World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
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Originally published February 14, 2025 for our End-of-Month Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get semi-monthly issues.
By Paul Collier, Editor
“A clear view of the difference between the province of constitutional law and the province of administrative function ought to leave no room for misconception; and it is possible to name some roughly definite criteria upon which such a view can be built. Public administration is detailed and systematic execution of public law… The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative. Constitutions, therefore, properly concern themselves only with those instrumentalities of government which are to control general law…
Our peculiar American difficulty in organizing administration is not the danger of losing liberty, but the danger of not being able or willing to separate its essentials from its accidents. Our success is made doubtful by that besetting error of ours, the error of trying to do too much by vote. Self-government does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking dinner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens…” – Woodrow Wilson, from The Study of Administration
INTRODUCTION
As President Trump moves to cut down the administrative state, the courts are now responding to his moves with aggressive rulings that could cause the President to ignore their rulings altogether, come what may. The story of the administrative state versus Trump, though, began long ago, in the mind of a professional man who was pondering this question: How can America overcome the limits of democracy and liberty?
On December 31, 1887, a policy wonk named Woodrow Wilson penned an essay called “The Study of Administration.” In that essay, Wilson outlined a dream of a new America that would free itself from the shackles of a democracy without surrendering the principles of a democracy.
That dream was fulfilled in the administrative state, where an army of “experts,” people who would use the broadly written language of laws to create more de facto laws not held accountable to public opinion. This would be accomplished using regulations, specifically the regulators, unaccountable legislators, that write the new de facto laws.
Wilson would become President in 1913, a year that saw the Income Tax created, the Federal Reserve created, and State Legislatures lose the power to select Senators. America was becoming more “Democratic” and more well-funded. The seeds of Wilson’s administrative state were created.
Over 100 years later, Wilson’s administrative state has grown into an anti-American leviathan, with its tendrils infecting every major American institution and almost every American life. A recent SCOTUS ruling that struck down the so-called Chevron defense, a legal precedent that conceded constitutional interpretation to the administrative state, effectively struck down the heart of Wilson’s administrative state. This makes creating new deeply buried slush funds for the anti-Americanist party, the DNC, much more difficult, so the pain of losing what they have is even more pronounced.
Now, DOGE and Trump are coming for Woodrow Wilson and his regulator army.
A. THE RISE OF THE AMERICANIST BILLIONAIRE
A civil war has broken out in America that takes us one step closer to a “hot” civil war, which is still far worse than this less invasive version that’s being fought right now. This war is being fought in government buildings in D.C., America’s capital. This war is being fought in U.S. courtrooms across this country. This war is being fought on social media around the world. This war is being fought in newsrooms and film studios. This is a war between the administrative state, the party in power, and the defenders of the republic, the counterrevolutionaries.
What attracted American billionaires to the China model was the idea they could enjoy the fruits of capitalism, mainly its creative power over socialist markets, while not suffering the full consequences of “true” capitalism, competition from the hoi polio.
When it comes to the DNC, the line between the DNC-captured corporation and the state is so blurred that it has become almost invisible. For instance, the Soros family gave millions to DNC-interest groups, even largely bankrolling the rise of so-called “Soros DAs,” far-left anti-crime Attorney Generals like Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg, people willing to violate American Rule of Law for the sake of the party.
Yet, the Soros Family has also received millions from USAID, one of what will most likely turn out to be multiple DNC slush funds designed to spread woke leftism abroad and insurrection at home. So where does the state begin and end with the Soros family? There is no separation, it would seem, to this writer.
After he was done with the political class, he turned his sights on the billionaire class, which is when American billionaires took notice. Some began to realize that a socialist system, even with capitalism for the party favorites, is still a police state system, making any billionaire vulnerable to the whims of a leader like Chairman Xi no matter how much wealth the party allows them to accrue.
The acceleration of the rise of the anti-woke billionaires came through the DNC’s poor decision to prosecute Trump, political opponents, J6ers, and even pro-life activists. They could see for themselves up close the real power of the woke left to destroy the opposition using lawfare and any other means they might find at their disposal.
They started to believe the Democrats were the violent revolutionaries (since 1913) seeking to create an oppressive police state that we always said they were. They knew one thing: if Trump lost in 2024, they might be the next to be hauled off to prison.
