A CALLOUS POLICY IS A CALAMITOUS ONE
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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2 thoughts on “A CALLOUS POLICY IS A CALAMITOUS ONE”
Your closing comment resonates with me. In the ten years we spent in Munich, most of the Germans we met admired the U.S. for how it had helped after the war. Now the Germans I’m in touch with can’t understand what is happening here.
I think what’s happening is the perhaps irreversible decline of international perception of the U.S. as a reliable, friend, ally, force for good and a nation to be admired.