In which the pond and the reptiles are distracted, and then the pond remembers what the distractions are distracting attention from ...

 

Yesterday, King Donald pulled off a classic distraction, a masterly troll. 

It wasn't a spur of the moment thing, he was clearly reading from notes, so it was deliberate, and so it required the reptiles leaping into action at the get go, to show off their gonzo starting block chops.

The pond will rush through today's early morning entries so it can return to those early moments:

Amazingly the responses were still there top of the digital world ma, and even better, it provided the pond with a perfect excuse to avoid a serve of petulant Peta rabbiting on about energy in the way her sock puppet, the onion muncher, used to do in his glory budgie smuggling days...

Jennings of the fifth form chipped in, while Lynda B-M was completely off the pace, still stuck in the standard reptile Zionist grove, ignoring the beatific vision...

There was simpleton Simon too, using it as a club to beat gormless Albo around the head, but back to yesterday ...

The reptiles started this day's coverage with a classic lie, tagging Cameron Stewart as first appearing 37 minutes ago...

But the pond tagged him as first appearing yesterday afternoon, albeit an hour after the news broke, and Cameron led the field...

There were the usual hacks rabbiting about - the lesser member of the Kelly gang and Ben Packing Some Ham for example - but it was Cam the man given the job of offering the first reptile response ... hedrew the reptile short straw and had to rush in to print with an analysis of the Gaza moment.

The header set the enfeebled tone, a sanewashing attempt to explain the implications:

Trump’s radical plan for Gaza is a gamble for the ages, Historic, audacious, ambitious, crazy, dangerous, jaw-dropping. However you want to describe it, Donald Trump’s plan is likely to define his presidency and the future of the Middle East.

Stop it right there, and put it another clarifying way: 

Stalin’s radical plan for the kulaks, Tartars, Chechens and others is a gamble for the ages, Historic, audacious, ambitious, crazy, dangerous, jaw-dropping. However you want to describe it, Stalin’s plan is likely to define his status as Father of Nations, Great Leader, General Secretary, Generalisimus, and the future of the Soviet Union.

Or another clarifying way: 

Hitler's radical plan for Germany's Jews is a gamble for the ages, Historic, audacious, ambitious, crazy, dangerous, jaw-dropping. However you want to describe it, Hitler’s plan is likely to define his status as Führer, Chancellor, and commander in chief of the army and the future of Germany's Jews.

On his second thoughts go, Cam came up with this variation and expanded from a three minute into a four minute read:

Donald Trump’s ‘Riviera’ plan for Gaza shocks the Middle East and the world, Donald Trump has up-ended the fraught politics of the Middle East with one of the most contentious plans ever unveiled by a US president, declaring that America will take ownership of Gaza and turn it into a new ‘Riviera’.

But the pond was interested in the first responder situation, as the off camber Cam stumbled through the troll, beginning with the obligatory snap of the visionaries conspiring to produce war crimes US President Donald Trump greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. Picture: AP Photo

In the morning edition, the tag added on Wednesday AEDT and the snap went through a transmutation, showing the criminals caught in the act:

 

Cam's first response verged on the delirious:

Historic, audacious, ambitious, crazy, dangerous, jaw-dropping. However you want to describe it, Donald Trump has taken a gamble for the ages on Gaza, one which is likely to define his presidency and the future of the Middle East.

Forget tariffs, the Mexican border and every other headline Trump has created since he became president again, this announcement on Gaza is the one that will be remembered in decades to come.

Trump argues that he can transcend generations of failure, misery, hate and destruction in Gaza by thinking radically about a region defined by ancient hatreds, disputed land and conflicting aspirations.

Yet the notion of the US taking ownership of Gaza and rebuilding it into a “Riviera” of the Middle East after relocating some two millions Palestinians from Gaza is so out-of-the-box radical that it will take the rest of the world time to digest the implications.

Let’s go through some of the key questions that will need to be answered if this proposal is to become anything more than a theoretical thought bubble for Trump.