So they threw in with Trump, dodged literal bullets, and now, with the creation of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Americanist billionaires (Trump, Musk) are battling the Progmerican billionaires by going after the heart of the DNC.
The heart of the DNC power is its magical, nebulous government-created-and-protected slush funds. These funds were created by Wilson’s administrative state, and now they are its lifeblood.
In front of those bureaucrats is the first line of defense, the DNC judges, the Judges willing to subvert American Rule of Law to advance the interests of the DNC, the party of Progmerica, the police state, where American liberty dies. This is that struggle so far.
B. THE PRIZE FOR VICTORY, THE COST FOR DEFEAT
What’s at stake for the DNC is the very survival of its key advantage, the ability to create the illusion of social acceptance, social ascendancy so the woke left can continue to use its most powerful weapon, social ostracism, as a legitimate expression of organic power (or grassroots power as opposed to what it really almost always is, astro-turfed power).
Through its control of most of the major institutions in America, the Progmericans are able to create the illusion that their way is the right way, the commonsense way, and anyone outside of that orthodoxy is rightly socially ostracized, if not imprisoned, if not killed.
But the ideology is antithetical to human flourishing, so only deception, fraud, and coercion can sustain it. For that, they need to control the means of social, cultural, market, and civic production, which they mostly do.
Should they lose even the majority of it, let alone all of it, this writer predicts a dramatic shift in political worldviews in America when Americans learn their American beliefs and American values are NOT fringe views that are code for white supremacism as the DNC media would have you believe.
Should the axe fall on even just the majority of their slush funds, the effect will be profound. It will ensure the Democrats will have to either abandon the anti-American wokism it decided to ride to power or cease to be a party at all.
C. DOGE BREACHES THE BEAST
After DOGE accessed the Treasury Department’s payment data when Homeland Security Officers had to be called to remove resisting bureaucrats from the premises, they discovered a far-left slush fund called USAID. Soon after, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly halted the operation (more on her later).
It was decided that the operation, the forensic investigation of government budget by DOGE, could continue after the DOJ agreed to a proposed order that would allow only two Musk-approved, but Treasury Department-employed people to have access to the data in read-only mode. These two special employees are Tom Krause and Marko Elaz.
The window into the soul of the so-called deep state, the USAID, would continue, and DOGE would expose, in detail, an operation that spanned the world, that funded the press, at home and abroad, and created many unaccountable funds worth billions. The heart of Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state lay bare for the world to see.
The use of slush funds to prop up media outlets telling Americans to hate themselves while inciting violence on a daily basis makes these same media outlets vulnerable if the slush funds are shut down.
After all, when the press continues to spread hateful messages, they lose customers, and they can only sustain themselves if they are being subsidized. In this case, they are being illegally subsidized by the government.
USAID was also behind funding the work done by these same insurrectionists to spread the Russia Hoax, a psyop that was intended to remove not just a sitting President, but the entire political opposition, criminalizing dissent in the name of safety against the Russian demon.
From townhall.com:
Public’s Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag once again dove into this sordid world of (supposed) NGO activity and government funding: they found that OCCRP pushed the Trump-Russian bank/money laundering myth.
USAID and the State Department appear to have created a vast network to co-opt the international press. These agencies funneled $472.6 million to Internews over the last 17 years. As of 2023, Internews operated out of 30 countries and had reached over 778 million people. The organization trained over 9,000 journalists and nearly 4,300 media outlets worldwide.
Jeanne Bourgault, Internews’ CEO, advocated for exclusion lists on social media “to combat disinformation” of disfavored views at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2024. The WEF then issued a report naming “misinformation” as the number one “Global Risk.”
Through these methods, USAID specifically, and the U.S. deep state in general, have used taxpayer money not only for censorship, but also for propaganda, agenda setting, and information control around the world.
As a result of their discoveries, Trump and his Secretaries have been slashing jobs and offering buyouts to others. They’ve also canceled what funding of leftist fake news outlets they could.
D. WILSON FIGHTS BACK
After a few thousand jobs were slashed, lawsuits ensued immediately, mostly filed in DNC-controlled courts. One immigration group suing Trump, CASA, is being funded by the government to the tune of $12 million from 2022-23 alone. Even as this report is finalized, news of more district judges striking down Trump’s orders are STILL coming in.
