Like you, I chuckle with smug bemusement at the spectacle of my liberal friends freaking out every time Trump offers an opening bid about something. They're convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that Trump will send divisions of troops to rape and plunder their way through igloo-scattered Greenland. They know with utmost certainty that Trump's tariff "war" will decimate our economy and render our big box stores into bare-shelved mausoleums. And nobody can dissuade them from the notion that cutting funds to transgender operas on other continents will strike a mortal blow to our national security.
And when their dire prophecies never reach fruition — and they never do — there is never any admission of overreaction or even of faulty analysis. They simply shift gears and replace one debunked prediction with another one even more hysterical and ridiculous than the first. Kinda like they do with their the-end-is-nigh-and-this-time-we-really-mean-it climate change apocalypses.
So when Trump proposed the idea of simply resettling Gazans elsewhere rather than trying to reason with them for the next century or three, I assumed this was simply just another of Trump's opening bids, designed to shake things up, get the ball rolling, put our Arab "allies" on notice that they'll be expected to contribute to a solution, etc.
The Arabs scoffed. The Europeans clutched their pearls. The Left erupted in howls of outrage about "ethnic cleansing" as if ethnic cleansing wasn't written into the very charters of the terrorists they support. It's as if sending Gazan Egyptians back to Egypt and West Bank Jordanians back to Jordan wasn't the precise opposite of ethnic cleansing.
Many conservatives, including myself, responded by crediting Trump for at least thinking outside the box. Yeah, the plan is probably an unfeasible non-starter, and it's more than anything a shot across the bow. But at least he's playing offense, we said. At least he's making it known that a return to a pre-Oct. 7 status quo is unacceptable and that Arab foreign aid is on the chopping block. Fine, his resettlement plan is a bit outlandish, but give us a better plan, something we can work with.
That was my mindset going into this past week.
But then on Tuesday, Trump met with Jordan's King Abdullah, who had the day prior flatly refused to consider the resettlement plan. But after the meeting, King Abdullah announced that his country would take 2,000 sick children from Gaza.
Huh?
It's impossible to overstate the significance of this concession. Some observers may scoff that 2,000 Gazans out of a population of roughly two million are small potatoes. But look at the bigger picture. For decades, every Arab country has refused to take a single Palestinian "refugee" on principle. But now, one of these firewall Arab nations is willing to forego that principle, be it for two million, for two thousand, or for two. This is an unequivocal game changer. There is no longer a unified, immovable front. This is the first crack in the dam, and the trickle has the potential to turn into a flood.
Then, the very next day, came the announcement from the United Arab Emirates in support of Trump's resettlement plan. UAE ambassador to the United States Yousef Otaiba stated that not only is his government seriously considering the plan, but that it also doesn't "see an alternative to what's being proposed."
What?
The UAE government has since tried to backtrack that statement, but one suspects this is simply a face-saving gesture for geopolitical consumption, probably leveraged out of them by the Saudis who don't want the horse before the cart. But behind the scenes, the emirates are more interested in removing this thorn from their side once and for all rather than maintaining faux outrage over the "Palestinian" cause that the dreaded "Arab street" itself long ago stopped caring about.
Another crack in the dam.
Then there's the prospect of Israel annexing the West Bank. Before Trump took office, that prospect was on nobody's radar, including Israel. Trump put it on the radar. And now it's reported that talks are being conducted to cede this newfound annexation prospect in return for a normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia who, until now, had demanded nothing less than a final and settled two-state solution.
One more time?
The cracks in the dam are widening by the day. The fact that things are moving so quickly and in the right direction tells us that this opportunity has been there the entire time. All we lacked was the political will. But with the slightest of nudges, the entire rotten, stinking edifice about "resistance" and "from the river to the sea" is collapsing under the weight of its own putrescence. The holy grail of Middle East diplomacy, a tangible, permanent solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, could finally be there for the taking.
And Trump might be able to do it.
He might actually be able to do it.
To top it off, there was the video posted last week that showed Gaza residents asking Trump to implement his resettlement plan. Granted, the video only shows a few people. But they make their statements on camera, in public, and in broad daylight regardless of what threats they face from Hamas. This tells us that their sentiment is widespread. Even the most callous antisemites are openly admitting they'd prefer to spend their lives in a safe, quiet Egyptian seaside neighborhood rather than in their Hamas-controlled "homeland."
The writing is on the wall. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians know it. The Arabs know it. The rest of the world watching from the sidelines knows it. The only ones who don't know it are the ayatollahs, EU bureaucrats, and Democrats. Whether their obstinate denial can stall reality for another half century remains to be seen. But the way things are going, reality might arrive far sooner than even the most optimistic of us Trump voters, even at the beginning of this month, would have dared to imagine.
Forget four years from now. The next few weeks could change the world as we know it.
And finally, on a side note, should Trump secure a permanent peace and end nearly a century of fighting, look for this year's Nobel Peace Prize to go to Lia Thomas.
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