The Garden after Gaza: Final Meditation
After the Wasteland, a New Imperium
If Trump’s Gaza peace plan succeeds, it will bring desperately needed relief to the people of Gaza after two years of unremitting hell of a genocide that has killed at least 67,000 Palestinians, many of them children, and left the enclave in rubble.
Trump’s plan will also bring the remaining Israeli hostages, twenty living and twenty-eight dead, home, a huge relief to families who have waited too long since their loved ones were abducted by Hamas during its gruesome attack on Israel two years ago today on October 7, 2023.
Some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, which include women and children, will also be released to return to their families.
Remaining Hamas fighters will disarm and leave the enclave, never to return, never to again play any role in its governance.
We should all hope for these outcomes.
The White Man’s Burden
That is the good part of Trump’s peace plan. There’s a less palatable part. Unless the plan is radically altered, it will also formally inaugurate a new American imperium. The assertion of American dominance over Gaza will be executed hand-in-hand with Israel, with the participation of other as yet unnamed ‘heads of state’ and the single specifically named former British prime minister, Tony Blair. All will serve on a corporate-sounding ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by Donald J. Trump. The new occupation of Gaza by the United States and a consortium of ‘technocratic’ members of the board will continue for an indefinite period, with ‘apolitical’ (uncomplaining? obedient?) Palestinians delegated to supporting roles. Ominously, given Israel’s predilection for breaking ceasefires and the Netanyahu government’s ambitions for a greater Israel cleansed of Palestinians, there is no timeline for transition from the new Board of Peace, which so eerily echos the old British 1922 Palestinian Mandate, to vaguely promised and defined Palestinian self-rule, and there are many points along the way where Palestinians could fail to satisfy their new masters or Israel with their progress.
And why is Tony Blair the only member of the Board who is named? Tony Blair, whom many in the Arab world view as a war criminal because of his leading the United Kingdom into the American war in Iraq? A Brit to lead a neocolonial 2025 version of the 1922 imperial British Mandate for Palestine? A former prime minister of Britain, the same country from which Palestinian survivors of British rule sought in 2022 a formal apology for alleged war crimes committed in Palestine in the 1930s? (Check out the ‘running the gauntlet’ photograph and eye-witness description via that link.)
Tony Blair?
Well, the major funder of the Tony Blair Institute of Global Change is Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men. Larry Ellison is a close friend of Donald Trump and a staunch friend of Israel. Larry Ellison’s company now owns CBS News, where it has put Bari Weiss in charge. It is concluding a deal, with Donald Trump’s blessing, to take part ownership of TikTok and will control the social media’s algorithm in the United States. Safra Catz, Executive Vice Board Chair and former Oracle CEO lays out the company’s rock-solid support for Israel:
We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry (Ellison, co-founder of Oracle) and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country and no one should be surprised by that.
Tony Blair is Ellison’s man, someone the Israelis can trust, someone Trump can trust, and someone Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, himself very close to Israeland one of the main architects of Trump’s plan for Gaza, can trust to further the business and strategic interests of its sponsors.
Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is British imperialism 2.0, with Tony Blair as the proposed Viceroy of Palestine serving under His Majesty the King-Emperor, Donald Trump.
What with the overt racism and all the talk of manliness among the Trumpists, the renaming of the U.S. Department of Defense as the Department of War, the racist roundups of immigrants and anyone who looks black or brown by the new American Brown Shirts, ICE, and now this peace plan for Gaza, I can’t help but think of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ an exhortation to Americans to assume the role of a bonafide white-supremacist imperial power in the United States’ newly acquired territory of the Philippines. Here is one stanza:
Take up the White Man’s burden— And reap his old reward, The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard— The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah slowly!) toward the light— “Why brought ye us from bondage, “Our loved Egyptian night?”
What of gardens in Gaza?
It will take decades to rebuild and restore Gaza. It will never be what it was, or could have been, before October 2023. Here are Palestinians from Gaza, prompted by their revulsion at Trump’s Riviera plan, sharing poignant video footage of some of their favorite places in Gaza before its destruction, a seaside metropolis surrounded by greenery and farms.
All that is left today is rubble, mile after mile of rubble, and land polluted by toxic waste.
It will take decades to heal what has been done to Gaza and its inhabitants. The pain and the destruction is unfathomable. Memories of what is lost will remain seared in people’s hearts and minds like the phantom limbs of a body that once was whole. Yet, I have no doubt that one of the first things Gazans will do to heal their land and their hearts is coax a plant to life among the ruins.
Gardening in the Shadow of Empire
Like a storm augured by darkening clouds and a first smattering of rain, it feels like war is coming to Europe. A Russian drone here. Russian fighter jets over European airspace there. The new Trump American Empire is threatening us too, throwing its weight behind the fascist populist right. Impatient with European norms, rules and taxes; intolerant of a region where, as compromised and fragile as it is, democracy still exists, America’s tech oligarchs and MAGA lords are moving in for the kill.
We are ill-equipped to resist them. Our cities and our villages and our gardens are beautiful. There is grumbling among the rank and file, and it is getting louder, but the cafés are full and we just had Paris Fashion Week.
In France, our government has buckled yet again. Macron remains president and has vowed never to resign but the prime ministers he names wilt off the vine one after another. Our last prime minister lasted 14 hours, a record of brevity in the history of the Fifth Republic. In contrast to President Macron’s suave moves on the international scene, here at home the country is in deep political and economic crisis. The far-right party of Marine Le Pen is just waiting for the death rattle of the French republic to move in and take power.
Like the Gazans under siege coaxing a single eggplant planted in an empty can to bear one or two fruit, I too turn to my garden, a living thing that demands my care, for solace and sustenance. In addition to fear, I feel a moral burden for the imperial shadow that is lengthening across our world. What the Palestinian people have been forced to endure, the extent to which they are surveilled with technologies of slaughter and control that are tested and perfected on their bodies are hard lessons that what one cherishes the most can be taken away with one bomb, one drone, one bullet, one app, one press of a button, one virus in a mobile phone, or a few AI-generated algorithms spewing lies.
If we are to survive in a world in which we want to live and not a dystopia created by the dark fantasies of real estate developers, tech overlords, and the new agents of empire, we must resist. We must keep working for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and to live free of occupation and surveillance and the constant threat of dispossession. The technologies trained on them are being turned on us as well. Our freedom, our dignity, our right to life and happiness are on the line, and our gardens will not protect us, even those enclosed, as mine is, by solid stone walls.
And yet, as Candide observed after running a lifetime gauntlet of outrageous trials and tortures, in the end, the world is what it is, and if we survive it, “we must cultivate our garden.” With that, I return to mine.
