So great is the despair, so intense the desperation, that the hopes of the Palestinians of Gaza now rest on a man who covets their land and wants to see them gone. The man in question is Donald Trump – and this weekend, there is a rare chance to push him to do the right thing.
There should be no mystery as to what that right thing is. Ideally, it would mean the US president using his leverage to force the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, into ending the nearly 22-month war in Gaza. But if that’s too much to ask, there is an even more pressing demand that Trump should be making right now: that Israel lift all restrictions, remove all bureaucratic impediments, and flood Gaza with the food and medicine the people there so urgently need – and that it happen immediately.
