Whither Gaza?

No sooner had the words passed his lips than Donald Trump was excoriated for offering a new plan to fix the situation in Gaza.

Foreign policy mavens, both left and right, denounced the new Trump plan as unrealistic, incoherent and doomed to failure.

One might wonder about the motives of a group of experts who had seen their most earnest efforts to solve the problems in the Middle East trumped by the impresario of Celebrity Apprentice. How did it happen that he and not they had come up with the Abraham Accords.The humiliation must have been unbearable.

Now, Lee Smith writes on Tablet that Trump’s new plan spelled the end of the fantasy called Palestine. 

Succinctly, Smith wrote:

Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

You might say that it was a choice. Rather than build a functioning country within their borders, the Palestinian Gazans decided to put all of their efforts behind an effort to destroy what Israel had built. Dae we notice, they were continuing the European War against Jews.

As Smith notes, they lost. Whether they are capable of accepting the consequences remains to be seen.

As for the mystique that has been applied to a specific piece of land, Smith explains that it is just that-- a mystique.It provides a convenient excuse for the nations that surround Israel and that have largely been outcompeted in industrial and military endeavours.

And Smith does not believe that the Trump proposal is as crazy as others do. After all, he points out, many Gazans are basically Egyptian. And, as for Jordan accepting refugees, they just accepted some half a million Syrian refugees. 

And this before we remark how much foreign aid we send to Egypt and Jordan.

Considering the misery that they have brought on themselves, Gazans ought to be grateful to President Trump for offering them something better. One suspects that the Saudis and the Emirati, peoples who despise the Mualim Brotherhood and Hamas, would be more than happy to lend a hand.

Smith sums it up. Trump has offered to save the Palestinians from themselves. They should be grateful.

Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American president, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.