Steve Apfel
Balaam’s Curse, Feb. 6, 2025
“Who’d bet on the human rights industry supporting a peace plan and packing up?”
No White House incumbent was better cut out than prickly Donald Trump to bring down the curtain on a conflict that has defied resolution. Shock and disgust followed his freaking plan to acquire the globe’s most disputed geography and develop Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East. The idea, say the predictable experts predictably forever wrong, is not remotely feasible. Real estate development to settle a perennial conflict? Unheard of! Who taught such a thing in a conflict resolution course?
Time will tell. Yet time is of the essence. Why wait when already the aspirant property developer answered the question that has been on every tongue from the day Israeli premier, ‘Bibi’ pledged to eliminate Hamas: what happens the day after? Who will take Gaza over? Trump has now answered: America will.
It may be the least thing he accomplished by the surprise he sprung. More tellingly by far, the trial balloon he floated at Tuesday’s press conference, cast light into the burial ground where the heart of truth beats unheard. To resolve the festering wound that is Gaza – to resolve indeed the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict – demands treating it as an economic problem.
How so?
All the archived peace plans crashed on the rocks because the array of peace-seekers and US Presidents blamed the brutality and intransigence of Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah on the wrong stumbling blocks. Which are:
(1) Antipathy of Palestinian warmongers to the idea of a Jewish flag in the neighborhood
(2) Israeli settlement building in the West Bank
(3) Israeli occupation, and
(4) Palestinian insistence on the time bomb cutely named, ‘The ‘Right of Return.’
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