This week, President Trump hosted Prime Minister Netanyahu as his first international guest in his new Presidential term, and today the two of them co-headlined one of the most awe-inspiring press conferences I’ve ever seen. It was better than any SNL performance since before Pete Davidson was born.
The momentous day began with Trump signing an executive order to sanction Iran, and prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capacity. Whether Arabic, or Farsi, he speaks effortlessly, and bilingually. Bigly.
The roast of Biden doesn’t get old for me, personally. I would be pissed too if I was left with the problems Biden created, and Trump is correct regardless. Iran did get too close to gaining nuclear weapons. “Lack of intelligence perhaps,” notes Trump. There’s a lot of that going around. It seems Santa didn’t give brains out to those in need this past Christmas. Sad!
Again - Arabic. The language of force. The vocabulary of strength. He is fluent.
Yalla, today grew even more dramatic, following prior executive orders to pull American funding from UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations that was directly involved in October 7, and to exit America from the UN Human Rights Council, which has stained its own name by giving too much power to corrupt states like Iran.
In today’s joint presser with Bibi (who looked happy and amazed like a newborn baby opening his eyes for the first time), President Trump said that America will take over Gaza and remove all Arabs from the Strip. He delivered a vision for the new Middle East that nobody saw coming, aside from the few of us who have considered the possibilities and Trump’s capabilities, much to the chagrin of many of the friends and family members who have since disowned us for it.
He said that Gaza would become an "international" zone and called it "the Riviera of the Middle East."
Cue the Queers For Palestine jokes:
It’s brilliant. Now of course, people will be up in arms. They will call this the second Nakba (the first certainly a well-spun lie that has kept the Gazans in a permanent refugee mindset long after anyone logically remains a refugee).
They will say that this is in breach of international law. (Trump did tell Egypt and Jordan last week that they needed to accept over a million Gazans into their territories, and both refused, along with the Saudis and the Emirates, and not out of a moral disgust for displacement no… Because - surprise, surprise – they also don’t want radicals and aggrieved Palestinians living in their countries).
They will claim that this is forcible displacement and ethnic cleansing. Yawn.
Let them. Let them talk. We’re done playing games. There’s a new sheriff in town who speaks street Arabic (yes, fluently), and he’s sitting at the chessboard. You know who I wouldn’t bet against playing chess? Don.
This isn’t a punitive act of displacement. This is a Churchillian moment of taking a terrible situation and finding an opportunity in the dark.
This is the conversation academics such as Dr Einat Wilf have been having since October 7; what happens the day after? How do we de-Nazify Gaza, similar to Germany and Japan post WW2.
This is about de-radicalizing a society that is run by a terrorist regime. If you read history, and understand what happened after 1945, you know this isn’t out of the ordinary.
The Two State Solution died on October 7. The first thing I said to a friend on that horrific day was: “there goes the two state solution” because the two state solution was savagely murdered along with 1,200+ Israelis, when Hamas chose to be that kind of a neighbor.
Anyone with common sense came to that conclusion there and then. There is no coexistence for Israel next to the Gazans. The Palestinians must be de-radicalized, and must cease to set their clocks/the dawn of time at 1945 and their claimed “Nakba” and their subsequent permanent “refugee” status.
Without a different kind of education and perspective, they will never be peace-abiding neighbors for the Jewish state. And there will never be stability in the region. Good faith is believing that stability is possible. And I believe wholeheartedly that it is. The Gazans lost a war they started with Israel and its allies, including the most powerful country in the world. Israel has never lost a war. And it's time for this war to end.
But Trump can’t just kick all the Gazans out! they’ll cry.
Watch him? Aba is in the house.
Reports earlier this week that Trump was getting ready to watch the 45-minute series of Hamas bodycam footage.
Many of the world’s media, including myself, watched that distressing film in the aftermath of October 7. We watched it to bear witness and to understand the depth of what happened on October 7. Anyone who speaks on Gaza should have been made to watch it. I’m sure it has crystallized Trump’s clear-cut thinking on the matter.
Meanwhile, it was reported this week that Biden quietly funneled $3 million to Palestinian government “Security Forces” for weapons training after October 7. More of these stories will come out over the coming weeks and months. Trump’s Administration will make sure to expose all of the backstabbing of the Biden Administration against America’s greatest ally. What in the fu_k were they doing?
