In Palm Beach, there lives a man who, when not living in the White House, enjoys the balm of temperate climes. He lives in a mansion, extravagant and luxurious. He wants for nothing.

Several thousand kilometres away, and roughly the same latitude, there lives a people, who when not living in their houses, are living in tents, in the rubble of their destroyed homes or in displacement camps. If they are not living, then they are dead. Their wants are simple – life.

The man, of course, is Donald Trump, the President of the United States. He does not see Gaza as a homeland of the Palestinian people. He sees a real estate opportunity. Indeed, his entire world view is a real estate sign. Everything has a price. Everything is a deal.

Several months ago, as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited him in the White House, he offered the view that the destruction of Gaza was an opportunity to create the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Gaza was a ‘’demolition site”. He wanted to “give people a chance at life. They have never had a chance at life because the Gaza Strip has been a hellhole for people living there”. Turning it into new development would bring “great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the US owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent".

It was going to be world class. “It will be wonderful for the people, Palestinians. We’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs and it’ll be something the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

Truly, the man is a fool. Of course, he is not the only fool to have handled the reins of power. But his is a particularly mercenary, narrow-visioned foolishness. Recently, he mentioned the idea again. The Trump administration, in the postwar reconstruction of Gaza, would take control of the Gaza Strip for 10 years and pay 25% of the population to up stumps. The strip would be reconstructed as a tourism and tech centre. Investors would funnel money into the rubble, and from the ashes would rise “mega-construction projects” such as data centres (because as everyone knows the Middle East has dams and dams of water it doesn’t need), beach resorts, and high-rise apartments.

No matter that you dress it up in these terms: “You build really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” it is still ethnic cleansing.

And the place of Palestinians in this new utopia? Well, they would be encouraged to just get the hell out of their homeland. Why, they would even be given US$5000 (US$5000!) to get out. The fewer Gazans there the better, as consultants behind the plan suggested. It would cut costs. They also predicted a fourfold return on the money investors put into it. This is beyond odious. A life, a homeland, reduced to cash flow.

When Netanyahu visited the White House, he remarked that “Israel’s victory will be America’s victory”. America was “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House’’.

And the wishes of the Palestinians? In this plan, they have no rights and they have no power. Trump cannot see their aspirations to live in a homeland because he does not see land in those terms. Land is real estate. If there has to be a clearance, such as in knocking down the old to create the new, well so be it. More than a year ago Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner thought the removal of Palestinians would contribute to the development of Gaza’s “very valuable” waterfront. No matter that in international law, the US does not have the authority to do so.

Trump’s latest moves have occurred as Israel is calling up thousands of extra reservists so as to occupy Gaza City. This means Gazans will be asked and, then more than likely, forced into resettlement camps. The BBC reported recently that Israel had taken control of almost half the city. This week, the Israeli military ramped this up, ordering all Gazans, about 1 million still in the city, to leave before the army begins its presumably final offensive to take control. To Palestinians, their home, and therefore their homeland, will soon be gone. Since the 7 October 2023 Hamas massacre of Israelis in which about 1200 died, the UN says more than 62,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign against Hamas. About 1000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank.

If starvation were not enough breathing over the shoulders of many Palestinians. Death and displacement is the constant shadow in their lives. And through the land one can hear the echoes of a poem by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, called The End and the Beginning, which begins:

After every war/someone has to clean up/Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble/to the sides of the road,/so the corpse-laden wagons/can pass.

Trump would not see this. How could he? The man is a fool.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.