Firstly, and most crucially, how will Trump persuade other Arab states to accept many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and how will he persuade around two million Palestinians to leave Gaza?

Cam abandoned that approach in his second go, making sure to snipe at Albo ...

Donald Trump has up-ended the fraught politics of the Middle East with one of the most contentious plans ever unveiled by a US president, declaring that America will take ownership of Gaza, resettle more than two million people, and turn the Palestinian territory into a new “Riviera”.

The White House was preparing to tackle swift and broad opposition to the President’s plan – from the UN, Palestinians, Arab countries and the Gaza-controlling terrorist group Hamas – as Mr Trump left open the possibility of dispatching American troops to make his vision for Gaza come true.

Framing his proposal in ­humanitarian terms, the President said Gaza was a demolition site that was unlivable and that new solutions were needed.

Anthony Albanese and other US allies were left scrambling on how to deal with Mr Trump’s radical Middle East proposal, with the Prime Minister repeatedly shutting down attempts to get his opinion on the Gaza plan and saying he would not give a “running commentary” on the Republican’s comments.

The reptiles varied the second snap. 

At first it was Palestinians stand beside a destroyed house in an area littered with rubble from buildings destroyed during the Israeli army's ground and air offensive against Hamas in Gaza City. Picture: AP Photo...

But that turned into an AV distraction with the tag featuring the bromancer: The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan claims US President Donald Trump’s announcement to take control of Gaza offers an optimistic “vision” of the future for its citizens. “Of course, the idea that America will own Gaza is completely bonkers but we’ve just got to try to imagine the Trump method and also look at what he’s done in the past and look at the whole message,” Mr Sheridan said. “Look at what he said about Gaza in another way he’s offering the Gazans a vision of what could be. “If Gaza had a leadership that was concerned about the welfare of its own people, it would be trying to do this itself in cooperation with Israel.”

 

In his first go, Cam clearly struggled:

Trump is likely to win the first half of this equation. Although Egypt and Jordan and other Arab states have so far refused to consider the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza, Trump can almost certainly strongarm them to do so using trade, diplomatic, military and other sanctions.

Egypt and Jordan fear that taking too many Palestinians undermines their own stability and security. But these – and other Arab nations – have been hypocritical during the Gazan conflict, expressing disgust for the plight of Palestinians while at the same time refusing to provide them with sanctuary on their soil.

But assuming that Trump is able to persuade Arab states to accept large numbers of Palestinians, how will he persuade the people of Gaza to leave their homes, even if they are largely destroyed?

Would their departure be voluntary or not?

It seems inconceivable that the US would forcibly remove them – not only would this be in breach of the Geneva Convention but it would create a generational conflict between the US and the people of Gaza.

Trump could no doubt encourage many Gazans to relocate voluntarily using all sorts of enticements, but there would still be a substantial number who would choose to stay. Trump’s treatment of Gaza as a valuable piece of real estate that can be made great again ignores the obvious fact that for many people Gaza is the only home they have known and many will refuse to leave.

Indeed, why would they want to leave if Trump is promising to rebuild their destroyed enclave into a “Riviera” that will deliver lovely homes and create thousands of jobs?

So what then happens to those who refuse to leave? Does reconstruction take place around them while they live in camps? What stake do they then have in the new Gaza? Can those who resettled during the rebuilding then return to Gaza?

Second time around, Cam had enjoyed the time to catch up with a few responses:

Jewish groups in Australia had hoped Mr Trump could help end the 16-month Israel-Hamas war but were fearful of any attempts to remove millions of Palestinians from Gaza.

The nation’s Muslim communities also expressed shock and said the policy could worsen tensions between Jews and Arabs.

Mr Trump said America should take “long-term” ownership of Gaza and resettle its people in “beautiful” areas in other Arab countries where they could live in peace.

“I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them,” Mr Trump said during a joint press conference with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington.

“They’ve lived like hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”

Mr Trump said the US would rebuild Gaza from the ground up and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” with “economic ­development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area”.

"Were fearful" discreetly avoided any mention by any Jewish person calling it an attempt at ethnic cleansing ...

