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Stephen Games

As I was saying to Donald Trump the other day …

I hadn’t expected Donald Trump to read the blog pages of the Times of Israel quite as closely as he obviously does. So it was with a warm sense of vindication that I listened to him, sitting alongside Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House a few hours ago, quoting what I had posted in my article, Make the Palestinians an Offer they Can’t Refuse, on January 23.

I had reported that there were five regions that would make good alternatives to Gaza for the Palestinians (and my own recommendation, because it seems so obvious and practical, is the whole of the Sinai Peninsula, which could easily be bought for them). Mr Trump decided that there might six regions, but I wouldn’t quibble over so slight a disagreement. And I very much doubt whether what he said is true, that world leaders have been telling him that they like the idea: that’s an example of the 47th president stating what he hopes will be the case as if it already was the case.

What we do disagree about is the question of consensus — not of other statesmen but of the Palestinians themselves. I said clearly that the key to the plan had to be that the Palestinians wanted it and supported it; for Donald Trump, the mechanism for vacating Gaza would seem to be forcible evacuation, and that is very different.

And of course the Palestinians will not want and support it, to their great disadvantage, and that’s a great shame. These days, we fetishise borders, and land ownership, and nationalism, and blood-and-soil, but the history of humankind is the great churn of populations around the world. That may be something that we Wandering Jews understand more than anyone else, because it goes right back to our origins, with Abraham’s trek westwards, and our 430-year exile in Egypt. 

If it is possible to write cultural history into one’s DNA, we may have internalised the experience of displacement. We remember that we were kicked out of Israel by the Romans, and subsequently out of just about everywhere in Europe by just about everyone else. But our fundamental experience was Babylon, to which we were deported very much against our will in 597 BCE and 586 BCE, but which most of us preferred to remain in when Cyrus gave us freedom to return, sixty years later.

Our adopted home became our preferred home, just as many Jews still prefer to live in the Diaspora. Even now, Jewish intellectuality values the ancient rabbinic writings of Babylon far more highly than those writings that emerged from the splinter community that returned to Jerusalem.

The Arabs do not have that long, exotic engagement with worlds that are not their own that we do, and which seems to give us the mental flexibility to visualise other settings and other scenarios. We are the Semites who moved around a lot; they are the ones who stayed put—although, even then, rootedness does not exactly describe the culture of the desert, where nomadism was the norm until the arrival of the twentieth century.

To that extent, there is a precedent for geographical fluidity even in Arab culture, and if the Palestinians could only swallow their pride and share the vision, they could shape for themselves a dazzling future—something I also wrote about on November 15, 2023, in an article titled, “A man. A plan. A canal. Palestine!” 

They won’t—because when push comes to shove, they seem to prefer the hell-hole in which hatred and victimhood have festered and can only go on festering, as Trump rightly said. That leaves us with the unappealing prospect of a spray-tanned property tycoon using his takeover of America to implement the biggest urban redevelopment project in the world and deploying US troops (and, I fear, the IDF) to make it happen.  

We are in uncharted waters. 

About the Author
Stephen Games is a designer, publisher and award-winning architectural journalist, formerly with the Guardian, BBC and Independent. He was until Spring 2018 a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, habitually questioning its unwillingness to raise difficult questions about Israel, and was a board member of his synagogue with responsibility for building maintenance and repair. In his spare time he is involved in editing volumes of the Tanach and is a much-liked barmitzvah teacher with an original approach, having posted several videos to YouTube on the cantillation of haftarot and the Purim Megillah.