A few hours’ drive northwest of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida lies a sprawling retirees’ complex known as The Villages.
It’s a lot like a seniors’ version of Orlando’s Disney complex, which is not far away. Population about 80,000. Ninety per cent white, median age hovering near 70, miles on miles of pools, pickle ball courts, golf courses and happy hour opportunities where you can easily get blitzed for the price of a beer or two in Toronto. Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one.
Is this the vision galvanizing Trump’s out-of-the-blue plan to colonize Gaza and rebuild it as a Middle Eastern version of the American dream? Photos of the devastation wrought by a year of warfare bring to mind nothing so much as Berlin circa 1945 once the Russians were through with it, a wasteland of broken concrete, mountains of rubble and piles of ash. To Trump it’s a killer real estate opportunity, cleared of Palestinians, bursting for rebirth as “a beautiful area to resettle people, permanently, in nice homes where they can be happy and not be shot and not be killed and not be knifed to death.”
It’s impossible to fully parody the U.S. president. Comics and late-night sketch artists can mimic the voice, copy the mannerisms, replicate the hair, the tan and the never-ending tie, but Trump’s peculiarities are so extensive that capturing them in a manner that wholly communicates the total weirdness of the man is more than humankind is yet capable of. He’s unique. Utterly unpredictable, endlessly inventive, incapable of personal insight.
His Gaza proposal may go down as his pièce de résistance, so utterly off the wall that neither his supporters nor opponents quite know what to make of it. Indications are he didn’t just dream it up on the spot during a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, but had tried it out on family and others prior to the Israeli prime minister’s visit. No one seems sure where he got the idea — he evidently didn’t share that information with the Israelis — or who would pay for it, other than it certainly wouldn’t be Americans. Nor would U.S. troops be sent to keep the peace in what has long been among the world’s most dangerous and deadly locations.
Within hours of Trump springing his plan on the world, underlings were frantically working to re-explain bits of it. Those Palestinians still in the territory, and the hundreds of thousands trying to return, wouldn’t be summarily ejected forever, but just sent off somewhere “that’s going to make people happy” until the rebuild was complete.
So how long would that take? Having just invented the plan it was hard to guess … 15 years? 20? Knowing Trump, who pledged to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours but hasn’t gotten around to it yet, a much shorter time frame may be in the offing. Say by next Thursday? The end of his term? Details, details, that stuff’s for losers and Democrats, this is Trump talking, don’t get in the way with fake news and loser thinking.
If the emirs, princes and Arab royals who are the moneybags of the region knew in advance of Trump’s idea or the extent of its ambitions, they aren’t saying so, except to make clear the costs won’t be coming from their bank accounts. Nor are they willing to accommodate relocated Gazans, whether temporarily or otherwise. Lebanon and Jordan remain home to numerous refugee camps holding hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, some families dating back to the 1940s. The reason the camps remain, several generations after they began, is because other regional powers don’t want them and aren’t open to adding another two million Gazans to the mix.
Equally perplexing is just who Trump sees as eventually inhabiting the new, beautiful land of nice homes and no getting killed. Wealthy U.S. Jews looking for a second home close to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem? Hamas veterans cleansed of their hatred and keen on a pleasant spot to while away their declining years? Perhaps a mix: Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, Israelis and maybe a Hezbollah or two, residing in peace and tranquillity, the fevers of their youth spent, their desire to drive Israel into the sea contained if only out of consideration for their new friends the Beckermans in the bungalow next door?
Presumably there will be rules. No discussing politics over backgammon. No river-to-sea banners adorning homes or golf carts. No plotting jihad in the hot tubs. Apart from a congenial environment it would be a historical miracle reversing two or three thousand years of unremitting hostility.
But one of the many things Trump doesn’t treat seriously is history. His understanding of the world runs directly through his experiences in New York real estate. Getting rid of the Palestinians in Gaza strikes him as no bigger deal than his alleged efforts to keep Blacks out of his rental buildings in the 1980s.
History is nonetheless reflected in the immediate opposition expressed across the Middle East and elsewhere, generally deriving from a refusal to countenance the forced displacement of Palestinians. Saudi Arabia said its position is non-negotiable. Egypt said the plan would only expand conflict in the region, offering a new catalyst for extremist attacks. Turkey said it was “futile” and “wrong even to open this up for debate.”
Only Israel expressed a degree of approval, and why wouldn’t it, given a U.S. takeover would reduce its isolation as a target of terrorist hatred and let Americans share the burden.
It’s a loopy idea but has an advantage in that, only a few weeks into office, Trump has assembled a list of goals so ambitious any one of them could preoccupy an ordinary administration through an entire term. He wants to buy Greenland, he wants to “take back” the Panama Canal, he wants all of Europe to bend to his military and trade demands, he wants Russia to make peace with Ukraine and he wants Canada to become the 51st state, in practice if not in reality. And now he wants to rebuild Gaza as a “Riviera of the Middle East” under the red, white and blue.
It’s a heavy load for a man who will be 80 by the time of the midterms. The more effort he pours into Gaza or Greenland, perhaps the less he’ll have for pointless trade battles with friendly partners like Canada and Mexico. That would be a win for us, if maybe not for potential investors in the Trump International Gaza Resort.
National Post