First time around, the reptiles had deployed a different AV distraction... In a shock announcement U.S. President Donald Trump proposed that the U.S. would 'take over' and redevelop the war ravaged Gaza Strip after Palestinians had been permanently resettled to neighbouring Arab nations. Israel's Netanyahu says Trump was 'thinking outside the box' but analysts say the plan lacks any detail. Sean Hogan reports.

 

Second time round they recycled that fist bump snap ...

In his first responder role, Cam was clearly a little confused, like a rabbit caught in a flood or an LA bushfire, or perhaps he was somewhere down in the Grampians ...

And who would live in the new Gaza? Trump says it will be occupied by “people of the entire world” including Palestinians. But does that mean a majority Palestinian population or others? And does that include Israelis?

And which country would eventually own Gaza? Trump says the US would “own” it for the “long term” but doesn’t say whether it would eventually keep it, or create a separate state or give it to Israel.

And what does this mean for any two-state solution? At face value it means that any two-state solution, as it is currently understood, is dead. This will guarantee intractable opposition to Trump’s plan in the Arab world. Any US occupation of Gaza will be viewed by much of the Arab world as the takeover of Palestinian land by America with the likely effect of mobilising a new generation of Islamic militants.

Trump’s vision for Gaza is really just that for now because there is no visible road map to achieving it. Trump did not rule out using US troops to guarantee security in Gaza. But at what stage would they go into the destroyed enclave to start rebuilding it?

For US troops to enter Gaza while Hamas still has a presence there would risk entangling the US in another deadly, intractable “endless war” that Trump has promised he would never start.

And how does Israel or the US persuade what remains of Hamas – which naturally opposes Trump’s Gaza plan – to lay down their arms and allow the US to proceed with the emptying and rebuilding of Gaza?

And what impact will Trump’s Gaza plan have on the here and now – the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire agreement and the return of the remaining surviving hostages?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg with Trump’s Gaza plan. His press conference made it clear that even he has not yet thought through many of these answers and that his Gaza concept is little more than an aspirational one. But Trump’s proposal has succeeded in completely up-ending conventional thinking on the Middle East, which is no doubt what the disrupter-in-chief wanted. Yet whether any of this radical plan will ever be achieved is another question altogether.

Cam's second go through was interrupted by another AV distraction and he tried to do a bit of bothsiderism:

He did not rule out using US troops to help secure his aims. “We’ll do what is necessary,” Trump said about the possibility of deploying troops to fill any security vacuum.

“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that.”

However, the deployment of American troops in Gaza would risk the US being caught in another Middle East conflict, something Mr Trump promised he would never do.

The President said his plan involved moving Gaza’s residents to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” in another country.

Asked how many Palestinians he had in mind, he said, “all of them”, adding, “I would think that they would be thrilled.”

But Mr Trump did not clarify whether those Palestinians who refused to leave Gaza would be forcefully removed, an act that would contravene the Geneva Conventions. He also did not say what role, if any, Israel might have in the removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

Mr Trump said that a rebuilt Gaza would ultimately be occupied by many different people “of the world” including Palestinians, but did not specify what he meant.

“I do see a long-term ownership position (the US), and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East,” the President said. He did not say if the US would seek to claim Gaza permanently.

Mr Albanese declined to comment on Mr Trump’s Gaza plan, saying only that Australia’s position on the Palestinian territory was unchanged and that Australia supported a two-state solution in the Middle East.

Other US allies are also unlikely to support the plan if it effectively kills the chances of a two-state solution.

However, Mr Trump appeared to play down prospects of a two-state solution under his plan, saying that “a lot of plans change with time. A lot of death has occurred since I left and now came back.”

Peter Dutton and his frontbench also avoided commenting on the Trump plan, with opposition assistant foreign affairs spokesman Julian Leeser saying: “President Trump has put forward an idea today. It’s not an idea that we’ve put forward.”

Liberal senator and former ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma said there were “positive” elements from the President’s comments and he should not be taken literally.

