US President Donald Trump’s latest proposal on Gaza provoked a storm of criticism, and even the audience Mr Trump seemed to appear to be appealing to, the Israeli right-wing, personified by Israeli PM BeIt is perhaps another matter that his ideas are so far out of the box as to be beyond the limits of reality, perhaps even sanity. It takes a peculiar confidence, even for someone as powerful as the US President, to repeat suggestion that has been rejected publicly by allies, but Mr Trump did so, not just blithely repeating his proposal to shift the Gazan population to Egypt and Jordan, but committing the USA to reconstructing Gaza into a ‘Riviera for that part of the world.’ As the Zionist right wing would like to see Gaza emptied of Palestinians, they would naturally applaud, but Egypt and Jordan have already condemned any attempt to force them to accept any Palestinians refugees. The elaboration he presented of that proposal, that the USA would step in to develop Gaza once it was vacated, raised a host of questions, which he did not attempt to answer, perhaps because of the realization that this would only raise a host of new questions.
Perhaps the main problem is that Trump sees the Gaza Strip as real estate to be developed, something which he did in his salad days, the big difference being that occupants and owners were on board. In Gaza, no one is on board, and no one else seems attracted by his ambition to build a substitute for Beirut. Indeed, he may be laying the seeds of a rivalry with Dubai, which has been developed to be a substitute for that city, which before Lebanon became torn by war half a century ago, had been the playground of the Middle East.
Amid the almost universal condemnation that Mr Trump’s proposal attracted was that by JUI(F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who apart from the condemnation, also made the telling point that the Pakistan government’s civilian and military leadership had not taken a stand on the issue. In this context, the presence of PPP chief Bilawal Bhutto at Mr Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast could be potentially embarrassing, while the Maulana’s holding back cannot disguise the fact that the PTI has been as silent about the proposal as the PML(N). Trying to stay in Mr Trump’s good books by keeping quiet is not going to be easy.
