When Donald Trump reassumed the presidency of the United States of America in January, eternal New York Times foreign affairs columnist and Orientalist extraordinaire Thomas Friedman took to the pages of the US newspaper of record with some advice: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.”
And while punitive imperial makeovers have long been US policy in said region, Trump has now taken Friedman’s challenge and run with it to a whole new level, announcing on Tuesday that the US would “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s genocide has officially killed nearly 62,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – although the true death toll is undoubtedly far higher. Most of the enclave has been reduced to rubble.
No matter that Trump appears to be unclear as to where on the global map the Gaza Strip even is, as evidenced by his recent ludicrously misguided claim that the US was sending tens of thousands of dollars “to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas”.
Speaking at the White House after meeting with visiting genocidaire-in-chief, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump declared: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.”
According to Trump, this “long-term ownership position” over the razed coastal enclave would basically entail forcibly displacing the bulk of the resident Palestinian population to “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts”, such that Gaza might be transformed into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Lest anyone question the prospect of the US illegally appropriating a territory 10,000 kilometres (6,214 miles away), Trump assured his audience: “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”
Anyway, who said ethnic cleansing wasn’t magnificent?
And if there are folks who think otherwise, well, Trump has not discarded the possibility of deploying the US military to rectify the situation: “As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that.”
Of course, it’s not particularly shocking that a billionaire former real estate tycoon – overlord of the iconic Trump Tower in New York City – might detect lucrative business opportunities in a picturesque Mediterranean seaside territory that has conveniently just been flattened by the Israeli army with dedicated assistance from Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.
Perhaps Gaza City might one day host its very own Trump Tower?
In the meantime, Trump’s tyrannical approach to the Gaza Strip is of a piece with the barbaric egotism he has extended to many other parts of the world, as well. In addition to taking it upon himself to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, Trump has also threatened to seize the Panama Canal and to annex Canada and Greenland, using military force if necessary.
This is not to say, obviously, that Biden and his fellow Democrats have not pursued their own monstrous policies – such as, you know, aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip.
But Trump’s proposed land grab in Gaza is an especially egregious manifestation of Orientalist psychosis, an exercise in redrawing the map of the Middle East by spontaneous fiat. The displacement of Palestinians to make room for the impending “Riviera of the Middle East” would seem to simply be a continuation of genocidal behaviour – at least as per the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Though emptying Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants would constitute comprehensive destruction on pretty much all the aforementioned grounds, Trump has determined that “the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable” – as long, naturally, as the Palestinians don’t return: “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza … I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They live like hell. They live like they’re living in hell.”
And yet one easy way to resolve the hellish situation would have been to refrain from creating it in the first place. Even before the onset of all-out genocide in October 2023, the US spent decades facilitating Israel’s regular bouts of mass slaughter, terrorism, and general oppression in Gaza. Now, Trump has reversed Biden’s superficial moratorium on the delivery of certain heavy bombs to Israel, which won’t do much in terms of alleviating “hell”.
Leave it to US imperialism, of course, to provide a handy non-solution to a problem it helped spawn – and to Donald Trump to provide the quickest-ever remedy to an intractable crisis that has occupied the better part of a century. As an added benefit, the hubbub over Trump’s proposed conquest of the Gaza Strip distracts from current serious problems in the US itself, including the country’s unabashed conquest by super-sketchy billionaires.
Trump has proclaimed that he would like to “just clean out” Gaza, a mission whose charmingly fascist ring is music to the ears of Netanyahu and his ilk. And as Trump undertakes to remake the world map in one fell swoop – thus “bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East” – we should have expected nothing less from the self-defined “very stable genius”.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.