By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, USA | 14 February 2025 (IDN) — The stark alternatives facing people in Gaza are both equally bad: stay in their little strip of Palestine and die or try to leave and die. It’s like choosing between the devil or the deep blue sea. They face death either way. Even those managing to find refuge will endure a sort of cultural death.
Now comes one Donald J. Trump, Real Estate Developer, saying Gaza should be reconstructed and become the Riviera of the Middle East under American ownership. “It’s a demolition site,” he says. It could be packed with hotels. US troops will provide security.
Trump wants the American people to support a huge international crime. Sorry. We’re not that crazy, corrupt, or evil. Well, maybe some of us are, but eventually people in the US will see the scheme of this flashy but inane real estate developer for what it is—a plan to get rich by copying a Las Vegas type development plan.
Casino gambling and girlie shows, he thinks, will show the Arab and Muslim people what real civilization is like. Any Palestinians left in Gaza can handle the garbage, clean hotel floors and make beds.
A grinning Netanyahu—indicted for war crimes and under arrest warrants in countries all over the world for killing 14,000 children in Gaza—was satisfied that Trump has agreed for the US to occupy Gaza like the dumbass he is.
Perhaps he doesn’t remember, or never knew, what happened in Beirut in 1983 when President Reagan sent the marines to Beirut to “provide security.” A truck bomb attack killed 242 marines, the greatest loss of life for the Marine Corps since WW II.
Developing Gaza is not a bad idea, actually. Gaza has always served as a key juncture in history. The site is positioned geographically to be a worldwide success because it is centrally located as a crossroads among Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Someday it could be a trading and commercial center rivaling Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai. The only problem as Trump sees it is that those pesky 2.3 million Palestinians refuse to die or go away from their own land, even under almost 16 months of bombing.
Palestinians are a group of people with a cherished nationality
The neglected factor, and the most important, is that Palestinians are a group of people with a cherished nationality of their own, recognized officially by the United Nations and 146 countries around the world.
Trump blithely and stupidly committed the first stage of genocide by advocating a mass population transfer of millions of Palestinian people in his Press Conference at the White House on February 4. He didn’t ask a single Palestinian. Since then, he has doubled down and refuses to rule out awarding the Palestinian territories on the West Bank to Israel as a prize.
Merely advocating a population transfer against the will of the people, if carried out, is explicitly forbidden by the UN’s 1951 Genocide Convention and is one of the elements of the “Supreme International Crime” of genocide.
Accepting children who need life-saving treatment, as Egypt has done during the ceasefire and Jordan’s King Abdullah II has agreed to do, is different. Because it constitutes humanitarian aid to those who have agreed to be transferred to another country.
What does that have to do with history? Everything. Trump’s last attempt at seafront development by building hotels and casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey between 1983 and 2014 was a gigantic financial and social failure.
Go there today and see the ruins of what was once a prosperous tourist attraction. His foolish ambition and corrupt financing destroyed it, and a lot of people were hurt in the process. After four bankruptcies the whole project flopped. Gaza is a thousand times more difficult to resurrect than Atlantic City.
The repeated history of Gaza is a warning to would-be emperors. Napoleon, like many others, conquered Gaza, but left it drowned in blood. More recently, Israel has militarily occupied but failed to retain permanent control of Gaza, withdrawing after the Suez War in 1957, and voluntarily again after a long occupation from 1967—2005. Now the announced goal of the Likud government is to hand the territory over to the Americans under Donald Trump.
The truth is they want out—Gaza is too expensive in money and blood. Let the Yankees do it. Esteemed Palestinian leader Haidar Abdel Shafi told me in his home in Gaza in 2006 when I asked him, “What if the Israelis come back? He said, “Believe me, they don’t want to come back!”
“Never Forgive—Never Forget!”
Then there is the tragic history of the Middle East itself, burdened by so much hatred and bloodshed that territorial compromise seems insolvable and old wounds appear as if they were yesterday. The graffito I saw during the 2006 Israeli war on Beirut says it all: “Never Forgive—Never Forget!”
What’s the missing element? The principle of national identity, national pride, and self-rule, which is the architecture of world civilization. That idea is built on 500 years of experience and two World Wars. The UN was set up in part to prevent such imperialism.
It’s time for Americans, especially the politicians in Washington, to act as if we believe in democracy and reject the crime of the century that Trump wants to commit: stealing Gaza by ethnic cleansing and giving it as a present to the Israelis.
source : indepthnews.