In his “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche proposes what he calls a “rule as a riddle.” It goes like this: “If the bond shan’t burst, bite upon it first.” If you can’t fix a problem with conventional means, go unconventional. If something is insoluble, do something radical.
It’s the same idea as the Gordian Knot — no one could untie it, so Alexander the Great simply sliced it open. What you don’t get, in the end, is a single piece of rope that remains intact. But the knot no longer exists.
So it is with what Donald Trump did at the most dramatic presidential press conference of my adult lifetime by announcing his plan for Gaza. As my sister Ruthie Blum put it on X, “To all those who’ve been screaming for 16 months about the ‘day after’: TAKE THAT!”
You want a way forward for the area that has been decimated as a result of the terrorist war launched against an unsuspecting Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — a war Israel neither sought nor planned for nor expected to have to fight?
You want to cry bitter tears over the uninhabitability of Gaza as a result of the consequences of the war that is entirely the moral, logistical and geopolitical responsibility of the terrorist organization Hamas and its sponsor in Iran?
Trump’s new fantasy
Dry your tears, says Donald Trump. Here’s the plan.
Gazans will have to go elsewhere for a while. Gaza will be cleared. It’s a “demolition site.” Unexploded ordnance will have to be dealt with. Many existing structures will have to be torn down. It’s an area the size of Chicago, so it’s quite the job.
Following the demo will come the rebuilding. All of this, Trump says, will be paid for by the very wealthy countries in the region, which will also be responsible for housing the displaced Gazans in one, two, four, seven, maybe even 12 comfortable sites. Gaza will be turned into the Riviera of the Middle East.
At that point, the people once resident in Gaza can return … if they want to. Otherwise it will become an international city for world people.
Bam! A plan! The bond couldn’t be burst, so Trump bit upon it first. No solution, eh? OK, here’s the solution.
Oh, but President Trump, they won’t pay for it! And they won’t take in the Gazans. Oh, I think they will, Trump says airily.
What’s going on here? Simply the shifting of tectonic plates, not naturally, but through the force of will — the will to power, as Nietzsche might have put it. On Tuesday, Trump asserted the will of the United States as the world’s most powerful, richest, most influential and most dominant nation in saying something must be done about Gaza, here’s what needs to be done, here’s who’s going to pay for it and here’s who’s going to manage it after.
What must be done is it needs to be cleared and rebuilt. Who’s going to pay for it are the fellow Arabs who have been “supporting” the Palestinians in order to keep the Palestinians far away from them. Who’s going to manage it after is the United States, really more as a real estate management company than a political entity.
Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?
A Palestinian state in the wake of Oct. 7 — and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people?
In no state for a state
Biden foreign policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while.
For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: There will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state. Like the Japanese and Germans in and after World War II, they have to be broken before they can be put back together as a functioning polis.
They’re not there yet. They may never get there, and Israel may have to live with this tragedy. But to do otherwise would be to commit suicide, and Israel showed in the aftermath of Oct. 7 that its three decades of flirting with suicide are over forever.
Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza. UNRWA has just been defunded by the United States and has literally been banned from operating on Israeli territory — meaning the only way its officials will be able to get to Gaza is by sea.
Time for a new deck
And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?
Where this goes nobody knows. But the knot has been cut. The bond has been bitten and burst. The world before Oct. 7 was unsustainable; we know that because Oct. 7 happened. There’s no going back, which is good, because going back means more Oct. 7s.
Going forward in the Middle East may lead to disaster. But what have the past 25 years in the Middle East been but disaster and uncertain and incomplete efforts to cope with the disasters emanating from there, from 9/11 on?
We’ve spent half a century listening to the sage counsel of responsible and sober men who tell us they understand history and its consequences, leading to Sullivan and Blinken and Biden and Harris. They weren’t playing the “great game”; they were playing 52 Pick-Up.
Time for a new deck. Time for a new dealer. Time for a new Middle East.
Reprinted with permission from Commentary.