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Notes -
Trump, in Shock Announcement, Says U.S. Will Take Over Gaza After Permanently Displacing Palestinians
Now there are a few problems with this. One is that Egypt and Jordan, the obvious candidates, are absolutely against it. Second is that it will be horribly embarrassing when an American soldier gets blown up by unexploded American ordnance that was donated to Israel. It's also somewhat incoherent - he's going to make it into some kind of big multicultural party zone?
The US does have lots of leverage over Egypt though, their economy has been on the cusp of collapse for a while now. So maybe Trump's increased willingness to deploy coercion will bear fruit here.
(1) Making America complicit in ethnic cleansing is a moral stain on us forever, occurring in the 21st century where every nation should know better — this is not the mid 20th or 19th century; as Trump’s continual 1.7 million remark tells us, there are 500,000 dead in Gaza, and if America goes in these bodies will be placed on us and not Israel — the history books will surely be written so that we the ones who did it; (2) Hamas is still in operation, so American blood and resources will be spent on Israel again; (3) if you think Western culture bears the blood guilt of WWII, consider how Arab people will look at us for the next few hundred years — meanwhile, Jews being responsible for displacing* Palestinians would at once delete the holocaust from our whole collective storehouse of political metaphors, as it almost has now for the Left; (4) it’s naive to think America will ever “own” it, we will be responsible for trillions in rebuilding it for Israeli settlers, and then a president will come along whose donors / influences push him to give it away to Israel.
That looks like an order of magnitude greater than most estimates. Where are you getting that number from?
2.3 million before the war, 100,000 known to have left. Trump on more than one occasion now has repeated that there are 1.7 million in Gaza. This means his advisors have told him this number. (Former real estate tycoon, he knows how to remember numbers briefed on, probably his deepest skill).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Now the old are dying naturally and less are born than before, but from what I can tell there are still births and Gaza’s population pyramid probably means that the births and deaths are approximately equalized.
Bold move to assume all unaccounted for are dead. There's "known to have left" (100k), there's "known to have died" (around 50k in this case apparently), and the rest are "fate unknown" who can be in either group. And that's assuming the initial numbers (2.3M and 1.7M) are correct and comparable in the first place.
Trump was given the number 1.7 million presumably when he asked his intelligence advisor — conferred with all of the intel of the American Empire — how many people would need to be relocated from Gaza. The advisor gave him the number of living people in Gaza, not caring about “unaccounted for” or anything besides being alive. I think this number is accurate, because he has said it on different occasions now and because it’s the exact thing his brain is trained to remember. (He literally encodes it in his memory as a real estate project, you can tell by how he speaks about it, this is his savant-level skill and it’s a simple number to remember.) Determining how many Gazans are alive is a trivial task for the America intel community — use drones and satellites and movement tracking. They’ve wrangled them through corridors, they look at aid dispersal, the population isn’t exactly in hiding.
It’s the Lancet... we can assume it is trustworthy on this number.
You mean he asked the guys who are about to get Tulsi Gabbard for a boss after putting her on shitlist? And whom Trump generally disrespects? I can only imagine how eager they are to work full throttle for the occasion.
If I were Trump, I would be asking people from my shadow cabinet, or whatever passes for one. But those people do not wield the full intel power of the US right now, and haven't for at least four years.
In an active warzone? With your upper estimate of roughly 1-in-5 dead?! Yes the civilians wll be hiding.
Lancet means civilian medics, which in Gaza means palestinian authorities, directly or indirectly. See recent discussion about UNRWA. Trump's data, wherever it came from, it's not from the palestinians almost for sure. You risk getting large error, possibly large than the effect you'll looking from, just because it's not the same source. Palestinians, I would guess, have incentives to over-count. External observation, which you assume Trump relies on, will likely undercount.
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