The anti-Semitic U.N. official Francesca Albanese says Donald Trump's plan to make Gaza the "Riviera of the Middle East" is "worse than ethnic cleansing." We’ve heard a lot of that sort of rhetoric in the wake of Trump’s announcement, so we asked the eminent historian Andrew Roberts to weigh in. Nations and peoples that start and lose wars of aggression typically don’t retain sovereignty of their territory.
No, throughout history, Roberts writes, "peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both." It's not Trump's plan to "own" Gaza, then, that's strange. "It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend," according to Roberts.
Mass population transfers have been common after wars. The classic example are those of the late 1940s, when there were no fewer than 20 different groups—including the Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of the Punjab, the Crimean Tartars, the Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin Islanders, the Soviet Chechen, Ingush, and Balkars, even the Italians of Istria—who were moved to different regions. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over 800,000 Jews from Arab lands were forced out of lands that they had lived in for centuries.
All of those peoples mentioned chose to try to make the best of their new environs except one, and most eventually succeeded. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, because Hamas and its predecessors have always unquestioningly chosen the destruction of Israel and the opportunity to massacre Jews over the best interests of their own people.
If each of the 22 Arab states undertook to receive 100,000 Gazans, the Strip could be the home to the remaining 100,000, living and working on Trump’s "Riviera." The reason that can never in fact happen is the Arab states’ and the United Nations’ wholly cynical and self-interested policy since 1948 to use Palestinian refugees as a continual destabilizing force against Israel (as well as a well-grounded fear and hatred of easily the most violent population in Arabia).
As the international community yelps with indignation at Donald Trump’s remarks and their implications regarding Gazans’ sovereignty and Hamas’s right to govern there, history is on the president’s side.
Read the full piece here.
Over the past two weeks, the American public has become increasingly familiar with "woke" USAID funding for DEI initiatives abroad. But under Joe Biden's USAID chief Samantha Power, the agency didn't just fund efforts to advance equity and inclusion in Serbia. It also spearheaded a more insidious effort to undermine Israel—and dodged federal oversight efforts along the way, the Free Beacon's Adam Kredo reports.
A recent Middle East Forum report, for example, found that USAID awarded "millions of federal dollars" to "organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas," including one that oversaw a U.S.-funded "educational and community center" in the strip. The think tank's report, however, only includes spending we know about. USAID routinely fails to report its subgrantees, according to a January memo from the agency's inspector general, thus impeding efforts to vet "fraud allegations."
Agency staffers also pushed back on the modestly pro-Israel policies coming out of the State Department and White House. Power, for example, once refused to meet with Israel's ambassador unless the Jewish state reached a ceasefire with Hamas, even though the White House National Security Council had signed off on the meeting. Her agency later called on the Biden State Department to end military aid to Israel, accusing the Jewish state of deliberately blocking Gazan aid deliveries.
The anti-Israel crusade "caused internal friction across multiple administrations," current and former U.S. officials, including some who worked with USAID during Power's reign, told Kredo. The rogue nature of USAID's career staffers, meanwhile, helps explain the Trump administration's push to dismantle the agency.
"More and more money flowed to groups and organizations whose work is contrary to the interests of the United States," one official said. "How bad it got is finally coming to light and there is finally transparency."
The Aspen Institute and Atlantic Council are two of the nation's largest liberal think tanks. They're also the recipients of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts.
That's according to federal spending disclosures reviewed by our Chuck Ross, which show that the State Department, USAID, and Department of Defense have funneled nearly $50 million to the two think tanks since 2021. A $6 million State Department contract with the Aspen Institute, for example, funds an online exchange program teaching "civic engagement" and "climate change and sustainability" to students in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2021, USAID "struck a five-year, $9 million agreement with the Aspen Institute to 'promote investment in Guatemalan entrepreneurs and innovators,'" Ross reports.
The think tanks don't exactly need the money. The Atlantic Council received 12 donations of at least $1 million each from Meta, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Arab Emirates in 2023, its donor list shows. That same year, the Aspen Institute disclosed donations of at least $1 million from 38 sources, including Walmart, Google, and the Ford Foundation.
"Taxpayer support for two deep-pocketed institutions could draw fresh scrutiny as the Trump administration—largely through the Department of Government Efficiency, the government unit led by Elon Musk—is scouring the federal government’s books for signs of fraud and wasteful spending," writes Ross. "Like many Beltway think tanks, the Aspen Institute and Atlantic Council have been highly critical of Trump's policies, both domestic and foreign."
Away from the Beacon:
- Delaware's Chris Coons defended the federal government's funding of the Iraq version of Sesame Street, saying it "helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS extremism and terrorism." How's that going?
- On Friday, Illinois's Wheaton College issued a statement congratulating alumnus Russ Vought for his confirmation as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. By Saturday, it had retracted that statement, saying the "political situation surrounding the appointment led to a significant concern expressed online." That’s the sort of backbone and principle we expect from academics!
- Fifty-three percent of voters approve of Donald Trump's performance as president, 70 percent of them say Trump is doing "what he promised" on the campaign trail, and 59 percent approve his deportation plans, according to a new CBS poll that is sure to discourage Democrats.