Mr Netanyahu suggested that he was open to Mr Trump’s plan. “He sees a different future for that piece of land,” he said of Gaza.

Then came that AVdistraction, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically after Palestinians are resettled elsewhere, moves that would shatter decades of U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Cam rounded the second go out with an attempt at context:

“It’s worth paying attention to this. We’re talking about it. It’s something that could change history.”

But Hamas said Mr Trump’s proposed relocation was “a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region”.

“Our people in Gaza will not allow for these plans to come to pass,” Hamas said. “What is needed is the end of the occupation and the aggression against our people, not expelling them from their land.”

The Saudi foreign ministry said the kingdom rejected “any violation of the rights of the Palestinian people, whether through settlement, land annexation, or attempts to displace them”.

But Mr Trump said he would persuade Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan to agree to ­resettle Gazans despite their current opposition to such a plan.

“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr Trump said. “I say they will.”

Trump officials say the President’s plan to rebuild Gaza could take 10 to 15 years.

Mr Trump did not say how the US would persuade Hamas to allow it to rebuild the enclave or what impact his proposal might have on stage two of the Gaza ceasefire deal that could see the remaining hostages released.

Egypt captured Gaza during the 1948 war and controlled it until Israel seized it after being attacked by Arab nations in 1967. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but launched a war against Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist group slaughtered about 1200 Israelis in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Very discreet - in both attempts, not a single mention of ethnic cleansing, not a single mention of genocide, not a single mention of a war crime to add to previous war crimes, not a single mention of the tangerine tyrant's plans, ominously withheld for the moment, for the West Bank, but likely to complete a cleansing worthy of Adolf or Stalin ...

But think of the real estate opportunities, Cameron ...

It didn't take long for the heavies to join in and naturally, being a devout Xian, the bromancer was all for ethnic cleansing and genocide, though he did see a few minor problems ...

Donald Trump’s real estate man view of the world might struggle against the messy realities of Gaza

Despite the madness of the specific notion of the US taking control of Gaza, it would be the height of folly to dismiss out of hand Trump’s radical vision for Palestine.

This first appeared at 10:09PM so early this morning the reptiles naturally dated it to "39 minutes ago", and changed the splash header to Some method, mixed with truth and courage, in the President's madness, while keeping the rest intact, and using the same snap, just updating it to Wednesday AET ...

Disappointingly, it seemed the bro didn't do a Cam. Get up, revisit the vomit, and try again ...

Instead the bromancer stayed in bed and the rebadging contained the same copy as first appeared:

Donald Trump has proposed the most astounding, outlandish, radical, gobsmackingly strange proposal of his entire life, in suggesting that the United States could long-term “own” the devastated Gaza Strip.
The chance of this actually coming about is surely just as great as the vision Trump once offered for North Korea under Kim Jong-un. Give up your nuclear weapons and build holiday resorts and casinos instead.
A rational Kim would have taken that deal. Just as a rational Gaza Palestinian leadership would themselves already have tried to turn their coastal homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East” by laying down their weapons and pursuing normalised relations with Israel. But Gaza, like North Korea, has never had a leadership that is ­remotely interested in the welfare of its people.
It’s easy to miss that Trump’s real estate developer view of the world is inherently benign.
Coastal resorts and condos are a path to jobs and improved living standards for countless developing ­nations. However, it obviously doesn’t fit into anything about the realities of life on the ground in Gaza.

The AV distraction was the same, In a shock announcement U.S. President Donald Trump proposed that the U.S. would 'take over' and redevelop the war ravaged Gaza Strip after Palestinians had been permanently resettled to neighbouring Arab nations.

And then the unrevised bromancer scurried on ...

Much outrage is being directed at the idea of the forcible relocation of 1.8 million Palestinians out of Gaza. If that’s what Trump meant, it’s obviously unacceptable. But he never actually spoke of forced ­relocation.

If, on the other hand, Trump has in mind allowing Gazans who want to leave and migrate to nearby Arab-speaking, Muslim majority countries to do so, that’s pretty interesting.

