdly misguided claim that the US was sending thousands of dollars “to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
Speaking at the White House after meeting with visiting genocidaire-in-chief, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump declared: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it”.
In order for the razed coastal enclave to become the “Riviera of the Middle East,” according to Trump, “long-term ownership position” over the area would essentially require forcibly shifting the majority of the resident Palestinian population to “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts” in order to make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump assured his audience that, in order to make people doubt the possibility that the US would illegally appropriate a territory that was 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles) away, “everyone loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
Anyway, who said ethnic cleansing wasn’t magnificent?
And if there are folks who think otherwise, well, Trump has not discarded the possibility of deploying the US military to rectify the situation: “As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that”.
Naturally, it’s not surprising that a billionaire former real estate mogul, the owner of the renowned Trump Tower in New York City, discovered lucrative business opportunities in a picturesque Mediterranean seaside region that has recently been helped by Joe Biden’s predecessor.
Perhaps the Trump Tower will be built in Gaza City someday?
Trump’s tyrannical policy toward the Gaza Strip is in keeping with his barbaric egotism, which he has also exhibited in many other countries. Trump has threatened to seize the Panama Canal, annex Canada and Greenland, and use military force if necessary, in addition to renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
This is not to say, obviously, that Biden and his fellow Democrats have not pursued their own monstrous policies – such as, you know, aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip.
However, Trump’s proposed land grab in Gaza is an especially egregious example of Orientalist psychosis, a deliberate mapping of the Middle East map. According to the Genocide Convention definition of genocide as “acts committed with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” the displacement of Palestinians to make room for the upcoming “Riviera of the Middle East” would appear to be merely a continuation of genocidal behavior.
Although, according to Trump, “the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable” as long as the Palestinians don’t go back, “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” according to what they claim. They live like hell. They live like they’re living in hell”.
Yet one simple way to get out of this terrible situation would have been to stop at first creating it. Even before the onset of all-out genocide in October 2023, the US spent decades facilitating Israel’s regular bouts of mass slaughter, terrorism, and general oppression in Gaza. Trump has now lifted Biden’s superficial moratorium on sending specific heavy bombs to Israel, which won’t significantly lessen “hell” in the world.
Of course, Donald Trump must provide the quickest-ever resolution to an unresolvable crisis that has plagued society for the better part of a century. US imperialism must provide a practical non-solution to a problem it helped to spark. As an added benefit, the hubbub over Trump’s proposed conquest of the Gaza Strip distracts from current serious problems in the US itself, including the country’s unabashed conquest by super-sketchy billionaires.
Trump’s declaration that he wants to “just clean out” Gaza is a mission that Netanyahu and his followers find entertainingly fascist. And as Trump attempts to “reform the world map in one fell swoop” to “bring great stability to that region of the Middle East, and perhaps the entire Middle East,” we ought to have expected nothing less from the self-described “very stable genius.”
Source: Aljazeera
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