Editorial | More in the Gaza threat

The world appears to have been caught in a cognitive fog, so appears to have grasped the full implications of Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing proposal for Gazans only after it was repeated in the presence of the Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The recent clarity, to be fair, might have been aided by the titbits of additional detail offered by the US president, such as the imagery of transforming the rubble of Gaza into the “riviera of the Middle East”.

Hopefully, having been earlier prompted by this newspaper, Jamaica’s government, and others of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), didn’t miss the plot. In that event, they should have added Mr Trump’s Gaza plan to the list of issues informing a common regional strategy for surviving his presidency.

For, by now it ought to be clear to regional governments, if it ever wasn’t, that in the face of Mr Trump’s norms-bust approach to governance, and the callousness with which he is inclined to exercise American power, that no one is safe. Angling for preferential treatment and carveouts by being overly deferential quislings is unlikely to be a prudent approach in Mr Trump’s universe.

BEST BET

The best bet for Jamaica and its CARICOM partners is collaboration and cooperation among themselves, and in building coalitions with other countries and regions with shared interests, to engage in respectful dialogue with the United States. That CARICOM is on such a track will hopefully be apparent at the summit of its leaders later this month.

Mr Trump’s willingness to unilaterally up-end agreements, even ones initiated by himself, was obvious from his threats – since place on hold for a month – to 25 per cent tariff on Canada and Mexico, America’s closest neighbours, and two of its three biggest trading partners.

When Mr Trump was first in office, he tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NFTA) and caused it to be replaced by the US, Mexico and Canada (USMCA) trade pact, which accounts for around US$2.5 trillion worth of trade among the members.

With his unilateral action against Canada and Mexico, ostensibly to force an end to the flow of illegal migrants and fentanyl across their borders, the US president was effectively changing the terms of the USMCA, a year ahead of its first six-year mandated review, and a decade before its sunset clause.

However, what Mr Trump has in store for the Palestinians of Gaza is something of a different order of magnitude. Essentially, using the pretext of the destruction wrought in the narrow strip of land by a year-and-a-half of war with Israel, he floated the idea of pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza.

That, for the Palestinians, would be another Nakba – the catastrophe – one even greater than the expulsion and displacement of around 800,000 Palestinians in the wars at Israel’s founding in 1947.

Before the current war, around 2.1 million people lived in Gaza, a seaside strip six miles wide and 21 miles long. In the days after his inauguration, and at the start of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the radical Islamist rulers of Gaza, Mr Trump suggested that the Palestinians would be better off leaving the territory and finding accommodation in neighbouring Arab countries.

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Mr Trump told reporters.

LARGELY SILENT

Arab countries baulked. But the West was largely silent at a proposal of ethnic cleansing, which would breach international law and was among the reasons for NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Serbian paramilitaries during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Recall Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sarajevo.

This week, at the press conference, with Mr Netanyahu at his side, Mr Trump repeated his suggestion for replacing the Palestinian and spoke of Gaza as a potential fine bit of real estate, which the United States should own and develop as a kind of luxury playground for the well-heeled. He may even have envisaged Trump-branded towers on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast.

The US president appears to have given no serious thought to the social and political consequences of such a move, or its implications for Palestinian-Israeli conflict, especially the long-standing principle of a two-state solution to the crisis. Jamaica was committed to that consensus nine months ago when Kingston formally recognised the sovereign Palestinian state, whose territory included Gaza. As have the rest of CARICOM.

In the face of a global pushback there has been an unconvincing attempt by US officials to walk back bits of Mr Trump’s Gaza position, but not with clarity.

What a fortnight of Mr Trump’s presidency has revealed in its chaos, inarticulateness and general incoherence is the Monroe Doctrine on steroids. The menace over tariffs, the intimidation of Colombia and the threat to retake the Panama Canal. But the spectral arm of the doctrine is grasping beyond the Americas.

In the context of these developments, it is not unthinkable that Mr Trump might assume that Jamaica, next door to Miami, and at the centre of one of the world’s great shaping lanes, would be a better fit in the US, as a logistics centre and as the “riviera of the Caribbean”.

Some Jamaicans might embrace that. But Mr Trump might also claim that Jamaicans ‘deserve” a bitter life in the Kalahari or in Sinai, rather than being America’s 51st state.

Planning and mounting coalitions now is vastly superior to floundering later.