It’s actually more coherent than the Albanese government’s previous approach of bringing thousands of Gazans to live in Australia while at a policy level ­opposing the relocation of any of the Gazan population.

Throughout post-World War II history, it has often been the case that populations of refugees who could easily be resettled are maintained in artificial refugee status for decades, for generations, in order to confer a dubious political legitimacy on the people who ­notionally represent them.

That’s certainly been the case with Palestinians.

A snap suggested why the tangerine tyrant's vision of a Riviera needed his masterly touch, the same that transformed Atlantic City into a series of bankruptcies, Rubble in Gaza City on Tuesday. Picture: AP

Oh the bro was finding a lot of truth and courage in this ethnic cleansing ...

But despite the madness of the specific notion of the US taking control of Gaza, it would be the height of folly to dismiss out of hand everything Trump said standing next to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

As usual, mixed with the madness was a lot of truth and courage in some of the things he said.

It is a hopeless cycle that the extremist leaders of Hamas viciously attack Israel, forcing it into a war, which leads to the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. This is then rebuilt with European, American and sometimes Arab money. Hamas steals a lot of the aid to manufacture weapons and tunnels and a few short years later attacks Israel again, knowing, and even desiring, that Israel will wage war once more. And the whole cycle is just repeated endlessly.

Yet the seemingly endless repetition of that cycle is the sum total of the liberal international community orthodox policy responses to Gaza.

On the second go, the reptiles interrupted the bro with the same AV distraction that had been deployed to interrupt Cam, featuring the bromancer blathering away. No need to repeat the blathering tag, just a visual reminder will do ...

The bro kept on the same way in both outings:

Trump wants peace for Israel, a better future for Palestinians, more Arab involvement in the ­solutions to come. Those are good sentiments to start with. And whatever his policy ideas are, they cannot be more sterile and ­ineffective than everything that has gone before.

Every single one of Trump’s deals starts with a good deal of bluster and then moves to something more constructive.

Is this the ideal way for foreign affairs to be conducted? Of course not. Does it sometimes produce ­results? Yes it does. The lesson: don’t ignore Trump’s bluster, and don’t think the bluster is the sum total of the story.

There were other intensely important decisions announced in the Trump/Netanyahu joint press conference. Trump has withdrawn the US from the UN Human Rights Council. That’s a big and good decision. That UN body is an infamous travesty.

So the country that supplied the bombs that devastated Gaza has joined with the country that dropped the bombs that devastated Gaza, in a genocidal way, and the bromancer deflects by talking about a UN body being an infamous travesty. 

There's only one infamous travesty here, and that's the bromancer proclaiming himself an Xian, unless he happens to be at one with the genocidal old testament god who allegedly wiped all life off the earth save that which could fit on a rather small ark, thereby (allegedly) dooming humanity and all creatures to incestuous inbreeding for all eternity.

But the pond digresses and the reptiles decided to dress in a snap showing why Palestinians needed to leave Gaza, A Palestinian woman pulls a trolley with water cans in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

It's amazing how the stubborn wretches have hung in so long, but no doubt promise of life in a Trumpian resort will tempt them.

Hearken to the dreaming:

"It's not a place where people want to live. They have no alternative but to go back. If we gave them an alternative of living in a beautiful, open place with some nice quarters there, nice housing of sorts, and we have the money in the Middle East," he said.

"I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people. I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable," he said.

It was a nicely gilded lily of hope and charity, but for some perverse reason, the pond was reminded of what the Nazis used to tell the Jews to get them on the trains:

People who were deported were told they were being relocated to the East (meaning Poland and similar places), where they would work. When people had specific concerns, for example, a man saying, “My wife cannot do manual labor,” they were told suitable work would be found, and there are plenty of letters and journals reflecting that people assumed statements like that meant they would be required to do domestic work, or perhaps other kinds of work, like sewing.

Trust the Nazis not to match King Donald's level of lying. They went the full yards, with the best known example the 1944 Theresienstadt.

Just the thing. Surely we need a similar epic to pitch Gaza as the new Riviera ...

