By Ellen Taylor

Saudi Arabia and Israel each have well-developed dreams for the strategically located real estate of Gaza. The Saudis, wanting to depart from their dependence on oil production, have developed plans for a 105-mile-long futuristic city, stretching up the Red Sea coast, then connected by a highway across Israel, to Gaza, where they will produce items like Teslas.

Israel plans to resettle Gaza, develop a free-trade zone, and exploit the 1.7 billion extractable cubic feet of natural gas under its ports.

On February 3rd, in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump revealed a plan for the U.S. to take ownership of Gaza, and create a Riviera-like resort. His plan simultaneously addresses U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East and gratifies his biggest donors.

Of course, the rule of law no longer has any bearing on geopolitical activities. All of these plans involve displacing large numbers of Palestinians. President Trump’s is almost playful and even speaks kind words: “We can get a beautiful area to resettle people permanently, in nice homes where they can be happy and not be shot at and not be knifed to death like what’s happening in Gaza.”

Gaza is now 92% covered in rubble. There is nothing, nowhere to live, nothing. The ruins are mixed with toxins and cadavers. It’s a monster superfund site. According to calculations, it will take 15 years to restore it to livability.

The ceasefire checkpoints in Gaza are staffed by veterans from U.S. Special Forces, and managed by a Wyoming Wealth Management firm. But the ceasefire is not working: More than 80 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since it began. Typically, one of these was a 5-year-old girl, riding in a donkey cart, making its way along a road forbidden to Palestinians.

What will happen to the 2 million people wandering around in the wreckage looking for bodies, and trying not to get blown up?

They don’t want to leave. Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia won’t have them anyway.

It bears remembering that these Palestinians don’t actually want to be in Gaza: where they really desire to be is in their legal homes in what is now Israel, only a few miles away. Under UN Resolution 194, they have the right to the houses and lands from which their grandparents and great-grandparents were driven by Israelis in 1948. They still treasure the keys to these houses.

President Trump’s plan makes no mention of this, or of the relentless expansion of Israel since the settlement of European Jews in Palestine, or the Palestinian reaction.

As Moshe Dayan remarked in 1956, “What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. … We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. … Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”

Most of the world has finally recognized the deadly mistake made in 1948, of allowing a Jewish apartheid state to exist in the Holy Land. Many Israelis are realizing this too.

President Trump’s plan for Gaza is grandiose, as are the plans of Saudi Arabia and Israel. An alternative plan, of about the same magnitude, would be to relocate Israel to “ a beautiful area … with nice homes … where they can be happy and not be shot at and not be knifed.”

It is the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who must leave. If they insist on an apartheid Jewish state, they must create one, with generous international support, either in Europe, the true homeland of the Ashkenazi Jews, and the source of their rich culture, or in the United States, within the friendly aegis of a people who have maintained it for eighty years, in Palestine.

This would demonstrate dramatic statesmanship, comforting a world desperate to wash away the bloody stain with which events in Gaza have darkened their spirits. It would also win for President Trump the Nobel Peace prize, and fulfill his expressed desire to be “the Peace President.”

Ellen Taylor is a Petrolia resident.