There won't be a population transfer from the Gaza Strip, and the Americans won't build a Riviera there.
There is no plan, no advance administrative work, no feasibility, no one who will take in two million Palestinians. This isn't the era of World War II. Over a million Germans are not being moved from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, nor millions of Jews to the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region.
US President Donald Trump (R) and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.Credit: AFP/Jim Watson
Donald Trump is talking nonsense; that's what he does.
During his first term, the U.S. president suggested that North Korea "could have the best hotels in the world" if it gave up its nuclear weapons.
Since winning the election in November he's been talking about reclaiming the Panama Canal, buying Greenland and annexing Canada.
We're old enough to remember him babbling in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu about Israeli annexation of the West Bank. The Israeli right-wing pundit Shimon Riklin danced with an Israeli flag outside the White House; Yonatan Urich, a media adviser to the prime minister, tweeted, "Sovereignty over all the settlements on Sunday." Many, many Sundays have passed since then.
It's an insult to human intelligence to take Trump's rhetoric seriously. He's a messed-up psychopath, and we live in a time of galloping backwardness. Netanyahu is a conscienceless psychopath himself, but he's not stupid.
Protesters rally against U.S. President Donald Trump in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Wednesday.Credit: Erica Dischino/Reuters
Even he froze in discomfort when Trump rambled on about relocating Gaza's residents, giddy from the embarrassing compliments that Netanyahu showered on him. How did Levi Eshkol put it? "No one has ever been slapped for groveling."
When the habitual American trip of the Netanyahus and their sycophants fades away, reality will remain, like a familiar hangover returning to visit after a night of revelry.
It's sad to see all too many figures and outlets in the Israeli media collaborating with this bonfire of the vanities, with debates at the level of a seventh-grade civics class – population transfer: pros and cons.
Even before the moral aspect, it mainly suggests superficiality and laziness. These elements of the Israeli media are so easy to manipulate. In this, both Trump and Netanyahu are truly expert: a constant carpet-bombing of empty words about things that will never happen.
Several hundred demonstrators outside the California State Capitol to protest against President Donald Trump on Wednesday.Credit: Noah Berger/AP
To our great regret (astonishment no longer applies here), there are also figures in the "opposition" who are quick to volunteer to get under the stretcher, to help bear the burden.
First and foremost, Benny Gantz, who said Trump's proposal showed "creative, original and intriguing thinking." Tomorrow, Trump won't remember what he was thinking and we'll be left with Gantz.
He is truly a lost cause. But the political camp that represents the sane, realistic, sober Israel – from Naftali Bennett to Yair Golan (yes, yes, this is the only coalition that might, perhaps, save Israel) – must wake up and regroup.
It has an urgent duty to organize to continue the fight for the release of the hostages, against the resumption of warfare in Gaza, to topple the government of destruction, rebuild the Gaza border communities and the Galilee, and for the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the greatest strategic defeat in the history of the country's history.
We have no children to spare for unnecessary wars. We have no more agonized hostages to sacrifice on the altar of the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir government. We have no time to waste on Trump's nonsense and Amit Segal's muted applause.
Trump is about to drag the West into a catastrophe the likes of which we may never have seen and dared not imagine.
Meanwhile, Russia and China are waiting, rubbing their hands in glee. Netanyahu and his rock of support, who popped up suddenly after a 70-day vacation in Miami, devoted four and a half hours this week to a taped interview with the televangelist pastor Paula White.
The evangelicals eagerly anticipate the second coming of Jesus Christ, triggered by the war of Gog and Magog at Mount Megiddo. We cannot allow ourselves to be the pawns of English-speaking lunatics from Florida or Caesarea. In our bleeding and tragic land, there are two nations; that will not change. They aren't going anywhere. Life isn't a reality show. Life is reality.