The bro didn't worry about any of that and ended on both occasions with a surge of Trumphalism:

Trump has ended all funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, the compromised UN body which has been an impediment to the political evolution in the Palestinian territories.

Above all, Trump declared that he will not under any circumstances allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And he has resupplied ­Israel with the most powerful of weapons.

Netanyahu was surely right when he declared that Trump is the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.

All of this change and ferment is very hard to navigate on day one. Anthony Albanese was right to avoid any detailed comment on the matter.

The Middle East was an extraordinary success story of Trump’s first presidency, especially the four normalisation agreements of the Abraham Accords. All this presidential energy is certainly going to have an effect on the Middle East. It won’t lead to Gaza becoming an American territory. But it could at least possibly lead to something better than exists now.

Yes there's nothing like a little lack of aid and children dying and disease and hunger and ethnic cleansing to help in the political evolution in the Palestinian territories. Or so your fundie Xian thinks ...

Phew, after those forensics, the pond needs a breather, and the infallible Pope hits the spot:

Oh dear, he mentioned ethnic cleansing, but it really is gentrification, isn't it, and the need to have gold plating on your showers, provided you can make the water work ...

That rather spoils the mood, but it did nothing to tamp down the excitement experience by Jennings of the fifth form, in Gaza takeover? It’s worth a try, because nothing else is working, The left in Australia will hate Trump’s burst of unlikely Middle East creativity - and the Israel-Hamas ceasefire may soon collapse.

Suddenly ethnic cleansing had been magically transformed a thought bubble of the first water, a burst of unlikely Middle East creativity ... with an opening snap of the two geniuses at work, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump chat in the Oval Office of the White House. Picture: AFP

Jennings began with what Magnus Carlsen might call the Jong-un move, though strangely it didn't stop a slaughter of pawns in the Ukraine...

President Trump’s instinct to disrupt established pathways and his lack of deep engagement in international affairs is what allows the idea that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too”.

In his first term, Trump stunned the foreign policy establishment by deciding to meet personally with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

He wanted to persuade Kim to abandon the North’s advanced nuclear weapons program by offering investment to bring the country’s economy up to par with Seoul.

Flying to Singapore for the March 2018 summit, Trump put aside his briefing papers.

He would wing it with Kim by showing a four-minute action-movie style trailer the President had the White House make.

The video is online and worth watching. The voiceover says it’s time to “change the course” of history, there are moments “when only a few are called on to make a difference”.

“Destiny pictures presents: A story of opportunity. A new story. A new beginning. One of peace. Two men, two leaders, one destiny.”

It didn’t work.

Oh, it didn't work, but it is inspirational, surely what's needed, as the pond keeps insisting, is a nice promo video showing off that vision of a new Riviera. 

Instead the reptiles settled for a snap of the two geniuses at work, North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un with US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June 2018. Picture: AFP

Jennings of the fifth form extracted a lesson. If Jong-un had made the proper move, he could have had a grand Trump Tower in Pyongyang, and some excellent casinos (though it is possible to go bankrupt operating a casino, just ask King Donald 1):

Given a choice between disarmed peace and prosperity or nuclear weapons and poverty, Kim Jong-un took the path that assured he remained in control.

Hamas would make the same choice in Gaza. The idea of turning the Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is anathema to everything the terror group stands for, including the idea that Gazans might be released from the living hell of Hamas control by being allowed to pick up their lives in a different location.

Trump’s idea has about as much chance as a snowball in Khan Younis, but the President should be admired for wanting to break the cycle of history that is endlessly delivering conflict for Palestinians.

The most likely point of failure for Trump’s idea is the Hamas and Fatah leadership and the left international consensus supporting them, including the United Nations. These groups are frankly not interested in Palestinians as individuals.

Had such an interest existed, the idea of resettling Palestinians into a viable state outside of Gaza and the West Bank might have been tried decades ago.

After World War II, tens of millions of people, most prominently the Jews, were relocated from existing homes to other locations. This movement of millions of refugees continues today.

