The out­rage over Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s “plan” to  eth­ni­cal­ly cleanse Gaza in all but name and turn it into a resort strip mall, is almost quaint. Did any­one expect ratio­nal­i­ty or human­i­ty from some­one demon­stra­bly unable to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between price, prof­it and val­ue, and who sur­rounds him­self with soul­less moguls of his ilk?

Whether it’s a bluff, a ploy, a dis­trac­tion or real, to reduce Gazans to the lev­el of a real estate deal, is dehu­man­i­sa­tion on a Mephistophe­lean lev­el sup­pos­ed­ly reduced to the ash­es of his­to­ry in 1945.
It puts the Trump admin­is­tra­tion in the com­pa­ny of right wing Israeli reli­gious zealots like secu­ri­ty min­is­ter Ita­mar Ben Gvir, who said his rights were “…more impor­tant than those of Palestinians…”.
(I won­der what impor­tance he places on Herr Elon Musk’s recent raised right arm salute?)
Why would, or should, Pales­tini­ans’ desire for a home­land with­in secure bor­ders be any less fer­vent, or valid, than that of Zionists?
What Pales­tini­ans call the “nakbah” – the cat­a­stro­phe  – of the cre­ation of Israel in 1948 that drove some 750,000 of them from cen­turies-old roots, to become refugees in Gaza and across the Mid­dle East, sparked decades of terrorism.
Any­one who doesn’t under­stand kick­ing them out of Gaza will enflame that all over again is, to be kind, naïve to the point of stupidity.
Neither Trump, nor his enablers and “advis­ers”, show any under­stand­ing of even recent U.S. his­to­ry, nev­er mind colonialism.
His boast that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” is pret­ty much what the Bush II admin­is­tra­tion had in mind for Iraq.
The price of that lie-based fol­ly is still being paid in the for­ev­er war against ISIS and its offshoots.
A nego­ti­at­ed, inter­na­tion­al­ly guar­an­teed  two state solu­tion, agreed on in the 1993 Oslo Accords and backed by more than 100 coun­tries is, and will remain, the only way to achieve any­thing resem­bling last­ing peace in the now 67-years and count­ing “Pales­tin­ian-Israeli conflict.”
Trump’s Gaza pipedream car­ries a grave and very real risk of plung­ing the U.S. into a new Mid­dle East war of the kind he pledged to avoid when he was first elect­ed in 2016.
But then, apart from being a “Dic­ta­tor on Day One”, have any of his pledges, promis­es and “plans” been realised yet?
Maybe some Repub­li­can con­gress mem­bers, whose job is “advice and con­sent” could point out that every Third World coun­try “tak­en over” by an empire-build­ing West­ern pow­er, fought back in imag­i­na­tive and deter­mined ways, until the would-be own­ers were evicted.
Efforts to inject real com­mon sense – as opposed to the kind Trump claims he has – are like­ly to be as wel­come as life-sav­ing vac­cines in MAGA world, however.

                    SPEAKING OF WHICH    

In anoth­er venal way of los­ing friends, influ­ence and stand­ing in the world, the Musk-moti­vat­ed, short-sight­ed cal­lous­ness of shut­ter­ing USAID is on a par with twin­ning Gaza and Mar-a-Lago.
Under the head­line: “The Pow­er of 1% and Glob­al Health: Sav­ing Lives, Improv­ing Eco­nom­ic Oppor­tu­ni­ty, Pro­mot­ing Secu­ri­ty”, the offi­cial USAID web­site points out that the one per­cent of the annu­al U.S. fed­er­al bud­get it spends per year, save mil­lions of lives.
The 90-day sus­pen­sion of its activ­i­ties cuts off med­ical sup­plies to stop hem­or­rhages in preg­nant women, rehy­dra­tion salts to treat life-threat­en­ing diar­rhea in tod­dlers, pre­ven­tive mea­sures to help avert mil­lions of deaths from AIDS, tuber­cu­lo­sis, and etc.
That the pres­i­dent of the world’s rich­est nation would do all that to save mon­ey, in the name of a base­less claim by the world’s rich­est man that  USAID is a “crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion” and a “rad­i­cal-left polit­i­cal psy- op”, beg­gars belief.
Only cow­ards and cretins pick on and take advan­tage of the vulnerable.
If noth­ing else, one would think bil­lion­aires could under­stand that if you save a life, you can make an ally and friend for life. (Or, in their lex­i­con, a customer.)
Gaza being part of the “Holy Land”, maybe they could con­sult Gala­tians 6:7 in a Trump “God Bless the U.S. A. Bible: “ As ye sow, so shall ye reap”.
To put that in sim­ple per­spec­tive: until the day he died at a ripe old age, my next door neigh­bour in Italy would not allow a neg­a­tive word about Amer­i­cans to be uttered in his presence.
Pepino was a young boy when the Allies bat­tled the length of Italy to dri­ve the Nazis out.
U.S sol­diers lib­er­at­ed the vil­lage where he was born.
“They were molto bra­vo,” Pepino told me. “They helped us. They gave us food. With­out the Amer­i­cans, my fam­i­ly would have starved.”
The basis of a sound, humane, win-win for­eign pol­i­cy is as sim­ple as that.

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