Love Among the Ruins

 I continue to be baffled by how seriously everyone is taking Trump's vaunted peace plan for Gaza. I get that we had unambiguously good news yesterday—as the Israeli hostages were freed and humanitarian aid started flowing again to Gaza. It's easy to be swept up in the good feelings from that. 

But I keep reading articles that then pivot to Trump's plans to rehabilitate the Palestinian authority and transition to a period of peaceful coexistence in the Strip—without seriously questioning his motives or underlying agenda. 

Many people—to be sure—are criticizing Trump's plan for being over-ambitious. But few—at least in the mainstream media—are pointing out how completely hollow and disingenuous Trump's claims to support Palestinian leadership actually are. 

I keep seeing articles, after all, that quote the line from Trump's peace plan about establishing an "apolitical Palestinian committee" to manage daily affairs in the Strip (whatever that might mean). But almost no one mentions the next sentence in Trump's peace plan—which says that everything this committee does will be subject to the "oversight and supervision" of Trump's Board of Peace—of which he, in turn, will serve as "head" and "chair." 

In short, what Trump has actually proposed is to appoint himself—alongside former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair—the interim rulers of Gaza. 

The "Board of Peace" in question—according to Trump's plan—would also supposedly "set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza."

So: Trump has appointed himself to a position of autocratic one-man rule over Gaza, and bestowed upon himself a unilateral power of the purse to decide who gets the lucrative contracts to rebuild the Strip.

There is not a doubt in my mind as to why Trump was suddenly interested in this proposition. He's seeing another chance for his personal and familial enrichment. Expect to see Trump, his sons, Jared Kushner, and perhaps Witkoff and other Trump cronies directly cashing in on the real estate deals that will flow from this. Trump never gave up his plans for a "Riviera of the Middle East" after all, it would seem. 

Stripped of the vague rhetoric of peace and humanitarianism, then—what's actually happening here is that Tony Blair and Donald Trump are jointly exploiting the destruction of a people and a community to engage in old-fashioned imperialism and profiteering over the ruins. 

In this sense, Blair's budding relationship with Trump appears like simply a redux of his "special relationship" with George W. Bush—which similarly resulted in the destruction and neo-colonial occupation of a country in the Middle East, to the ruination of its people and the benefit of foreign investors.

As Harold Pinter memorably portrayed that earlier "Special Relationship": 

The bombs go off

The legs go off

The heads go off

[...]

A man bows down before another man

And sucks his lust