The out-of-control US president’s goals for Gaza are disgusting and dangerous, Brian Reade says, and world leaders must remember their history and grow a backbone
Don’t be fooled into thinking that Donald Trump came up with this latest wheeze to turn the Gaza Strip into the Las Vegas Strip off the top of his lacquered head.
It had been in his sights for a while. During his previous White House term he appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Sadly, he would have been better off asking Stormy Daniels to find out why the Big Bang happened as Kushner made little progress, but he did conclude that once all the Gazans were removed, the Strip could be “very valuable waterfront property”.
And according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu last summer that Gaza was a prime piece of real estate and he should think about what kind of hotels could be constructed there, no doubt muttering, “Mine, baby, mine,” as he did the YMCA dance.
So it’s not a shock to see Trump calling the homeland of 2.1 million displaced Palestinians a “demolition site” which should be turned into a US-run leisure resort, as he stood next to Netanyahu who faces a war crimes trial for his leading role in the murderous destruction of Gaza.
But is it disgusting, nauseating and highly dangerous? Yes.
It’s like Harold Truman standing next to the Enola Gay pilot in 1945 saying, “Hiroshima is a wasteland now. So let’s help everyone out by letting Disney turn it into a theme park called The Playland of the Rising Sun.”
Or Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, standing alongside a chortling Ian Paisley in Stormont, proposing to end The Troubles by “razing West Belfast to the ground, turning it into a beautiful golf course with a Union Jack flag on the pins of every green, and forcing the Vatican State to take in all the displaced Catholics”.
So what should our government make of it? Dismiss it as the latest rant from the world’s most demented barroom bore or recall what happened the last time a leader of a major Western power openly advocated ethnic cleansing?
Because, if you throw in this mooted Gaza land-grab with Trump’s blatant play to swallow up Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal to give the US what a certain Populist leader of the 1930s termed more “lebensraum”, then the prospect of a very dark path opens.
And just as Britain shamefully stood by and let Adolf Hitler take Austria and Czechoslovakia because they were petrified of upsetting him, so the current British Prime Minister shapes up to be a second Neville Chamberlain: hiding behind his Downing Street couch, petrified of saying anything that may upset the out-of-control megalomaniac in case he puts tariffs on our Scotch whisky.
What chance Starmer returning from Washington in the near future, clutching a piece of paper and saying Trump has agreed to “peace in our time” as US marines’ boots land at Haifa en route for Gaza and Armageddon?
If history teaches us one thing, even as recently as Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, it’s that when you don’t stand up to bullies, you pay a terrible price. Trump is not just a bully, but an empowered one, who genuinely believes he’s been given a mandate to redraw the global map for the sole interests of America.
It’s time the rest of the world’s leaders grew some backbone, faced him head on and put him firmly in his place.
