Donald Trump’s real estate man view of the world might struggle against the messy realities of Gaza
The chance of this actually coming about is surely just as great as the vision Trump once offered for North Korea under Kim Jong-un. Give up your nuclear weapons and build holiday resorts and casinos instead.
A rational Kim would have taken that deal. Just as a rational Gaza Palestinian leadership would themselves already have tried to turn their coastal homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East” by laying down their weapons and pursuing normalised relations with Israel. But Gaza, like North Korea, has never had a leadership that is remotely interested in the welfare of its people.
It’s easy to miss that Trump’s real estate developer view of the world is inherently benign.
Coastal resorts and condos are a path to jobs and improved living standards for countless developing nations. However, it obviously doesn’t fit into anything about the realities of life on the ground in Gaza.
Much outrage is being directed at the idea of the forcible relocation of 1.8 million Palestinians out of Gaza. If that’s what Trump meant, it’s obviously unacceptable. But he never actually spoke of forced relocation.
If, on the other hand, Trump has in mind allowing Gazans who want to leave and migrate to nearby Arab-speaking, Muslim majority countries to do so, that’s pretty interesting.
It’s actually more coherent than the Albanese government’s previous approach of bringing thousands of Gazans to live in Australia while at a policy level opposing the relocation of any of the Gazan population.
Throughout post-World War II history, it has often been the case that populations of refugees who could easily be resettled are maintained in artificial refugee status for decades, for generations, in order to confer a dubious political legitimacy on the people who notionally represent them.
That’s certainly been the case with Palestinians.
But despite the madness of the specific notion of the US taking control of Gaza, it would be the height of folly to dismiss out of hand everything Trump said standing next to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
As usual, mixed with the madness was a lot of truth and courage in some of the things he said.
It is a hopeless cycle that the extremist leaders of Hamas viciously attack Israel, forcing it into a war, which leads to the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. This is then rebuilt with European, American and sometimes Arab money. Hamas steals a lot of the aid to manufacture weapons and tunnels and a few short years later attacks Israel again, knowing, and even desiring, that Israel will wage war once more. And the whole cycle is just repeated endlessly.
Yet the seemingly endless repetition of that cycle is the sum total of the liberal international community orthodox policy responses to Gaza.
Trump wants peace for Israel, a better future for Palestinians, more Arab involvement in the solutions to come. Those are good sentiments to start with. And whatever his policy ideas are, they cannot be more sterile and ineffective than everything that has gone before.
Every single one of Trump’s deals starts with a good deal of bluster and then moves to something more constructive.
Is this the ideal way for foreign affairs to be conducted? Of course not. Does it sometimes produce results? Yes it does. The lesson: don’t ignore Trump’s bluster, and don’t think the bluster is the sum total of the story.
There were other intensely important decisions announced in the Trump/Netanyahu joint press conference. Trump has withdrawn the US from the UN Human Rights Council. That’s a big and good decision. That UN body is an infamous travesty.
Trump has ended all funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, the compromised UN body which has been an impediment to the political evolution in the Palestinian territories.
Above all, Trump declared that he will not under any circumstances allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And he has resupplied Israel with the most powerful of weapons.
Netanyahu was surely right when he declared that Trump is the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.
All of this change and ferment is very hard to navigate on day one. Anthony Albanese was right to avoid any detailed comment on the matter.
The Middle East was an extraordinary success story of Trump’s first presidency, especially the four normalisation agreements of the Abraham Accords. All this presidential energy is certainly going to have an effect on the Middle East. It won’t lead to Gaza becoming an American territory. But it could at least possibly lead to something better than exists now.
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