Fore! Trump's Gaza Proposal Draws Divergent Receptions

Long ago, after Samson devastated Gaza with the jawbone of an ass, the Old Testament argued weaponizing a donkey’s mandible was the most effective way to slay Philistines and bring peace to the land of Israel.

The first golfer weighed in on the matter shortly after American voters junked President Joe Biden’s soporific blueprint to end the some 3,000-year-old conflict between the squabbling children of Abraham.

Fore!

“We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” President Donald Trump enthused. “And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it.”

The Oslo Accords are out of bounds. A fairway wood is the new club of choice in the land Christians, Muslims, and Jews consider God’s proving ground. No surprise, the reactions to Trump’s divine plan for the Philistine’s biblical homeland were swift, twitchy and capricious.

“A grand Mar-a-Lago, by golly, that’s the idea,” bellyached Le Monde, the French newspaper of record. “Luxury villas in olive groves, buildings in the local style on the waterfront. With a golf course in the dunes, the holes for bunkers are already there.”

Hamas, the terrorist group that governs Gaza, promptly condemned Trump’s 18-hole proposal as a “recipe for creating tension and chaos in the region.”

“Nah,” one of Trump’s legion of blithe mimics spritzed back on social media. “Gaza is already a hole. All we have to do is add 17 more.”

But never mind the chatter that Trump’s vision of Gaza is a spectacle fit for the lunatic pages of history. Take a deep breath and ask, is it even remotely possible that a land mired in misery and ruin can, with all the subtlety of the Village People at a funeral, be transformed from a battered, war-torn strip of earth into a linkster’s paradise, a luxury beachfront for the well-heeled and well-tanned?

Back in 1920, Trump’s idea was no whimsy.

Decades before the creation of the state of Israel, the British administration in Palestine established the Sodom and Gomorrah Golfing Society. Old timers say caddies on the aptly named course along the Dead Sea were local lads and, according to oral history, more than a few of those young Palestinian loopers would have poleaxed Trump’s 2.8 handicap like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Indeed, there was a lot of hoopla surrounding the Palestinian entries in the first Pan-Arab Golf Championship staged in Beirut in 1975. Although my notes of that match are as long gone as Beirut’s claim to the title “Paris of the Middle East,” the winner was the late Englishman Sir Michael Bonallack. His caddy was a Palestinian. And there were plans for resorts, spas, and golf courses galore throughout the region.

“The Lebanese Civil War, the troubles between Israel and Palestine politically and socially obliterated what had been golf’s significant cultural presence in the region,” says Bonallack’s close friend and playing partner, the celebrated golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr.

“Michael helped me promote RTJ2 courses and adjacent projects in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world because he understood golf as an economic engine and a vehicle to bring dissimilar cultures together,” Jones adds. “We never had the opportunity to attempt that in Israel or Palestine.”

New York real estate developer Joe Bernstein has spent the past two decades and some $46 million trying to keep the dream alive on the lush Israeli wheat fields around Mount Arbel, where King David composed the 23rd Psalm, Jesus Christ delivered his Sermon on the Mount, and Saladin on July 4, 1187, crushed the Crusader army dispatched to recapture the Holy Land.

“The Galilee Golf Club will be a leitmotif for a country that has rid itself of isolation to become part of the global economy,” Bernstein told me beneath the myrtle trees shortly before Iranian-funded Hezbollah terrorists to the north pocked what he described as a “cozy citadel in the Promised Land” with 20 Katyusha rockets during Israel’s 33-day war against Lebanon in 2006.

 “We’ll convert their craters into bunkers,” Bernstein’s partner Moshe Shapira vowed as we subsequently surveyed the damage to the Moshav Kfar Hittim farmland, site of Galilee’s 18-hole championship course and luxury resort complex.

Nearly 20 years later, Bernstein and his partners are still waiting to break ground at the junction where Christianity, Islam, and Judaism collide. As for using his expertise to help Trump create water hazards out of artillery craters and transform antitank ditches into greenside obstacles, Bernstein says, “no thank you.”

Trump’s proposal to displace some 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza has been derided by some as “ethnic cleansing.”

More than 47,000 Palestinians, have died in Israel’s military response to Hamas’ October 2023 attack that killed 1,200 people took another 250 hostages. Israel says it has killed over 17,000 militants.

Bottom lines here are proverbial. The Palestinian Authority wants political jurisdiction over post-war Gaza. Hamas demands military control. Israel and the U.S. find both solutions darker than the inside of a wolf.

With that kind of scorecard, Bernstein marvels that Trump has the bluster to believe that a lack of confidence — rather than centuries of shared blood, sweat, and fears among the locals — is the principal obstacle to achieving peace through condominiums.

“That land belongs to another people,” Bernstein says.

“I’m committed to owning Gaza,” Trump insists.

“Gaza is not a property to be sold and bought,” fumes Ezzat El Rashq, a member of the Hamas political bureau.

“A revolutionary, creative approach,” was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s verdict.

As RAND economist Daniel Egel reads the spreadsheet, construction costs will likely balloon beyond $80 billion. The World Bank calculates $53 billion, tops.

The clash between prophets and profits continues.