Good morning. Donald Trump’s suggestion that Palestinians should be forced out of Gaza so that it could be rebuilt as a US-run “Riviera of the Middle East” is so outlandish that many have returned to the reminder that we should beware of taking what he says too literally. And, it’s true, the comments don’t seem as if they came on the back of a detailed feasibility study; White House officials spent much of yesterday trying to walk his comments back.
But it’s also true that his proposal, which if enacted would amount to an unambiguous case of ethnic cleansing, tells us something about who Trump understands to be the stakeholders in Gaza’s future: not Palestinian civilians, but the United States, Israel, and the contractors who could make it happen. And the idea has so delighted the Israeli right that it is easy to see how, even if no American soldier ever sets foot in Gaza, it creates the space for serious discussion of the same project by other means.