A good summary of the work being done by the DNC-serving courts was written by John Daniel Davidson from The Federalist:
Federal judges in Democrat-majority districts have issued preliminary injunctions blocking Trump’s executive actions to end birthright citizenship, reform and downsize the United States Agency for International Development, and offer buyouts to federal bureaucrats. A federal judge this past weekend blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and all other political appointees in the Trump administration – including the Treasury secretary and his deputies – from accessing payment data at the Treasury Department.
… (Another judge, appointed by Obama, took the extraordinary step of ordering the administration to pay back every cent of federal funding that’s been paused or canceled – and threatened anyone who violates his order with criminal contempt.)
What all this lawfare amounts to is a kind of judicial coup against the sitting president. By doling out injunctions like they’re USAID grants for LGBTQ awareness programs in Mali, Democrats have been able to hamstring key aspects of Trump’s agenda – at least for the moment. It’s a simple enough tactic. All Democrats have to do is shop for a venue to find the most activist, rabidly anti-Trump federal judges in the country, file their lawsuits, and wait for the injunctions to come raining down.
Vice President JD Vance tweeted, “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.” This seems like pretty aggressive language to me.
President Trump has filed an Emergency Motion to dissolve the TRO to cancel the most aggressive judgments. From President Trump’s filing:
At approximately 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 8, 2025, this Court issued an ex parte Temporary Restraining Order that purported to limit access to a vast swath of Treasury systems to only “civil servants,” while prohibiting “all political appointees” from doing the same. On its face, the Order could be read to cover all political leadership within Treasury – including even Secretary Bessent. This is a remarkable intrusion on the Executive Branch that is in direct conflict with Article II of the Constitution, and the unitary structure it provides.
There is not and cannot be a basis for distinguishing between “civil servants” and “political appointees.” Basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the President. A federal court, consistent with the separation of powers, cannot insulate any portion of that work from the specter of political accountability. No court can issue an injunction that directly severs the clear line of supervision Article II requires. Because the Order on its face draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction, it should be dissolved immediately.
The war in the courts continues, with a recent ruling in Trump’s favor offsetting the far-left judges’ treasonous actions. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. removed his freeze on federal employee payouts.
The Democrats know their heart of power is under assault. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) yelled out at a rally, “We will not take this! We will fight back! And god#%m it, shut down the Senate! We are at war!” Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) screamed, “Pay attention. We’re here today in the hopes that you will see the light. But if you do not see the light, we will bring the fire. Resist!”
The Democrats are calling for street fights and threatening to “get up in their faces” while their DNC-serving judges are threatening to arrest Trump if he doesn’t comply with their unconstitutional orders. One Democratic Party U.S. congressmember recently threatened to meet Elon Musk with “actual weapons,” and encouraged his followers to do the same.
Robert Garcia (D-CA). said “Well he is a d#%k, and I think he’s also harming the American public in an enormous way. What I think is really important and what the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight… This is an actual fight for democracy, for the future of this country, and it’s important to push back on the chairperson of this committee.”
PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS
The heart of this battle, right now, is in the courts, and the DNC has polluted it with activist party members who hold no loyalty to a country they’ve been trained to believe is merely a white supremacist demon that helped invent or completely invented evil itself.
The DNC-controlled courts will do what they must to protect the party from being politically executed before our very eyes. The question is, what will the Americanists do in response? This could be the flashpoint where the civil war of today becomes something awful tomorrow.
If SCOTUS intervenes quickly and settles most of the lawsuits in Trump’s favor, expect to see Progmerican billionaires begin leaving the country to head to friendlier climes. There may be some token blue state resistance, but this will not devolve into a hot civil war, as the counties outside the cities in those states will quickly make it clear they stand with Trump.
If SCOTUS intervenes quickly and sides with the bureaucrats, America will face a constitutional crisis, one I don’t think Trump will back down from. In this scenario, we will soon devolve into a hot civil war. If Trump fails to defy the courts, the bureaucrats have won, which will also lead to a hot civil war, but not as quickly as it will if Trump defies the court orders.
This writer supports Trump ignoring the court orders, for he would know that to preserve this infestation is to guarantee the destruction of the republic, so he will have nothing left to lose. Blue states will form associations but will not officially secede from the union; rather, they will simply not recognize the authority of the Trump Federal government. Numerous states will issue arrest warrants for Trump and every other member of his cabinet.
