Trumps foul solution to the Palestinian

These are not easy times.

To help prepare to write this column, I was obliged to listen repeatedly to the meandering musings of US President Donald Trump at a White House news conference on Tuesday while a grinning accused war criminal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stood close by nodding in happy approval.

Perhaps like you, a number of emotions welled up in me as I watched a calculating charlatan suggest that America “will own” Gaza and that, for their own good, more than two million Palestinians would be evicted from their ancestral homeland to make way, presumably, for a horde of fanatical Israeli settlers and voracious real estate moguls, including Trump’s eager son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Perhaps, like you, I became angry.

I became angry at the audacity of a preening braggart who knows nothing about Palestine or its history but claims to have the best interests of Palestinians at mummified heart while he intends to “clean out” Gaza and, in effect, erase them and their history.

But, unlike so many other callow commentators, I am not shocked by this singularly sinister plan made plain publicly by Trump to engineer what amounts to his foul solution to the Palestinian problem.

The US will take over the Gaza strip,” Trump said. “We will own it…you [Palestinians] just can’t go back.”

There is nothing to “go back” to since for 15 months, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. More than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly infants, children and women, have been killed. More than 100,000 people have been injured – in mind, body, and spirit – often grievously.

Now, Israel is busy razing the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu and rancid company are determined to turn much of it into dust and memory, too – with the enthusiastic complicity of America’s entrenched political and media establishment.

That wanton brutality has not bothered Israel’s atrocity-excusing allies nor that many Israelis one bit – such is their defining disregard for the grotesque number and manner of Palestinian deaths.