It is only the Palestinians who are burdened by an ideology – driven by those who will never live in Gaza – which demands that they, their children and grandchildren will forever be refugees and that displacing Jews in Israel is the only solution to their plight.

Some Arab countries pay lip service to that ideology – mostly to escape any sense of obligation that they might offer space for a Palestinian homeland.

The reptiles recycled a snap to show the urgent need for a real estate developer to be given a go, The idea of turning the Gaza Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is anathema to everything Hamas stands for. Picture: AP

What a splendid vision it was, and despite King Donald reading from notes, and having sequestered with his other genius before turning up to announce his vision, Benji was apparently caught on the hop, at least according to students struggling in the fifth form to keep up...

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu looked like a man who couldn’t believe what he was hearing at the same time as he said that Trump’s vision “of a different future” was something the President was “taking to a much higher level”. It should at least be explored as a possibility.
Whether any of this is deliverable depends on how deeply Trump wants to invest money and effort into his plan. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are key. They need to agree an outcome that accommodates a Palestinian political entity somewhere.
That won’t happen without many billions of US dollars changing hands. But look at the trillion-dollar costs of American wars in the Middle East. Perhaps there is a deal to shape. Note that on February 4, Trump signed a national security presidential memorandum to
­impose “Maximum Pressure on the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Denying Iran All Paths to a Nuclear Weapon, and Countering Iran’s Malign ­Influence”.
For a normal US administration that would be major global news. For Trump it has been hidden behind the Gaza gambit. Perhaps the memorandum shows a wider plan developing for a new security order in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab world may see a new approach to Gaza as worth entertaining in return for a permanently cowed Iran. An ­important way to shape Iran’s ­behaviour might be to build a ­deterring, large scale US military presence in Gaza.
Already there are Republicans saying they would rather the money was spent at home. A key challenge for Trump will be to persuade Americans that the best way to avoid losing lives and money in the Middle East is for the US to strengthen its military presence there.
The biggest losers are Hamas and those who want to keep Palestinians suffering in pursuit of the unobtainable goal of statehood “from the river to the sea”. And we have to acknowledge that many Palestinians clearly share that Islamist ideology.
That means the left in Australia will hate Trump’s burst of unlikely Middle East creativity.
It means also that the Israel-Hamas ceasefire may soon collapse.
Hamas will try to rally its international backers with more violence.

It was excellent stuff, blaming all the dropkick losers for not embracing the vision, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should have the country prepared for more attempts at domestic terrorism. Picture: NewsWire /Martin Ollman

Never mind that the tangerine tyrant has kicked a hornet's nest, while seeking to dislodge the hornet's nest and set it up in Egypt or Jordan - strangely nobody seems to mention Lebanon these days ...

In Australia, that means more protests and more anti-Jewish hatred.

The “progressive” left will be outraged, in most cases I suspect without really knowing why – are they defending the right for a two-state solution never to ­materialise?

In reality, that’s a core Hamas goal – they want a one-state solution, their state.

We should gear for more attempts at domestic terrorism. It’s plain to see this is coming.

Anthony Albanese has one last chance to get ahead of this risk by upping the counter-terrorism threat level and preparing our ­response capabilities.

Peter Jennings is director, Strategic Analysis Australia.

But surely the two state solution is intact. It's just that Israel and the USA are the two states ...

Phew, after that, the pond needs another snap of the vision ... and one came thanks to the immortal Rowe ...

Okay, the pond has been more than fair, and so to briefly mention what the reptiles, in their excitement, almost forgot. 

All the distractions that people needed to be distracted from ...

The first might be summarised in a Peter Baker tweet ...

In short, King Donald 1 and Uncle Leon are conspiring to destroy US aid, and US soft power, and leave the field to China...

At the same time as King Donald purports to be an imperial coloniser of the first water, ready to do a Teddy Roosevelt with his troops in a foreign adventure, he was in reality making sure that isolationism and retreat from the world - except perhaps from the AfD and Uncle Leon's yearning for a white nationalist apartheid South Africa - remained the order of the day ...