Blue States will see counties within them revolt, peacefully, doing to them what they just did to Trump, refusing to recognize state authority. Maps will emerge that will show the true reality of power for Progmerica, that the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly a city party that lacks real presence in most of the country.
Outside of the cities, Progmericans do not gather in significant numbers. If the maps reveal this reality, expect the shooting war to be averted. If not, this is when the shooting war begins.
If SCOTUS fails to act quickly, the battle will be over the hearts and minds of the people, with the DNC hate machine, the info-terrorist-insurrectionist media, pulling out all the stops to scare Americans into thinking reining in government bureaucracy and spending is somehow white supremacism.
Believe you me, friends, in the woke left parlance, the shortest path to cutting off critical thinking and winning every “debate” is to convince the sycophant their enemy is the devil himself, which is what “white supremacism” really means. It is a dog whistle for the devil, Satan, Old Scratch himself. This time will be no different.
But the use of yell-shaming as a means of human control eventually breaks, and the human ends up breaking their spell over them, laughing at the wokist’s taunts, its baseless accusations, and its hysterical cries.
If SCOTUS drags its feet and allows these cases to slowly work through the courts, this will mean more violence Americans will have to face, and more blue state tyranny Americans behind enemy lines will have to face.
With only state power to thug their enemies with, the people in blue states will soon be reminded of the difference between Trump’s America and Progmerica, where they now live. This will cause those who might not be able to afford to leave to STILL leave for red horizons, as the exodus from woke continues.
Their ability to fund more city burnings is less than it was, but city burning is coming, and the response from Trump might be heavy-handed, as it probably should be.
If this writer is right, the power of the media to mold American opinion is diminished more and more every day. Their power is so waned that I do not believe the lies they tell onscreen will overcome the reality Americans feel in their lives every day.
They want this rot gone, even if they don’t fully yet fundamentally understand that this rot is centralized in one entity, the DNC, the Democrat National Corporation.
If the spirit of America is as strong as I believe it is in this land today, this will be the last gasp of the latest iteration of Hell, the Democratic Party and its woke left vehicle of power. Still, it will hardly be the last we hear from Hell, for Hell never shuts up, and WILL NEVER shut up until Christ returns.
FURTHER RESOURCES:
The Study of Administration – Woodrow Wilson
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Originally published February 14, 2025 for our End-of-Month Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get semi-monthly issues.
By Michael A. Cessna, Military Affairs Correspondent
“Whoever is killed by a Jew receives the reward of two martyrs, because the very thing that the Jews did to the prophets was done to him. The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah. Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world. The Jews kill anyone who believes in Allah. They do not want to see any peace whatsoever on Earth.” –Abu Al-Subh, former Hamas minister of culture, from a sermon which aired on Al-Aqsa TV, April 8, 2011
INTRODUCTION
As Donald J. Trump assumed office for the second time as President of the United States, aside from the hysterical – and distressingly public – psychological breaks that instantly issued forth from the ranks of the Liberal-Progressive Left on Trump’s swift engagement in the domestic and internal governmental arenas, Trump was immediately faced with an array of foreign policy disasters left for him by his defeated and disgraced predecessors, and among those was the never-healing wound that is the Gaza Strip.
In brief: Trump’s publicly proposed solution was, with colossal understatement, a bombshell to the world at large. The proposal? Hand Gaza over to America, who will clean it up and rebuild it with the conditions that the Palestinians be relocated to new lands. Technically speaking, this could be called “ethnic cleansing,” meaning to denude a geographical region of a targeted ethnic group. It could also be called “migration.”
We’ll let future historians decide what the action should be called should anything approaching the GazaLago plan happen.
To understand the possibility of such a proposal, one must consider the historical background, starting in 1948 and working up to the present day. Afterwards, we will consider the options and how that might or might not align with Trump’s proposed GazaLago.
A. HISTORY TO PRESENT DAY
With Hamas backed into a corner, now being forced to trade the hostages taken in October of 2023 in exchange for breathing room as Israeli forces close in, the people of Gaza are now facing the reality that they have been left without any effective aid or relief, because actions have consequences in proportion to their intensity.
