We Are All Gazans Now
February 7, 2025
First Greenland, then the Panama Canal, even maybe Canada. And now Gaza. Though crazier yet, seemingly a more serious notion (at least in Trump’s broken brain).
At his first appearance with fellow criminal Netanyahu, Trump called Gaza a “demolition zone.” And who demolished it? Netanyahu. Trump said it’s a killing zone where nobody can safely live. Who’s made it that? Netanyahu, standing right there, grinning. The scene made my head explode.
Trump says America will take over Gaza (Netanyahu seems favorable) and make it the region’s “Riviera.” And the Gaza Palestinians will have “far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free.”
In Trump’s “Rivera?” No, that will be for different folks. Gaza’s current inhabitants would be “resettled” to their “more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes,” maybe in Egypt, or Jordan.
I have been to those countries. Few of their own people live in Trump’s promised paradise. Rather mostly in slums. Palestinians would face squalid refugee camps. But Egypt and Jordan are refusing even that (though Trump threatens to bully them into it).
Israel says it has begun preparations for the Gaza exodus. While the whole rest of the Middle East is horrified, believing this would destabilize the region with a couple million more permanent refugees, aggravating enmities. Totally against America’s interests. Never mind our now having to fight Hamas — and the cost of reconstructing a Gaza reduced to rubble.
And it would be an American crime against humanity. Gaza’s inhabitants don’t want to leave, knowing better than to expect “new and modern homes.” The right term would be ethnic cleansing.
That’s exactly what Netanyahu’s regime wants. Increasingly ascendant in Israel is an insane extreme right-wing Jewish nationalism aiming to somehow disappear all Palestinians. They want to restore the settlements in Gaza withdrawn in 2005. In the West Bank too they’re mounting an under-the-radar pogrom, making life hell for the Palestinians there. Violently assaulting them and throttling public services like hospitals. Trump has the Israelis’ backs.
He’s even decreed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, for deeming Netanyahu a war criminal. Most of the world has condemned Trump’s move.
Meantime, the Trump-Musk administration is trying to dismantle America’s government and civil service. Through illegal means, like the employee buyout scheme, coupled with intimidation. Not a plan for bureaucratic reform, but destruction. The whole federal architecture has been handed over to the world’s richest man, a proto-Nazi jerk with conflicts of interest galore, who also controls a giant social media megaphone. What could go wrong?
Musk has already literally shuttered the USAID program (labelled “evil” and “criminal”), firing and locking out employees and stopping its programs. A hugely fateful rupture in U.S. policy, taking a sledgehammer to our national interests, scarcely even debated in the public square.
Many Americans do hate the idea of foreign aid (vastly overestimating its cost). And a 2009 book, Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo, showed how much is wasted or even deleterious. Yet, if not pure altruism, it does serve our interests. It’s “soft power” sowing goodwill, strengthening our valuable alliances, a pillar of the post-WWII world order. And some of it is truly beneficial, like all our efforts against disease, such as George W. Bush’s highly effective PEPFAR program combating AIDS in Africa. Now too killed by Trump.
Meantime, we’re getting into trade wars with Mexico and Canada — some of our best friends in the world. Or at least they were, pre-Trump. The real winner from our blowing up these relationships will be China.
Meantime, here at home, not only has Trump targeted undocumented residents, he’s virtually slammed the door on all immigration. Even stopped help for refugees previously arrived. One organization, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (with a local Albany operation), was left unable to service people already their responsibility.
Meantime, we used to think deportations were just for non-citizens. But Trump is deporting citizens. Made a deal with El Salvador to ship Americans from our prisons to their hell-hole dungeons. Is that legal? Does that even matter anymore?
All this wreckage of our institutions, traditions, policies, and civic culture will be hard to put right. Especially with a citizenry so mindless, even a saner later administration won’t be able to get that toothpaste back in the tube and rebuild what’s destroyed. Gaza a perfect metaphor.
My wife and I have been sharing an ancient history book. Reading aloud of once-great Athens’s “drift into both cruelty and folly,” I added, “like, in later times, America.” She said those words prompted the same thought. Though it’s not a drift, but a plunge.