Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno on Oct. 11, 2024.
Before medical students are officially given the right to treat patients, they must take a pledge to help diagnose and heal to the best of their ability and judgment. The 2500-year-old Hippocratic Oath has stood the test of time, with the Latin phrase “primum non nocere,” meaning “first do no harm.”
While elected officials in the United States must pledge to “preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States,” they do not face the requirement of spending many long years in study and practice of their craft before they can run for elected office, nor they take an oath to “first do no harm.”
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Donald Trump, who has publicly acknowledged that he does not read much or study history, once again exposed his ignorance and lack of experience in geopolitics when he stood before the press aboard Air Force One and was asked about plans for the aftermath of the Hamas-Israel war.
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“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said, adding that there have been centuries-long conflicts in the region.
“I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now,” he continued. “Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”
What appeared to be one of his infamous off-the-cuff remarks was actually vetted earlier when he contacted Jordan’s King Abdullah II about potentially building housing and moving Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries.
He also told reporters that he intended to call Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the following day about similarly absorbing Palestinians.
Rather than forming a coalition of countries to rebuild the Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people, his scheme amounts to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land. This plan is similar in many ways to his conceived “mass deportations” of Black and brown people from the United States as part of his patriarchal Christian white nationalist project.
Following the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Jordan took in more than 2.39 million Palestinians. Today, over two million Palestinians live in Jordan. Though most currently reside in cities and villages, some still live in refugee camps. While we do not yet know how Jordan’s King responded to Trump’s request earlier in the week, we do know how Abdullah II generally feels about the idea: “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt,” he said last year.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi released even tougher remarks last year, saying the current war was not only targeted at fighting Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, “but also an attempt to push the civilian inhabitants to… migrate to Egypt.” He warned that this could demolish all chances of peace in the region.
A “one-state solution”
Trump’s ignorance regarding the politics of the Middle East, along with his rejection of the creation of an independent Palestinian state, align with his nomination of Christian Evangelical and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to be U.S. Ambassador to Israel during his second regime.
Huckabee has long rejected the idea of an independent Palestinian state carved from the territory Israel seized following the 1967 war. He has argued for a “one-state solution” in which the Israeli government holds all power. This position contradicts longstanding U.S. policy.
He has claimed, for example, that the West Bank of the Jordan River belongs to Israel, and he stated emphatically that “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”
Huckabee must have forgotten that Ishmael, the original ancestor of the Arab people, was also Abraham’s son and heir.
He condemned Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and described the Jewish settlers evacuated by Israeli forces as having been “marched at gunpoint.” Huckabee stated: “I feel that we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that has historically belonged to the Jews.”
Well, Mike, what is now referred to as “North America” has historically belonged to indigenous nations. So, you must, by analogy, be asserting “that we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that has historically belonged to [indigenous nations]” and that all non-indigenous peoples must evacuate this land as well.
Just as Trump’s idea of injecting bleach to attack the Covid-19 virus will destroy the human body, his Gaza scheme will destroy the working plan for the Abraham Accords seeking mutual cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors, especially this section:
“In this spirit, we warmly welcome and are encouraged by the progress already made in establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and its neighbors in the region under the principles of the Abraham Accords. We are encouraged by the ongoing efforts to consolidate and expand such friendly relations based on shared interests and a shared commitment to a better future.”
Trump’s scheme is not “based on shared interests” among the nations in the area, and it will set back progress that has barely begun. In all likelihood, it will also sabotage the delicate and already tense ceasefire between Hamas and Israel and may further jeopardize the lives of the Israel hostages.
Donald Trump has now officially withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization. Perhaps his Gaza scheme represents his passive-aggressive pull out of the Abraham Accords.
Trump is free to inject bleach into his veins, but we must not allow him to pour gasoline over the flames of Gaza. We must find some form of Hippocratic Oath for politicians to swear allegiance so they “first do no harm.”
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