The reality on the ground is that the people of Gaza who stayed took no action against Hamas for nearly twenty years before the attack on October 7. As a result, no civilized country wants to take them in. Unlike their counterparts in the West Bank, Gaza Palestinians have no safe harbors.
Seeking some sort of firm resolution to this long-running problem, Donald Trump did what he does best: he shocked the world out of somnolence by “thinking outside the box” – but in a way so extreme, the world gasped in shock, as Trump stated flatly, that the United States would “take over the Gaza Strip.”
Is he serious?
A couple caveats with Trump’s proposal include a statement by White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who told the press, “It’s been made very clear to the president that the United States needs to be involved in this rebuilding effort to ensure stability in the region for all people. But that does not mean boots on the ground in Gaza. That does not mean American taxpayers will be funding this effort. It means Donald Trump, who is the best dealmaker on the planet, is going to strike a deal with our partners in a region.”
That was followed up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who told the press that “to take over Gaza” is “… going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions.”
This demographic shift fundamentally altered Gaza’s character, as its population swelled with displaced Palestinians from what became Israeli territory.
From 1948 to 1967, Gaza remained under Egyptian control, though Egypt did not annex the territory or grant citizenship to its residents. The 1967 Six-Day War brought another dramatic change as Israel occupied Gaza along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and other territories. This began a period of direct Israeli military administration that would last for decades.
The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of Gaza and the West Bank.
The following year, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, leading to tensions with the rival Fatah movement. By 2007, these tensions erupted into open conflict, resulting in Hamas taking complete control of Gaza while the PA remained dominant in the West Bank.
The post-2007 period saw Israel and Egypt impose a strict blockade on Gaza, severely restricting the movement of people and goods. This period was marked by recurring cycles of conflict between Hamas and Israel, including major military operations in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014.
Each round of fighting resulted in significant Palestinian civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, while Israeli communities faced rocket attacks from Gaza. Despite various attempted ceasefires and Egyptian-mediated negotiations, the underlying tensions remained unresolved.
Living conditions in Gaza deteriorated under the blockade, with limited access to electricity, clean water, and economic opportunities. The territory’s population of over 2 million people, predominantly young and increasingly urbanized, faced unemployment rates among the highest in the world, caused not only by the Hamas authority’s incessant tilting at the Israeli windmill, but also by its own terrible governing practices.
This event marked the deadliest day in Israel’s history and led to the most intense military response against Gaza since 1948, fundamentally altering the regional security landscape and drawing increased international attention to the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
B. FALLOUT OF THE GAZA WAR
Israel, hampered by a vacillating Biden administration, has been unable to bring the conflict to a swift conclusion. This inability has been due not only to Joe Biden’s complete ineptitude, but also by a wide-ranging series of attacks from enemies as diverse as the Houthi rebels of Yemen, their co-religionists of the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon, and direct attacks from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Those attacks, beginning in April of 2024, were by far the most serious, running until October of 2024, as Iran traded fire with Israel via drones and missiles over the Jewish state, striking their embassy in Damascus, Syria.
The Israeli strike killed many senior field commanders, including at least two Iranian general officers of the IRGC. This put Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the difficult position of trying to hang on to his state, while dealing with Iran’s Don Quixote impersonation as he continued to battle the remnants of the Islamic State.
This close association with Shi’a Iran has driven yet another wedge between Hamas and the Palestinian authority, as the religious divisions of Shi’a vs. Sunni cause yet more problems for Gazans, while the West Bank Palestinians continue to count their blessings on staying out of the conflict.
What we know now, after the events of recent days following the revelations of the shenanigans of USAID (which you can read more about on pg. xx), is the conversations about the REASONS for that destabilizing event could get VERY INTERESTING.
The collapse and exile of Assad and his family has completely upended the politics of the entire region, in ways that have yet to play out fully.
In this context, What about Gaza?
The conflict that began with the attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7 of 2023 has made the Palestinian cause – and Palestinians in general – highly toxic throughout the world.
Playing on the sympathy of being under hostile rule in your homeland (while deftly dodging the actual history) is never a bad strategy. Slaughtering women – even pregnant women – and children, and taking hostages for torture and ransom? Not a great plan, especially when more than nine million of your people are refugees in neighboring countries.
It is this refugee problem that lies at the heart of the matter, because – for varying reasons – no one wants to take in any more of them.
