Israel, the 51st State

Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Donald Trump seriously when Trump said he wanted to turn Canada into the 51st state. A Financial Times headline two weeks ago announced that “Trump’s Threat to Annex Canada No Longer a Joke for Trudeau.” At the same time, Chrystia Freeland, who was seeking to succeed Trudeau as prime minister, then threatened a 100 percent tariff on Tesla vehicles made by Elon Musk, King Trump’s favorite courtier.

Well done! It is always good to see Ottawa take on a realist and combative stance. But despite his newfound wisdom, “governor” Trudeau, as Trump calls him, was wrong about the figures: there is already a 51st state, and it’s Israel. And soon, Gaza will be the 52nd. Think I’m kidding? Not any more than Trump is. While Canada was still getting wise to Trump’s bullying, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his support for the President’s plan to empty Gaza of its 2 million inhabitants and create an American-owned “Côte d’Azur.” According to Netanyahu, this bold real estate project is the “only viable plan to enable a different future” in the region.

Before Trump’s inauguration in January, I would have dismissed such a statement as pure madness. But the United States has a history of seizing vast swathes of land under fraudulent pretenses. This history includes the brutal 1838 expulsion of 16,000 Cherokees from Georgia ordered by President Martin Van Buren based on plans promoted by his predecessor, Andrew Jackson, that became known as the “Trail of Tears”; the seizure of two fifths of Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48; and William McKinley’s imperial conquests overseas in 1898 that violently repressed Filipino rebels.

“Manifest destiny” has vastly expanded America’s territory. Why not add Gaza to the list, with the help of “governor” Netanyahu? After all, the Trail of Tears was a joint military project of President Van Buren and Georgia governor George Gilmer.

Let’s remember that Netanyahu spent part of his childhood near Philadelphia and was once a United States citizen. When he speaks in Washington or at the United Nations, he brings out his impeccable American accent; when he speaks in Israel, he hides it. A skillful activist, he could have pursued a successful political career in Pennsylvania.

But his talent as a demagogue is not what makes me think Netanyahu, with Trump, can pull off the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It’s his ruthless character as a political survivor. Despite the atrocious attacks of October 7, no sane person would view a massacre in Gaza—where children are indiscriminately mutilated and killed on a regular basis—as a just or proportionate response. More than 48,000 Arab bodies to avenge 1,200 slaughtered people (including 37 children and 21 Bedouins)? This can’t be an existential question for Israel, which has an exceptionally efficient army and a well-stocked nuclear arsenal.

Yet Gaza is not necessarily the best example to support my point. In the West Bank, where foreign media can still operate, daily horrors are both more commonplace and less frequent than in Gaza. A new Israeli-Palestinian documentary, No Other Land, is illustrative of the harassment Palestinians suffer at the hands of the Israeli army in collaboration with Jewish settlers, who are growing in numbers.

Seeing a Palestinian home or school demolished by bulldozers without any blatant killing or obvious injury is paradoxically almost as shocking as seeing rows of small, motionless bodies, or children with amputated legs and arms. Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s film clearly shows Netanyahu’s violent nature, suggesting that for him, destroying the West Bank is a personal operation, while the furious bombing of Gaza (reminiscent of the United States’ bombing of Vietnam) is more distant and abstract.

When did Netanyahu, the supposed spokesperson of the Jewish state, become so cold blooded? According to my friend and mentor Earl Shorris, “No one speaks for the Jews.” This simple sentence opens his book, Jews Without Mercy (1982), which condemns the American Jewish neoconservative movement of the 1970s and ’80s. “All Jews want Israel to survive,” Shorris writes. “The disagreements between neoconservatives and other Jews” concerns the unbridled support of Israel by activists who believe “the government can do no wrong, nor can supporters of Israel err in moral choices if those choices are made with the interests of Israel in mind.” Not much has changed.

Although secular, Shorris reminds us that “the lesson of the desert is that the world exists because of mercy … Mercy is the soul and the shield of the Jew … A Jew without mercy is a man prior to the Covenant” of Mount Sinai. “He belongs to the horde; he invites the desert.” In that sense, Netanyahu is more American than Jewish. His desire to work with Trump to expel the Gazans and annex the West Bank is, perhaps, the inevitable outcome.