Anyone seeking fictional forewarning of the dystopic nightmare of a second Trump administration might consider the 1979 film Being There, in which a simpleton savant inveigles his way into the confidence of the US President.
Expertly acted by Peter Sellers in what turned out to be his last film Chance, the idiot gardener of a rich industrialist, is mistaken for prescient political sage, Chauncey Gardiner, whose homespun, platitudinous aphorisms about the growth of plants and the passage of the seasons are used as the intellectual underpinning of American policy.
As the president comes to the end of his second term in office, the hapless Chauncey is seen as a natural successor.
Of you might look to Phillip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, which imagines an alternative history in which Franklin D Roosevelt is ousted from office in 1940 by a populist, xenophobe celebrity, Charles Lindbergh.
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Told from the perspective of a New York Jewish family, Lindbergh’s rabidly isolationist administration oversees a gradual descent of American culture from folksy antisemitism to full-blown pogroms and massacres against Jews.
Of course, fiction never fully reflects reality and so, depending on your point of view, Trump is either a bad Chauncey Gardiner or a pro-Israeli Lindbergh. You see the disturbing irony here.
One of the most unsettling images of Trump’s time in government was his recent intervention in Middle East affairs, in which he proposed the wholesale ethnic cleansing of two million Palestinians from Gaza, to make way for a beachside holiday resort for the rich.
More nauseating than his evident lack of self-awareness, was the sight of a bristling Benjamin Netanyahu – not quite believing his good fortune – giddy with renewed self-validation.
While no-one other than Trump really thinks that this devastated citadel of modern historical dysfunction will, or could, ever be transformed into a swinging Florida of the Levant, the Israeli Prime Minister has clearly spotted an opportunity to play his US counterpart like a real-life Chauncey Gardiner.
By tacking so far to a point of absurdity over the fate of Gaza, Netanyahu evidently believes he can shift the dial of moderate opinion away from the goal of a two-state solution toward an acceptance of, at least, the status quo.
The problem with raising the stakes in such a way on this most contentious of issues – Hamas is already backtracking on the ceasefire following Trump’s comments – is that it has now forced everyone in the mainstream to take a view.
If we believe it is wrong, even to suggest the enforced eviction of so many people from a patch of land they have inhabited for centuries – and all but an extreme minority on the right wing of Israeli politics would suggest that it is – then we are obliged to ask ourselves why.
Until now it has been convenient for the country’s right wing government to encourage the idea that the history of violence in the region dates back to October 7, 2023.
On that day Hamas perpetrated one of the most sickening and bloody atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust, slaughtering 1,200 people attending a music festival – including babies and whole families – injuring a further 5,431, committing sexual violence and taking 240 civilian hostages.
Israel responded to this repugnant and wholly unjustified attack on innocent and unarmed people by targeting the Hamas stronghold of Gaza with a relentless military operation that has, so far, claimed the lives of 47,540 Palestinians caught in the crossfire.
But anyone with even a modest understanding of the region knows that its history of violence predates that by several decades, to long before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Then it was Zionist groups, including Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang (Lehi), who employed terrorist tactics against the British mandate and Palestinian Arabs.
In October 1945, Jewish underground groups initiated a two-year insurgency by targeting colonial railways, oil refineries, and police boats in Palestine. In July 1946, Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 92 people.
On April 9, 1948, Irgun and Lehi militants perpetrated the Deir Yassin massacre, in which more than 250 Palestinians were killed, and many corpses mutilated. That, along with other massacres in towns like Saliha and Lydda, triggered the Nakba, a mass Palestinian exodus.
Trump’s proposal forces us to ask ourselves: if it is wrong to evict two million Palestinians from Gaza today, was it also wrong to displace up to 800,000 Palestinians from hundreds of villages following the Palestinian war in 1948, in which the state of Israel was created?
Is it also wrong that, since 1948, the Israeli government has used afforestation to uproot countless Palestinian communities, limit the growth of others, and conceal evidence of destroyed villages.
This displacement takes various forms, including concealing the ruins of destroyed Palestinian settlements, encircling remaining communities with "nature reserves" to prevent their expansion, and planting trees in the Naqab to displace Bedouin groups.
Israeli afforestation is not limited to the internationally recognized borders of Israel. Policy papers from Netanyahu's previous government coalition in 2022 explicitly committed to afforestation in parts of the West Bank, which is widely considered to be Palestinian territory illegally occupied by Israel.
If it is wrong to displace two million Palestinians from Gaza, how can it be right that Israel has illegally occupied Palestinian territories since 1967, encompassing the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza?
The country’s policies in the West Bank, particularly the construction and expansion of settlements, have been characterised as de facto annexation, further solidifying the claim of illegality under international legal standards.
Despite its severity, the illegality of the occupation has received less attention than violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law during the occupation.
The United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly condemned the continuing occupation as illegal, and legal scholars generally agree that, regardless of its initial legality, the occupation has become unlawful over time.
If Trump’s proposal is aimed at opening up the conversation about the rights of Palestinians in Israel, then bring it on, but why stop at Gaza? Why not expand the discussion to their rights, and the infringement of their rights, in other areas of the country and back in time, long before October 6, 2023?
Carlos Alba is a journalist, author, and PR consultant at Carlos Alba Media. His latest novel, There’s a Problem with Dad, explores the issue of undiagnosed autism among older people
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