By the late 1960s, Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Jordan numbered around 400,000, with many living in refugee camps. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964, had become increasingly powerful within Jordan, effectively creating a “state within a state.”
Palestinian fighters (fedayeen) operated with relative autonomy, using Jordanian territory to launch operations against Israel, which often resulted in Israeli retaliatory strikes on Jordanian soil.
This situation created growing tensions with the government of Jordan’s then King Hussein. The PLO’s military presence, parallel administrative structures, and challenge to Jordanian sovereignty became increasingly problematic.
Palestinian militants began setting up checkpoints in Jordanian cities and occasionally clashed with Jordanian security forces. The situation was further complicated by the presence of more radical Palestinian factions that rejected even the PLO’s authority.
The ensuing conflict, known as Black September, lasted from September 1970 to July 1971. The Jordanian military’s campaign against Palestinian armed groups resulted in thousands of casualties and ultimately led to the expulsion of the PLO and other Palestinian armed organizations from Jordan.
Most Palestinian fighters relocated to Lebanon, significantly shifting the regional dynamic of the Palestinian resistance movement and leading to long-term consequences for Lebanon’s internal stability.
In brief: Jordan still maintains Palestinian refugee camps housing more than 2.3 million refugees. It cannot take more, especially the heavily radicalized Hamas fighters and their supporters from Gaza.
Likewise, Egypt cannot take in too many Gazans, either. This is not so much due to bad history with the Palestinians, but because Egypt is an economic basket case. The massive state is desperately trying to stabilize its economic situation, before it turns into a far worse version of Tunisia in 2011. Adding over 2 million desperate and radicalized refugees is a recipe for disaster, one far worse than Jordan.
In a word, NO. Israel has been dealing with the “Gaza Problem” for over 75 years, and after committing the largest killing of Jews since World War II, no rational Israeli government is going to agree to let Gazans rule that state again, as they have proven – through their acquiescence to rule by Hamas – that they cannot be trusted with even humanitarian aid.
The October 7 attacks fundamentally altered Israeli security calculations regarding Gaza. The swift breaching of Israeli border defenses, which were previously considered highly secure, demonstrated vulnerabilities that Israeli military planners hadn’t anticipated, such as the use of paraglider assault troops. The scale of civilian casualties and the methods employed raised serious concerns about future security threats if Gaza returns to Palestinian control.
From Israel’s security perspective, the attack highlighted how civilian infrastructure and resources in Gaza, including construction materials and humanitarian aid, had been utilized for military purposes, such as the construction of extensive tunnel networks. This has led to heightened skepticism about the ability to prevent future militarization of the territory under Palestinian governance.
Additionally, polling data has indicated that Hamas maintained significant popular support in Gaza prior to October 7, even though that support is eroding steadily. This erosion has occurred as Hamas has shown that it cannot follow through with its rhetoric, thus raising Israeli concerns about whether any alternative Palestinian leadership could effectively prevent new militant groups from regaining influence in the territory.
The extensive tunnel system discovered during the subsequent conflict has reinforced Israeli arguments that any future governance arrangement would require strict security oversight to prevent rearmament.
In brief: Israel no longer wants “home rule” in Gaza, as that has proven to be a catastrophic failure.
C. GAZA OPTION #3: LET IRAN DEAL WITH IT?
The fighting that began in earnest in late 2023 was driven by money given to Hamas by Iran via a deranged release of some $6 billion dollars to the terrorist regime in Tehran by the Biden Gang. It is not unreasonable to demand that the Iranian regime take in the Gazans it goaded into a suicidal attack on Israel. This is in no way as ludicrous as it might first appear, as it would not be the first time this would have happened.
In 1982, the original secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) withdrew from Beirut, Lebanon, by sea, under the protection of a multinational peacekeeping force led by the United States and France. Although thoroughly beaten by Israeli forces, the PLO did their best to reform and reorganize in their new homes in Tunisia and Libya.
Responsibly, then, Iran should be on the hook to resettle the population of Gaza, as they are ultimately responsible for this mess. The spectacular mismanagement of social and economic policies by the incompetent mullahs has created a situation where Iran definitely needs the infusion of a population with no issues with procreation.
But…let’s give Iran a dodge to get out of doing that – after all, that is certainly what the Biden administration would have done.
