Trump’s Plan for Gaza

“Ethnic cleansing,” grumbles the eloquent editor of the New Yorker in respect of President Trump’s plan to allow Arabs to leave Gaza and for America to take possession of the territory. “Sheer lunacy” says a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. It took the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal to ask whether Mr. Trump’s idea is so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering.One would think that those belittling Mr. Trump’s plan for Gaza would have been given pause by the pattern. Mr. Trump announces or makes some demarche — say, move the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, exit President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, bring Arab countries into the Abraham Accords. The liberal experts start pointing out the problems, only to discover Mr. Trump was right.One person who does perceive this pattern is Prime Minister Netanyahu. On Tuesday evening at the White House, he spoke about Mr. Trump’s outside-the-box thinking. “After the jaws drop, people shake their heads and say, ‘you know, he’s right.’” Israelis know something about unconventional thinking. They have used it to their advantage in making the desert bloom, in becoming a regional economic power, and in securing military victories.Those victories — the beeper attacks that sidelined Hezbollah’s leadership, the entry into Gaza that felled Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammad Deif, the bomb in Iran that found Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh, the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — are what created the space for Mr. Trump to make his “very strong recommendation.” Had Israel taken the advice of the “experts” none of those victories would have obtained.Is there a downside? Mr. Trump addressed concerns about American forces getting drawn into counterinsurgency warfare against Hamas. He issued a social media post this morning explaining that the Yanks would take over from Israel “at the conclusion of fighting.” He assured, “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed.” That’s fine. Our GIs are already stationed in countries with plenty of money to raise their own armies.Israel can defend itself, and supply a security umbrella to an American-controlled Gaza, too. Anyone complaining about a hypothetical American troop presence in Gaza can first tackle the American bases in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Kuwait, Turkey, Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Belgium, Italy, Djibouti, and Australia. If there aren’t any American troops in Gaza, it’d be one of the few places where they’re absent.What we tend to think of is the potential upside of the gumption on Mr. Trump’s part to try another course. “Lech l’aza,” or “go to Gaza,” has, in Hebrew slang, become a kind of curse, like “go to hell.” Leave it to Mr. Trump to turn it into a blessing. It has even led to speculation, if only speculation, that he might make a post-presidential home at the equivalent of a Mar-a-Lago on the Mediterranean coast.“God works in very strange ways,” Mr. Trump said at a prayer breakfast this morning. “With God, the scriptures tell us, all things are possible.” The Book of Kings I 5:4 says Solomon controlled the region “even to Gaza … and he had peace on all sides.” Allowing the Palestinians and the Israelis to escape the hell of Gaza, and letting Americans arrive to build it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” may have its risks, but who has an offer without them?

Trump’s Plan for Gaza

Trump’s Plan for Gaza

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