The pond gets its information and politics from US comics and The Daily Show provided this other list of distractions from which mug punters in the US needed distracting...

The show used them as a running gag to show the legal system trying to play catch up with the law, and of course it never caught up ...

There were many other distractions which required distraction - the Waffle House upping the price of eggs, and everybody enjoying John Kennedy waffling on about how he preferred eggs to sex, and then there was a 100k of eggs stolen ...and then there were victims of Karma ...

Oh yes, it's speaking now...

Others in the FAFO included Venezuelans in Florida gripped with the fear, and Hispanics full of regret, while the FBI took legal action as 5-6k of their kind contemplated being given the boot, and so on and so forth, but the one that captivated the pond came via this bsky post ... with the original containing the LinkedIn CV ...

"Bigballs"!! 

Stand proud,  "Bigballs", give us the full nerd geek tech bro look ...

Here the pond must make a confession. 

Way back when, the pond subscribed to Wired, and still has a collection of ancient magazines which really should be in an archive or the local dump. 

The pond switched off when as it turned into a moribund world of inbred tech bro, but suddenly, thanks to Uncle Leon, tech bros are all the rage, and Wired became relevant again...

Everybody, including the post above, was quoting The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover, Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure.

"Bigballs was featured:

...Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.
Both Bobba and Coristine are listed in internal OPM records reviewed by WIRED as “experts” at OPM, reporting directly to Amanda Scales, its new chief of staff. Scales previously worked on talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, and as part of Uber’s talent acquisition team, per LinkedIn. Employees at GSA tell WIRED that Coristine has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs. WIRED previously reported that Coristine was added to a call with GSA staff members using a nongovernment Gmail address. Employees were not given an explanation as to who he was or why he was on the calls.

There's a lot more in that about the tech nerd geek bros that everybody was quoting, but they were also quoting WIRED's A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System, The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.

A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.

It was great stuff, oligarchian, dystopian, Orwellian, a billionaire white nationalist intent on destroying the government of the USA from within, a worm eating at the brain, until all sense and sensibility vanished, and with the full consent of King Donald I and a spineless GOP-led Congress full of fawning butt kissers intent on forgetting their constitutional powers...

There were so many distractions, and the pond's head was spinning and MSNBC was in a frenzy, and nobody could keep up, what with all the confusion and chaos, and so the Democrats sent out Chuck Schumer to send everybody to sleep and create fun for late night comics. 

Politico tried to write one up ... Science funding agency threatened with mass layoffs, National Science Foundation staff heard the plans at a meeting Tuesday.

But it was just one of many, and who knows what will happen.

All that matters is that chaos and confusion abounded, and will keep on abounding, especially as medical science was already on its last legs, what with RFK Jr. slouching towards Washington, and then there was Tulsi waiting in the wings and ready to do Vlad the Impaler's bidding - such a good chum - and Kash standing by with his enemies list, ready to cleanse the FBI ...

And we're standing by, strategies in place to cope with the new world order ...

As science was mentioned, the pond was inclined to go on another jag, what with having been trolled by a perfect distraction, which provided the perfect excuse to scout out the distractions ...

At least these stand a fair chance of not being wiped from the full to overflowing intertubes by the end of the week... already a feature, not a bug, in the new regime.

The Graudian is always ready with a supply of gloom ...Temperatures at north pole 20C above average and beyond ice melting point, Scientists say unusually mild temperatures linked to low-pressure system over Iceland directing strong flow of warm air towards north pole

Or ... Greenland ice sheet cracking more rapidly than ever, study shows, Crevasses increasing in size and depth in response to climate breakdown, Durham University researchers find

Or ...Climate change target of 2C is ‘dead’, says renowned climate scientist, Prof James Hansen says pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, though other scientists disagree.

Whatever, there's never been a better time than now to build a first class hotel right on the beach. Is he right, or is he right?

Make sure you join Cameron, the bromancer and Jennings in the fifth form in making an early booking ... and let's hope it's not like some New York buildings...The Leaning Tower of New York, How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.