THE NEW AMERICAN VALUES

In another bizarre Trump news conference the man who has previously denounced empire building now says he wants to own Gaza and turn it into  a Rivera of the east, removing all the inhabitants and forcibly resettling them in  Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon, which sounds very much like what Adolf Hitler proposed for the Jewish people of Europe in the 1930s.

Trump's intention was made quite clear by his White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt  when she said that the USA  wants to take over Gaza, in other words conquer and occupy another state, presumably by force as it's unlikely the Palestinians will just go quietly.

To put this into perspective, the territorial boundaries of what is now Gaza was originally part of the Ottoman Empire until at the conclusion of WWI and the dismantling of the Turkish Empire it was controlled by Great Britain under a League of Nations Mandate.

The relinquishing by Great Britain of its mandate in 1948 precipitated the Arab-Israeli war during which tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled to the Gaza Strip.

Subsequent conflicts led to the area being occupied at different times by both Israel and Egypt  until the Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority as a limited governing authority, initially led by the secular party Fatah until that party's electoral defeat in 2006 with Hamas then taking over the governance of Gaza, which ultimately  led to further conflict with Israel.

No stretch of the imagination can possible give America any rights whatsoever over Gaza and Trump's expressed intent to take over the territory is conquest, nothing less.

Taken with his expressed intent to re-occupy the Panama Canal Zone, annex Canada and occupy Greenland by armed force it ill beholds him to criticise Russia for it's illegal occupation of the Crimea and its war with the Ukraine.

Is this to be the new expression of  'American values' where any smaller, less powerful nation, which means most of the rest of the world, can be seized and occupied by America, just because it can?