(Dobbs) Just In Case You Thought This Was Really About The People Of Gaza

It's about “relocation,” an “ownership position,” Trump's “Riviera of the Middle East.”

What in the world does Donald Trump think Palestinians have been fighting for over the last almost 80 years? Why in the world does he think they’ve lived in semi-squalor, sometimes behind barbed wire and concrete barricades, instead of moving, when it was even possible, to a nicer place? Every time over the years that I went into the slums of Palestinian refugee camps, in Gaza and elsewhere, I wondered about it myself.

The answer is, just as Jewish citizens of Israel make a biblical argument that they are entitled to the heartland of Judea and Samaria, Palestinians invoke their ancestral histories there, and the centuries when the land on which the State of Israel resides today was their home.

You can disagree with their claims to the soil, and you should disagree with the terror tactics of the fanatical factions that have always been part of the fight.

However, there is one thing with which you cannot disagree, not if you know even a shred of history: Palestinians did not suffer for all these years so that eventually they could be “relocated.” They suffered so they could stay where they are. They suffered for the distant dream of an independent Palestinian state.

But that’s Trump’s next step: relocation. In what world can a man like him be so blind?

Remember his outlandish proposal— his outlandish but personally profitable proposal— to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” permeated with tributes to Trump himself? It sounded at the time like another of his rash and ridiculous schemes.

But according to The Washington Post and The Financial Times, it wasn’t just a fleeting fantasy. They reported last week on a 38 page prospectus, produced by Trump allies, for what’s called the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, which will be known by the acronym, the GREAT Trust.

So when the president was asked back in February whether American troops might be sent to Gaza and answered, “We’ll take it over and develop it,” he wasn’t just floating something. He was setting it in motion. Not just to “take over” Gaza as he put it, but as he also said, to “own” it, in the form of a U.S.-administered trusteeship “while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.”

The Post reports that the plan begins with “at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls ‘voluntary’ departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.”

Trump said six months ago that everyone he has talked to about the general plan “loves the idea.”

But he fails to mention one thing: he hasn’t talked to the people of Gaza.

Which brings us back to the Palestinians who live there now, if after 23 months of devastation and death, you can call it living.

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, “We are talking to several countries” about absorbing Palestinians who would leave under the terms of the GREAT Trust, what Netanyahu calls “voluntary emigration.” His neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, have always feared the intrusion of terrorists and have flatly said they won’t do it. The other countries whose names come up— Libya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Somaliland— are unstable and unsafe themselves. Hardly prime attractions for Palestinians who would hope to leave peril behind.

No one denies, reconstruction in Gaza will rival some of the most challenging post-war projects in history. According to the U.N., 90 percent of people’s homes are in ruins.

Everything would have to start from scratch, from installing infrastructure for clean water, sewage treatment, electricity, and cellular coverage, to rebuilding homes and shops and schools and hospitals and just everything else that allows a civilized society to function.

It is fair to assume that some Gazans, exhausted by the years-long prospect of surviving in tents and scrounging for food until reconstruction takes a concrete form, would welcome a ticket to get out. But not all, maybe not most. They have suffered privation and domination and, as they see it, virtual imprisonment all their lives. If they leave, it will all have been for naught.

More than fifty years ago, when one of my first jobs in journalism was serving as editor for radio legend Paul Harvey, he handed me a commentary one day that he intended to read on the air. His solution to the hostile relationship between Palestinians and Israelis? Give the Palestinians a corner of Arizona. His thinking was, they like hot climates, they like the desert, this would give them all that but also a place to live in peace.

For more reasons than I can count, I talked him out of it and he shelved it. But one of those reasons was what I wrote about near the top: for Palestinians, it wasn’t just about living in a hot climate in the desert. It was about living where they believed, whether justified or not, they were entitled to be. It was about staying where they were for the distant dream of an independent Palestinian state.

That is still their goal, supported by most of the Arab states in that part of the world.

But it is not Netanyahu’s. It is not Trump’s.

Their goal is “relocation.” Their goal is an “ownership position.” Their goal is a “Riviera of the Middle East.” But if they want buy-in for their plan from the Arab world, they’ve got a strange way of going about it.

The United States over the weekend denied or revoked visas for a Palestinian delegation to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York just a week from now. That includes a ban for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel, with its evidently indiscriminate and arguably disproportionate punishment of the civilian population in Gaza, every day pushes the boundaries of war. It protests that this is untrue. but how can we know if it doesn’t permit Western journalists to put their own boots on the ground and see the war with their own eyes?

When Trump publicly threw out the idea for his “Riviera of the Middle East” in February, the slick video that illustrated his vision came complete with a snappy soundtrack, a song with the lyrics,

“Donald’s coming to set you free.

Bringing delight to all you see.

No more tunnels, no more fear.

Trump Gaza is finally here.”

Just in case you thought this was really about the people of Gaza.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net