When Donald Trump reassumed the presidency of the United States of America in January, eternal New York Times foreign affairs columnist and Orientalist extraordinaire Thomas Friedman took to the pages of the US newspaper of record with some advice: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.”
And while punitive imperial makeovers have long been US policy in said region, Trump has now taken Friedman’s challenge and run with it to a whole new level, announcing on Tuesday that the US would “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s genocide has officially killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – although the true death toll is undoubtedly far higher. Most of the enclave has been reduced to rubble.
No matter that Trump appears to be unclear as to where on the global map the Gaza Strip even is, as evidenced by his recent ludicrously misguided claim that the US was sending tens of thousands of dollars “to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas”.
Speaking at the White House after meeting with visiting genocidaire-in-chief, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump declared: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.”
According to Trump, this “long-term ownership position” over the razed coastal enclave would basically entail forcibly displacing the bulk of the resident Palestinian population to “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts”, such that Gaza might be transformed into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Lest anyone question the prospect of the US illegally appropriating a territory 10,000 kilometres (6,214 miles away), Trump assured his audience: “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
Anyway, who said ethnic cleansing wasn’t magnificent?
And if there are folks who think otherwise, well, Trump has not discarded the possibility of deploying the US military to rectify the situation: “As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that.”
Of course, it’s not particularly shocking that a billionaire former real estate tycoon – overlord of the iconic Trump Tower in New York City – might detect lucrative business opportunities in a picturesque Mediterranean seaside territory that has conveniently just been flattened by the Israeli army with dedicated assistance from Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.
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