These are not easy times.
To help prepare to write this column, I was obliged to listen repeatedly to the meandering musings of US President Donald Trump at a White House news conference on Tuesday while a grinning accused war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stood close by nodding in happy approval.
Perhaps like you, a number of emotions welled up in me as I watched a calculating charlatan suggest that America “will own” Gaza and that, for their own good, more than two million Palestinians would be evicted from their ancestral homeland to make way, presumably, for a horde of fanatical Israeli settlers and voracious real estate moguls, including Trump’s eager son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Perhaps, like you, I became angry.
I became angry at the audacity of a preening braggart who knows nothing about Palestine or its history but claims to have the best interests of Palestinians at mummified heart while he intends to “clean out” Gaza and, in effect, erase them and their history.
But, unlike so many other callow commentators, I am not shocked by this singularly sinister plan made plain publicly by Trump to engineer what amounts to his foul solution to the Palestinian problem.
“The US will take over the Gaza strip,” Trump said. “We will own it…you [Palestinians] just can’t go back.”
There is nothing to “go back” to since for 15 months, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. More than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly infants, children and women, have been killed. More than 100,000 people have been injured – in mind, body, and spirit – often grievously.
Now, Israel is busy razing the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu and rancid company are determined to turn much of it into dust and memory, too – with the enthusiastic complicity of America’s entrenched political and media establishment.
That wanton brutality has not bothered Israel’s atrocity-excusing allies nor that many Israelis one bit – such is their defining disregard for the grotesque number and manner of Palestinian deaths.
I have warned in column after column that this has been the perverse end game all along: To ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and replace them with a string of seaside resorts.
That has been the end game since 1948. And a succession of Democrat and Republican presidents has enabled Israel – with a spigot of arms and dependable diplomatic cover – to realise its dream of ridding Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians once and decidedly for all.
It was a dream shared by the decrepit and recently departed US commander-in-chief, Joe Biden, his duplicitous Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and craven Democratic Party “elites” who feigned interest in a phantom “two-state” concoction as they rearmed Israel to the hilt and voted down – again and again – ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.
Biden and Blinken stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Netanyahu like obedient manikins while Israel vented its killing lust against largely defenseless Palestinians and Gaza was reduced to uninhabitable, dystopian-like rubble.
In words and deeds, Blinken and Biden set the egregious stage for Trump’s demented gambit. The only and instructive difference is the current Israel-adoring occupant of the Oval Office said the carefully-hidden-behind-more-agreeable-language-part out loud.
I doubt that the Israel-is-always-above-reproach crowd who populate CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times opinion page will remember that senior Biden administration officials were also negotiating with Israel to drain Gaza of Palestinians but reached for a palatable euphemism called “civilian safe passage”.
I doubt, as well, that the familiar roster of deferential Western writers and pundits who pin the Israeli flag on their X handles in a puerile act of solidarity will have the decency to admit finally that the blatant meaning of what the Israeli-American axis has done, and aims to do, to Palestinians constitutes genocidal ethnic cleansing – not as a rhetorical cudgel, but as an established matter of international law.
They will, of course, never stray from their unquestionable defence of Israel – no matter the horrors or outrages it perpetrates or envisions.
Instead, the pretend progressives are busy pointing a smug finger of blame at “uncommitted” voters for having refused to support failed Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.
These deluded partisans have apparently forgotten that the former vice president is as responsible for the wholesale death and destruction of Palestinians and Gaza as her doddering ex-boss.
These insufferable amnesiacs best be quiet.
Meanwhile, Trump’s ethnic-cleansing-drenched remarks have revealed that stages two and three of the so-called ceasefire agreement that set the terms for the possible reconstruction of Gaza are a cynical farce.
Bereft of even a hint of humanity, Trump and Israel’s racist cabinet will make sure that Gaza will not be rebuilt. Working together, they will guarantee that Palestinians remain exposed and vulnerable to the harsh, unforgiving elements, deprivation, disease, and want.
They know that time and the grinding, never-ending occupation are on their side.
Soon, Palestinian mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons will confront an excruciating dilemma despite their moving, dignified insistence that “we shall not be moved.”
For some, no homes, no jobs, no schools, no hospitals, no libraries, no playgrounds, will, inevitably, translate into no hope.
In this awful context, the only option for many Palestinians may regrettably be to leave Gaza and the West Bank to try to discover a new life with tangible promise and possibilities.
That is the undeniable, insidious aspect of Trump’s mad ideas – to force Palestinians to make a choice: Stay in Gaza and succumb to despair borne of resignation and hopelessness or, reluctantly, seek refuge in foreign places near and far as so many others have done.
In the end, all the columns that will be written devoted to Trump’s obscene scheme are grist for the ephemeral mill.
Palestine’s fate and future will be resolved by Palestinians in quiet conversation amid the ruins wrought by the “international community” who, for generations, has condemned and abandoned them to the rabid wolves.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
