The paradox of the wars that Israel's fought over the last 75 years is that it could never really win. If the opposing Arab armies had won we know what would have happened: the Israelis – the Jews – would have been slaughtered and driven out, to much rejoicing across the Arab/Muslim world. But the Israelis couldn't capitalise on their victories. The world would have been horrified. They were, for Israel, wars of survival, and the aftermath, basically, has always been a return to the pre-war position. The Arabs never had to pay for their aggression, and no lessons have ever been learnt by them. They just start preparing for the next war – with the world, mainly in the shape of the UN, encouraging them along.
Well, whatever else you can say, Trump's put a bomb under that. Lee Smith at Tablet:
Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.
Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.
Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.
Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode. […]
Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.
Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.
Interesting times. This is a paradigm shift in thinking about Israel and Gaza – and only the US could make this suggestion. The old pre-Obama US, that is. Could it really happen? Could they make it work? I honestly don't think so, but….we'll see. It certainly has – as Trump loves to do – shaken things up.
Mick Hartley 