Almost exactly two years ago, J. D. Vance wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump on the grounds that Trump was antiwar. In that op-ed, Vance brought up the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in a way that suggested that, by brokering that deal, Trump had brought peace to the Middle East.
Yesterday Trump held a press conference with the most notorious war criminal on the planet. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu just spent fifteen months reducing Gaza to rubble. Twenty-five miles long and six miles wide, the Gaza Strip now has the world’s largest population of child amputees. The scale of civilian death there, even in absolute terms, has dwarfed recent wars fought in places with vastly larger populations, like Iraq and Ukraine. As Netanyahu grinned from ear to ear, Trump laid out a plan for the United States to step in and finish the job.
The United States, Trump said, should “take over” Gaza. “We’ll own it.” Its entire population of around two million Palestinians would leave. The United States would raze all the destroyed buildings, “level it out,” and rebuild the territory from scratch as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” When pressed by reporters about whether Palestinians would be allowed to come back after the rebuilding was done, Trump asked, “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”
As the man who turned it into hell sat smiling beside him, Trump answered follow-up questions. Where would these millions of permanently displaced residents live out the rest of their lives? It was his “hope,” he said, that “we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return.” The destination for this permanent exile “could be Jordan, it could be Egypt, it could be other countries.” They wouldn’t all have to go to the same place. They could be dispersed between “four or five or six areas . . . it…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
