AT PENPOINT
US President Donald Trump is showing his age, because he is throwing old solutions at current problems. It would be funny if it was not so tragic. Joe Biden did not run last year because he was flubbing so much in public that he was suspected of suffering from senile dementia. However, none of his executive decisions could be faulted for showing signs that anything was wrong. His unwavering support of Israel could be faulted for being a go-to solution mired in the past, and failing to take account of new realities, but compared to Trump’s recent solution, now seems merely a hardheaded solution, trifle conservative, rooted in present realities of US politics, and going back to the founding of Israel.
Trump’s proposal seems rooted in the 1948 Nakba: that the Palestinians in Gaza should be sent to Egypt and Jordan. Gaza would thus be vacated, and thus made available to Israel for setting up settlements. Gaza will have to be rebuilt, so does it matter where the rebuilding takes place? This proposal has been rejected by both countries, though it mirrors what happened to Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948.
It should not be forgotten that the majority of the population of Gaza consists of Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948, who fled from Israel and went into refugee camps there. The Gaza Strip was a small portion of Palestine that was taken over by Egypt in 1948, when it went to war against Israel. It used the Strip to base a short-lived Palestinian government-in-exile. The Gaza Strip was only occupied by Israel after the 1967 War.
It was only after that War that Israel occupied the West Bank, which until then had been in Jordan in control. That occupation sent another wave of refugees into Jordan, to join the ones already there. With 2.1 million refugees, it is the biggest host of Palestinians in the world, of whom 7 million are formally refugees.
However, that should not obscure the fact that in 1948, Palestinians spread throughout the Arab world, being better educated than most natives of the lands they went to, and also with the refugee’s drive to work hard to survive, they made a place for themselves. Jordan had a conflicted relationship with the refugees. After 1967, the PLO under Yasser Arafat shifted to Jordan, and began to challenge the authority of the state. The Jordanian government and the PLO went to war in 1970. The war ended in 1971, after which the Black September was founded, which carried out the assassination of Jordanian PM Wasfi Tal in Cairo (where he was attending an Arab League meeting.
Trump was at his worst at the beginning of his first term, but this time around, he has started so strongly, that even an improvement will still be pretty bad. Is one to seek a prior example in the conversion of the Roman Republic to an Empire, or France before the Revolution? Either way, the road to perdition will be paved with good intentions
It might have become obvious that Egypt has a conflicted relationship with Gaza. When it signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, it only got the Sinai back, not the Gaza Strip. Israel was supposed to withdraw from it and the West Bank after elections. Jordan also has a conflicted relationship with Palestinian refugees.
If one adds to that the desire of Palestinians to retain their land, Trump’s solution is a bad one. It might be in line with Israeli wishes, for it would provide a path towards the ‘Greater Israel’ dream, in which Israel would absorb the territories it occupied in 1967. One of the overriding concerns Israel has had is that the numbers don’t add up. In Greater Israel, the Palestinians would become a majority if there was universal adult suffrage.
Even at present, Greater Israel is an apartheid state, with only some Palestinians allowed to vote. Israelis do not want a Palestinian PM, which will become inevitable if there is universal suffrage. One way this could be avoided is if the Palestinians could be somehow eliminated. Genocide was tired, but has not worked. Throwing them out is a good option.
However, making families refugees twice is a bad idea for Israel. Many Biharis now settled in Karachi first became refugees in 1947, when they went to East Pakistan, and became refugees gain in 1971, when it became Bangladesh. Their example makes it likely that twice-displaced Palestinians will not allow Israel any peace.
Trump has similar old-fashioned ideas for tackling the opioid crisis, by imposing tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China. The flaw is that he has taken no steps to tackling the demand for opioids. The only parallel is the Prohibition, between 1920 and 1933, when the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited throughout the USA. Demand for bootleg liquor was strong, because Prohibition was not really popular. The Mafia got into the business, and the Prohibition probably made fortunes for its bosses. It might be mentioned here that the Mafia was already into racketeering and prostitution, so bootlegging was merely added on, but was not what got it into crime. There was widespread smuggling from Canada and Mexico. As alcoholic beverages were legal in both countries, neither were very cooperative with the USA, as they should be with opioids, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs.
It was perhaps inevitable that smugglers from Canada and Mexico would get into the drugs trade, for the US demand is so great. At the same time, both Canada and Mexico have legalised marijuana. The USA hasn’t yet, but 24 states have, and further 15 have done so for medical purposes. The suspension of the tariffs until they do something about drugs means that Trump obviously use his reputation for being crazy to the hilt.
The tariffs are also aimed at saving jobs, which probably won’t happen, because there is no real way to make labour less expensive. Trump is also not realizing that thus hitting out at China will not work. Even if China was to take some dramatic step, Trump would find another excuse for the tariffs, because he resents China exporting so much to the USA..
Trump does a lot of harking back to the past. The idea of absorbing Canada goes back to the time Canada did not join the Thirteen Colonies in making the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It won independence from the UK much later, in 1867. It’s almost as if Trump and some cronies did some post-prandial loud thinking while the bottle was circulating briskly, and he released a summary of those inebriated remarks as his own idea.
The idea of taking over Greenland makes no sense, unless one considers that it is one end of the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, a key naval chokepoint in the North Atlantic. It also provides access to the Arctic, which may become even more important if the polar ice-cap melts, or shrinks much further.
Another chokepoint is at the centre of Trump’s ambitions (though ‘ramblings’ may be more accurate), the Panama Canal Zone. While Panama has separatist tendencies before, the country was created in 1903 by the secession of a province of Colombia. The Canal Zone was US territory, which the USA only returned to Panama in 1976. Panama is a favourite whipping-boy for the USA. Its military strongman, Gen Manuel Noriega, was kidnapped during the 1989 US invasion of Panama, and given 40 years after being tried in Florida and convicted of drug smuggling.
Trump was at his worst at the beginning of his first term, but this time around, he has started so strongly, that even an improvement will still be pretty bad. Is one to seek a prior example in the conversion of the Roman Republic to an Empire, or France before the Revolution? Either way, the road to perdition will be paved with good intentions.
