Getting Trump, Palestine Right (Brussels Morning)
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2024-03-11

Read column: https://brusselsmorning.com/two-misconceptions-trump-palestine/37373/

Nowhere is delusional wishful thinking more evident than when it comes to Donald Trump and to a Palestinian state.

Trump first (the way he likes it).

In history, there is a long tradition of outlaws and rebels turned heroes and kings: Robin Hood comes to mind and so does King David.

But unlike Robin Hood and King David, when it comes to US politics, Donald Trump is a destroyer, not a reformer, nor, ironically, a builder. Criminal indictments only burnish and cement his credentials as the enfant terrible foe of all things establishment. 

The masses in the West feel that they are being held hostage and enslaved by rapacious, venal, and mendacious elites. 

They regard these elites and their values as avowed enemies: the West, governments, academia, mainstream media, science, the finance industry, the Jews.

The enemies of the elites are the friends of the masses: terrorists, antisemites, conspiracy theorists, Russia, China, populist authoritarians, the alt right, and authoritarian politicians like Orban, Putin, Erdogan, and Trump. 

The masses abuse democracy and empowering technologies in order to destroy the established order. 

This is Jose Ortega y Gasset’s “Revolt of the Masses” which always results in ochlocracies and atrocities.

Now to a Palestinian state.

Exactly like owning a gun and driving a car, attaining one’s own statehood requires a level of maturity and training as well as experience. Rogue states are sooner or later doomed to disappear and this is the fate of kleptocrats and bullying thugs. 

Every single time the Palestinians have gained a modicum of autonomy and have enjoyed tens of billions in international aid ($44 billion between 1994-2020), they botched the whole thing and reverted to terrorism, corruption, bloody coups, and misgovernance. Their track record of defiant incompetence is both mind-boggling and abominable. 

Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are egregious, venal, kleptocracies with the latter also an Islamist death cult.

Palestinians are not ready for a state. The international community needs to establish a mandate, a protectorate over the territories assigned to a future Palestinian state and educate the indigenous population and the local leadership in how countries act: governance, rule of law, democracy. 
Only once deemed ready, should the Palestinians be allowed to form a polity which would not a constitute a danger to itself and to its neighbors. It might take a while.