It is so refreshing to see a President of America speak with this kind of common sense. And yes, if you’d told me in 2020 that I’d be saying these things about Donald Trump, I would have asked for a lobotomy. But it’s too late now. I am here with my eyes open and my ears piqued:
So yeah. Sorry Ireland. Sorry Spain. Sorry Norway, lol. You’re not going to see a recognized state of Palestine in a post-October 7 world. And if any of your leaders hope to get along with the most powerful man in the world, you probably want to re-think the whole antisemitic foreign policy thing.
My WhatsApp groups were in a state of shock and awe earlier.
In case anyone reading this is feeling confused and needs reminding:
the Gazans chose this. They elected Hamas. They never overthrew the terrorists who stole their children’s futures and oppressed their civilians and built a war bunker underneath their cities. They let their children be educated to believe that the one thing worth dying for was to cleanse Israel of the Jews “from the river to the sea”. They have a victim complex. They wanted to gain power by preying on Western sympathy, instead of taking billions of dollars of aid and making Gaza a great home for the Palestinians; a jewel in the crown of the Middle East. The Gazans have abused their opportunity, and the have lied to the world. That’s a choice they made.
Israel chose something else. In 1945, Israel decided to build a great nation on the heels of the Holocaust. The Jewish nation did not take time to lick its wounds, but instead got to work, and built in 75 years one of the most astonishing countries on the planet, never mind in the region, with an embarrassing list of world-beating industries and achievements. It came as no surprise to me today when news hit that the five IDF observers, freshly released from the depths of Gaza hell (Naama, Liri, Daniela, Karina and Agam), have requested to resume their military service in two weeks. The State of Israel is allegedly prioritizing instead their full recovery before any decisions are made. But that is the proof that the Israeli spirit, the Jewish spirit, can never be broken. These girls are Amazons.
Women around the world ignored our female hostages in Gaza, but when they came out after 470+ days, instead of having a victim complex like the feminists of the West, they said: actually we'd like to take our trauma and go back to what we were doing. Other women don't stand with us because they envy our strength and our refusal to be labeled as victims. Instead, they have sided with the people they relate to the most: the Gazans. Who cannot advance themselves for getting in their own way. True successful survivors don’t have time for wallowing.
As for Trump, he is watching what we are watching every weekend now: the Hamas production of a fake genocide in Gaza.
This past weekend, more sickening scenes as Yarden Bibas was released without his wife Shiri and two baby boys Ariel and Kfir. His face was lost, and he has no knowledge of his family’s whereabouts. He is not home, because they are not home. As for American hostage, Keith Siegel, he looked utterly emaciated but refused to use a wheelchair when the IDF collected him from the Red Cross. A lion of Judah.
The jig is up for Hamas, for Gaza, and for all their supporters around the world.
I want to publish what Dr Einat Wilf said on X tonight in her initial response to today’s developments because her brain always makes the most sense to me:
"Some thoughts on the US President's proposal for Gaza:
1) Look here at the attached image of one of the hostage release productions. What the President correctly sees is that Gaza has no objective geographic problem. It is not some windswept landlocked area facing droughts. It is located on a beautiful part of the Mediterranean with soft sands from the Egyptian Delta. It sits at the cross roads of two ancient trade routes. Connected by train through Israel to the Red Sea, it could provide competition to the Suez Canal (is this also part of the thinking?). It has energy reserves. It has everything it needs to be a major trading and tourism hub (and a US military base?). The only problem Gaza has is politics - its people are committed to an ideology of destruction (sustained in that by organizations like UNRWA) - meaning destroying what the Jews have built next door rather than build for themselves. What the President seems to notice is that Gaza's inhabitants could have built for themselves something remarkable on this strip of land, and instead they chose - and it is an ideological choice - to turn it into an integrated weaponized landscape for the singular purpose of destroying Israel. So the President sees what Palestinians, Egyptians, even Jordanians, should have long ago seen - Gaza is an extremely valuable piece of land - if, and that's a big if - the politics can somehow be moved from ones of destruction to construction, figuratively and literally.
2) However, the Arab world is no stranger to grand US-building project ideas intended to help settle Arab refugees and move on from war. What the Arab countries have done in the past with such grand US ideas, beginning in the 1950's is take the money, hijack the agency through which it was to be done (UNRWA), build nothing, and keep the Arab refugees generation after generation turning them into a people - the Palestinians - tragically organized around the idea of no Jewish state. This means that any grand project depends on taking advanced actions that will not allow it to be hijacked. As the US defunds UNRWA it must avoid repeating a situation where western money flows, but the politics of destruction remain. Perhaps, this is why the President speaks of the US taking over the territory immediately.
