From real estate to realpolitik, here are some potential real-world consequences of the president’s proposal.
Ownership by whose sanction? On whose terms? And on what planet? Put aside the colonialist audacity of the idea. Or the prioritization of property over people. Or the purported desire to Make Gaza Beautiful Again—for “the world’s people.
” Or the tone-deaf messaging to the Palestinian people and their supporters across the globe. The main takeaway is that Trump’s assertion yesterday in the White House East Room projects an administration with an unserious foreign policy. The Americanization of Gaza—for all the talk of its being an “out of the box” idea—is a cockamamie, dead-on-arrival, diplomatically disastrous notion. It is a children’s fable from the hungry wolf’s perspective. The consequences are already reverberating in every world capital. And it is not hard to imagine the continued fallout. Let me list just a few of the possibilities… Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, ISIS and al-Qaida, largely on their heels over the past year, may be newly emboldened. There are very real risks of spikes in antisemitism and anti-Americanism . China could perceive US designs on overseas territory as sending a signal that America might turn a blind eye to Beijing’s own regional designs on Taiwan. Ditto for Russia, with regard to Eastern Europe. The dreams of revived talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be dashed for the foreseeable future. American and Israeli ties to Egypt and Jordan would be tested, to say the least. During Trump’s first term, his first foreign visit was to Saudi Arabia, where he posed with his hosts beside a glowing orb. That fading image has been replaced with one of Trump standing shoulder to shoulder in the Oval with a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu. What might the world make of this lockstep American–Middle Eastern bro-hood, already exemplified by Joe Biden’s embrace of Bibi on an airport tarmac? The notion that the executive branch already sanctions lawlessness at home could be reinforced by a plan that, on its face, violates international humanitarian law. The reputation of America, a country often lauded as a beacon of democracy, could be further eroded so that an old trope reemerges, tried and true as it may be: that a land of freedom was built, from its inception, on systemic land grabs from Indigenous peoples. And that’s just for starters. In fact, we should have seen this coming. Trump telegraphed the idea last year in an interview with Hugh Hewitt: “They never took advantage of it, you know, as a developer. It could be the most beautiful place—the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East.”
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