Let Iran send the Gazans to their co-religionist proxies in Yemen, the Houthi rebels. Sure, that would transfer the fighting to Yemen, but, like Somalia, Yemen is one of those wars “voted most likely to continue.”
Doing so, applying an appropriately ruthless level of ‘realpolitik’, would both kick this particular can down the road, and be a stick to keep Saudi Arabia in check…or, at least force them to hire more mercenary troops for the long term.
If that sounds harsh, what is harsher is considering how many people have been killed to date by children in a sandbox, thinking that they are adults, while their sand squabbles kill people continuously.
Playtime is over, and it’s time to grow up and join the rest of the adults in the 21st Century.
PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS
So – “GazaLago?” What? – And then…there is The Donald. When Trump made what at first sounded like an off-hand comment from someone who might be getting a bit old in the brain, people were really shocked when he doubled down on his statement.
Is the United States about to go “boots on the ground” to take over Gaza? Hopefully, this is a serious bluff by Trump, as doing so would be a catastrophic blunder on his part.
The Palestinians in Gaza are outraged at the very idea of being displaced. However, given their role to date in how we got here, their say does not really carry as much weight as they or their supporters think.
If Gazans are really serious about wanting a better life, their best bet is to find somewhere else to live…because they are ultimately responsible for creating this problem, and actions have consequences.
If Trump is using this as a bluff to force Egypt and Jordan to cave on taking in Gaza refugees, he is being ill-advised, because – for the reasons outlined above – neither state can really absorb any more radicalized Palestinians.
For his part, King Abdullah of Jordan bought time by offering to take in some 2,000 sick Palestinian children from Gaza, but this is actually much more than Jordan should have to do, as the Hashemite kingdom is one of the U.S.’s staunchest and most consistent allies in the Middle East. For its part, Egypt has offered to help rebuild Gaza, but without Palestinians becoming their problem.
This is an uncharacteristically dangerous gamble on Trump’s part, as even back-room diplomacy in the Middle East has to maintain “wasta” (or “face”) for the leader, lest they lose their perceived legitimacy.
But…Let’s assume, for a moment, that Trump actually follows through on establishing a U.S. “protectorate” of some kind over Gaza. What would that look like?
Firstly, it would be an abject failure of staggering proportions if such a geopolitical situation were to occur, and the Gazans were left in place, while the rebuilding would continue. Terrorist attacks and sabotage would be rampant, as would relentless attempts to infiltrate the U.S. through a visa program. These things would happen as a matter of course.
On the other hand: What if Trump can actually force a displacement of Gazans to “somewhere else”? This would leave a blasted hellscape of rubble and ruins, lousy with unexploded ordnance, riddled with unstable tunnel networks.
Now, Trump – who made his money, one should recall, in real estate development – is well aware of what it would take to rebuild Gaza, in a “mechanical” sense; in fact, he likely did the calculations in his head.
In this event, yes – with multiple billions of dollars in investment over at least a decade – the Gaza Strip could become a new “Riviera” for the Mediterranean, although the advertising campaign would be insane. It would take at least another decade to approach paying off its initial capital investment, however…and that is leaving aside the potential political fallout that would occur initially.
There is, however, another option – which, let me note, would also involve removing the Palestinians: Converting the Gaza Strip into a new version of the “Tangier International Zone.”
An artifact of the colonial era, the Tangier International Zone (TIZ) was a diplomatic agreement between Britain, France and Spain to convert the ancient port city across from Gibraltar to a kind of “free state,” which operated as a completely open city from 1925 to 1956, mostly to ease British fears of Spain taking control of the southern side of the Straits.
Morocco, the technical ruler of the city, was at that time under the “protection” of France, and did not have much say in the process. It was a home for all manner of hedonists, smugglers, rebels, renegades, and shady bankers; in a very real sense, it was “more Casablanca than Casablanca.”
That potential could turn GazaLago it into an economic powerhouse, and pay off its reconstruction bills in short order… But don’t hold your breath – that sort of vision is something unreadable by the rickety post-WWII international diktat, and something the Skittle Hair Brigade will never accept, even if it benefits them directly.
The Lessons of Modern War, Vol. 2: The Iran-Iraq War – Anthony H Cordesman (Author), Abraham Wagner