3) How can the politics of destruction be changed? The key is to end the lie and the scam of perpetual Palestinian refugeehood and the violent vision of "return" that underpinned the October 7th attacks and massacres, and which for generations have sent Gazans the message that Gaza is not their home, but a launchpad from which to "liberate Palestine from the River to the Sea". How? transmute any notion of refugeehood and "right of return" into property rights in Gaza. Gaza's inhabitants, regardless if they are given temporary or permanent refuge in other Arab countries, and even if they just remain in Gaza, must be struck from UNRWA's records as refugees and must each individually recognize that they possess no such thing as a "right of return" into Israel. In return for that, and only after this is done, each Gaza resident receives a unit of property rights (such as an apartment) to be realized when Gaza is rebuilt. That right can then be realized or sold, but it is a simple property right in Gaza, where Gaza is home, not a destructive vision of "return" to somewhere else.
4) Finally, if I were Jordan, I would finally recognize how valuable Gaza is and I will make a play for it - offer to provide temporary or permanent refuge to Gazans - and in return take over Gaza as a Jordanian foot in the Mediterranean. I would then offer Israel to give back the Arabs of the West Bank the Jordanian citizenship that was stripped of them in exchange of Israel allowing two train routes from Jordan into Gaza through the West Bank and from the Red Sea, creating competition to the Suez Canal. (and if I'm Egypt, I would try to prevent Jordan from doing this, and offer to take over Gaza myself).
Bottom line: what the President's proposal served to highlight is this:
Gaza is an incredibly valuable piece of territory. Whoever can figure out how to change its politics from the current ones of obsessive destruction to forward-looking construction, will benefit greatly themselves and will benefit the region more broadly.
Sort of what I said, but much smarter.
It must be asked why anyone would want Palestinians to survive off the fumes of a constant war? Especially when Trump is offering them an opportunity for something better?
He is offering life support. Here is an option to relocate for however long it takes to rebuild Gaza, to rid it of Hamas and weapons and terrorist ideology, and instead morph it into a place for prosperity and growth. For all the talk by humanitarians about Gazans, none of them are humanizing the people who live in this place they have fetishized. I’d hope there are Gazans who would chose an alternative life over the fear they have under Hamas’s regime. If humanitarians really wanted an end to war - to perpetual war - this is it. This is a vision for lasting peace.
This weekend, I was harassed twice by a man for wearing a yellow pin in a grocery store in LA. The second time he harassed me it culminated in him telling me that “the solution to you people is from the river to the sea”. He laughed hysterically in my face and spat in my direction. I don’t expect antisemites to act with any dignity or sanity or respect. However, I do expect more from our friends and neighbors. I expect more to make a stand of solidarity with the Jewish people and against the scourge of antisemitism that is becoming the norm so much so that innocent Jews around the world can’t go to a grocery store without being spat on. When I left the store, I thought about the yellow hostage pin, and I thought about the yellow star in the 1930s. I thought, Wow we volunteered to identify ourselves with another yellow badge so the antisemites can see who we are.
Gazans made a choice to go to war. Israel made a choice to defend itself. And the rest of the world made a choice to behave with the same ignorance and stupidity that harks to the back of beyond. They believed a savage terrorist organization over the Jewish people, who have contributed to society in droves, and who have lived among them in peace for years, and who comprise only 15 million of the population. Shame and embarrassment will come to them in time. Hamas laugh at them and they earned it. Hamas invested a lot of time and expense in these people becoming their brainless foot soldiers, so desperate Westerners are to be popular and liked.
Hamas did this to Gaza. In a way, it’s incredibly sad, but I don’t have tears to cry for the strip. They may get what they never imagined a free Palestine would be. Set free among the corners of the world, never to return the same way again.
If I could see the man who assaulted me on Sunday night today, I would tell him that his “solution” is being realized in a way he never saw coming. Israel and her best friend America. From the river to the sea, bitch.
P.S. Thanks to everyone who sent unbelievable responses to ‘Athena’; my last essay. I’ve never had responses like those in 15 years of writing. Every hour last week I felt like there was no point. What a difference a day makes. Thank you.
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