Trump’s Gaza Vision The president is right: the Middle East mold of the past 78 years must be broken. by Kenneth R. Timmerman
https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-gaza-vision/
Albert Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. That’s what the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership have been doing for over seventy years.
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who has pitched himself as the modernizer of a very backward country, has rejected President Trump’s radical new proposals to spring the Gazan trap by saying there must be a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital – or else.
This is tired old dogma, which has paralyzed the region and legitimized the attempted genocide of the Jewish people of Israel for the past seventy-eight years.
In the past, the Saudi “or else” meant an oil boycott of the United States, which they imposed after the 1973 war – when they quadrupled world oil prices, ostensibly to punish the United States and other world powers that had supported Israel.
Could the Saudis pull off such a stunt today? Sure, they could cut back production, which would temporarily raise world oil prices. But with the United States now energy independent, the pain would be felt mainly by Europe, China, and the developing world.
The pain would also be felt by the Saudi people, who have become accustomed to lavish handouts from their princely leaders. What would happen to the Saudi monarchy if it could no longer afford to buy off their people?
Maybe the “or else” means that Saudi Arabia will fund the Palestinian Authority, either alone or with its Arab allies. But do the Palestinians want to become vassals of the Gulf Arabs? I think not.
Maybe by “or else” MBS (as the Saudi crown prince likes to be called) is signaling his willingness to finance the reconstruction of Gaza and the re-establishment of the political mafias that have terrorized the Palestinian people – as well as much of the world – since 1974?
Trump has called out the emperor without clothes, and that is the myth that somehow the Palestinians are capable of self-governance, capable of living side-by-side in peace with Israel, capable of renouncing the Jew-hatred they have embedded in their society for generations by teaching it to children at home, in mosques, and in UN-funded schools.
“It’s been an unlucky place for a long time,” Trump said at his joint press conference in Washington last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
That was Trump being polite. He could have employed a term he used during his first term for failed states, and it would have been perfectly accurate in describing Gaza.
Gaza is a hell-hole of a “country,” and it is so because of the Palestinians who run the place with money they extort from around the world, including from the US taxpayer.
It will take time for Trump’s proposal to sink in with the Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Jordan.
What about the Palestinians themselves? Trump made a similar offer during his first term, which he called the “deal of the century.” It would have brought more than $100 billion in US and international aid to reconstruct Gaza and the West Bank – if only the Palestinian leadership would make peace with Israel.
But for the Palestinian mafia, that was a bridge too far. It was then, and it remains so today.
I have been to Gaza many times and have devoted multiple chapters to the Palestinian tragedy in my latest book, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue.
The Palestinians are their own worst enemy. As I recount in one of those chapters, they cannot even conceive of cleaning up the beaches to promote tourism, because of “the occupation.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu said it well last week in Washington. He applauded Trump for his
willingness to puncture conventional thinking… to think outside the box with fresh ideas…. You cut to the chase. You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say. And then, after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads. And they say, you know, he’s right.
Can Trump transform Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East? Not while the old guard Palestinian mafia continues to terrorize the Palestinian people and the rest of the world.
I have long believed there can be no peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis until this old generation dies out – just as the old generation of Hebrews had to die out during the forty years of wandering in the desert, before their children could enter the promised land.
The pity is, for the Palestinians, that old generation is now just three years old. They have been weaned on the mother’s milk of Quranic Jew-hatred for generations. Until that poison is removed from their diet once and for all, mothers will continue to offer up their sons as “martyrs” so they can murder Jews as they did on October 7 and so many other times.
Did you ever wonder why no Arab state wants the Palestinians to migrate to their homeland? They saw what the Palestinians tried to do to King Hussein of Jordan in September 1970, when they launched a failed civil war, and in Lebanon in 1974, when they created a state within the state.
Given that track record, today’s Arab leaders don’t want to open their doors to the Palestinians. Who can blame them?
Gaza has become synonymous with hopelessness, death, and despair. President Trump, for the first time ever, is offering Palestinians a hopeful future.
Today’s Palestinian leaders have shown over and over that they prefer generations of insanity over a future of hope. As Trump says, such an unlucky place.
Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute. His latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, was recently published by Bombardier Books.
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