From the Globe and Mail: “Trump says he wants U.S. to redevelop, take ownership of Gaza Strip after Palestinians are resettled elsewhere”
“President Donald Trump on Tuesday (Feb 4 2025) suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area.
Trump’s brazen proposal appears certain to roil the next stage of talks meant to extend the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
The provocative comments came as talks are ramping up this week with the promise of surging humanitarian aid and reconstruction supplies to help the people of Gaza recover after more than 15 months of devastating conflict. Now Trump wants to push roughly 1.8 million people to leave the land they have called home and claim it for the U.S., perhaps with American troops.”…
trump’s serious! He caved when Canadians and Mexicans pushed back! (Well it wasn’t our pushing back that made him cave, it was the stock market fall early in the morning on Monday that did it, and his cronies reaction to what would have turned into a rout, but anyway…).
He doesn’t, in god’s name, expect the Palestinians to vacate meekly! He’s going to have to slaughter every last one of them! I know that’s what the idiot would really like to do, then give the land to the goddamn Israeli settlers, that’s what he’d really like to do.
I’m sure every single young Palestinian will fight to the death over this lunacy.
Please someone with sense – listen – it’s time to lock trump up!
A local comentator yesterday made an interesting assertion – she didn’t think anything Trudeau or Sheinbaum had to say to trump made the difference. trump is claiming a win for the US. Yes, both Canada and Mexico agreed to strengthen the borders with increased policing but those were actions already being undertaken, and likely desirable. No, she believes the pushback against the 25% tariffs came from a few significant close trump confidants who screamed loudly when both Canada and Mexico revealed their retaliatory tariffs and some personal businesses (like Tesla and Starlink) were going to be hurt! (The early morning big drop in both US and Canadian stock markets was an indication of what would come if the tariffs were actually levied.)(A good explanation by Matt Stoller.)
OK, so the tariffs have been shelved for the next 30 days. Where does that leave us? Stuck with the same “cat and mouse” game, more musings about the “51 state”, questions about what will happen in a month answered with a cryptic “Watch.” We’re stuck in limbo for a month.
Yesterday Canadians, (Mexicans, too, I’m guessing) began boycotting “produced in US” products. My grocery shopping on Sunday took me 20 minutes longer because I read every label and put back anything connected with the US. I wasn’t shopping yesterday but I know when I go to any local store in the next day or two I’ll find Canadian products marked with shelf labels or small Canadian flag stickers to make my shopping Canadian easier! I must check whether any such labelling will happen online – I have to look for it. I have to make the same effort to buy Canadian when shopping online!
The thing is, we Canadians need to keep that up, not just for a week. Not just for a month. We need to make buying Canadian a priority going forward. Our politicians need to keep this conversation going.
In part that will happen because there’s an election in Ontario shortly, and the Liberal Party of Canada is in the midst of a leadership race where these threats made by trump will continue to be a major issue. When parliament resumes in March, I expect the government to fall to be followed by a national general election where our vulnerability to trump’s whims will be front and centre.
While PP (Poilievre) has managed to take a “tough” stance on Canadian retaliation to the stupid tariffs, he can’t resist lying about our energy exports, he can’t stop himself from belittling anything the Liberal government puts forward. His “Canada First” is tinged with a kind of bombast that reveals the posturing he’s addicted to. I have a very close friend, a staunch Conservative, who keeps telling me PP is “a smart politician”. I can’t see it. Forced into defending Canada, he’s still singing his one song – he can’t bring himself to stand as a leader of a signifiant resistance to a US takeover. He’s certainly not persuading me to vote for him. I wonder how many other Canadians are evaluating the situation similarly.
The next thirty days are important. I have decided to stop worrying about the impending tariffs, not because they’ve been set aside, but because I refused to live with the uncertainty. I do believe as March 3/4 draws nearer the nonsense from south of the border will reappear, with new unmeetable demands and both Canada and Mexico will scramble once more to strategize ways to push back.
In the meantime every Canadian needs to be creative about finding small ways to strengthen our sovereignty! It’s not enough to refuse to buy US today. We need to keep it up going forward and for the foreseeable future! It’s part of the “playing offence” that Jean Chretién was advocating!
I do think Canadians – a good number of us, at least, understand that the tariffs are about submission and nothing to do with US national security. It’s sheer bullying with all the hallmarks of bulling – unpredictability, impossible/inexplicable/changing demands which cannot be met, taunting, and on and on. We’re organizing, here, too – I thought it would be against Poilievre (our mini-trump), but turns out, it’s against trump himself! Even Poilievre is on board with this resistance with full out support for retaliatory tariffs and other withholding of necessary commodities to the US! I also think a good number of Canadians understand this may be for the long haul, at least until the pain is great in enough in the US for people to start marching against Washington screaming in rage against the insanity of it all.
Robert Reich offers a very clear synopsis of the madness of what’s going on both with regard to tariffs, but also about the coup that’s taking place in the US largely without public awareness!
A friend commented this morning: One wonders if this moment is our “1938”?
I replied:
“It’s 6:30am. I can’t fall back to sleep. I’ve been thinking the very same thing! Yesterday it was Columbia! On Feb. 1 it will be Canada and Mexico. The militia are now armed and active and there’s no one who will stop them wreaking havoc against the “enemies”. The courts are a joke. There are people who see what’s coming, but they are powerless to stop it. The moment for that has come and gone. And then there’s the tech panic over China’s latest AI announcement. And out of control AI. This time it’s all out economic warfare and who knows what else! And it’s all happening so fast that nobody can see it all, no time to react, and no way to run from it or toward it. There’s so much disruption you can’t get a handle on it. We will all need to make the personal decision to go along or to resist and resistance will need to be creative. Yes, I do think this is our 1938 moment!”
Last night I watched “Resistance: They Fought Back” on PBS – a documentary about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. It premiered last night – International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.“
That’s partly why I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Since the day trump was elected I’ve been uneasy. OK, now people will get what they voted for, I said to myself. It wasn’t going to be pretty; he’d telegraphed his plans openly with Project 2025. I wasn’t prepared for how fast everything would unravel. In a single week it’s become clear how trump’s agenda will unfold.
The best example of what’s coming is what happened to Columbia yesterday/day before – Seth Abramson gives the most succinct description of what transpired: https://sethabramson.substack.com/cp/155917891. trump sent deportees to Columbia without any prior consultation with Columbia, and he used a military plane to shuttle them – an overt display of disrespect to Columbia. Columbia rejected the military flight (though not explicitly the deportees). trump then issued a 25% tariff on Columbian exports to US along with withdrawing diplomatic clearances. Columbia threatened retaliatory tariffs on coffee, corn, flowers. The corn got somebody’s attention – corn farmers? Columbia backed down, trump withdrew the tariffs. The outcome of all of this? The rest of the world is on notice that tariffs is the big 2×4 trump plans to wield if you don’t give him what he wants.
But capitulation can’t be the go-to response for nations under threat. Canada/Mexico have been under threat of tariffs for weeks (months). The purported reasons are illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Both countries have taken steps to improve border control to prevent people and drugs crossing into the US. However, it’s not about people and drugs; it’s about subjugation! February 1 is a few days away. I expect the tariffs will be applied on Canada/Mexico exports, anyway. Then it will be retaliatory tariffs and other restrictions imposted against the US by Canada/Mexico. And on it will go.
Back to the documentary. What do you do, what can you do, when your livelihood, your very life, is threatened. The Jews in Europe redefined “resistance” – surviving any way you could was fighting back against Nazi extermination plans. Walking to the gas chambers with dignity – they knew that was the fate they were facing – spit in the face of their Nazi exterminators. Surreptitiously holding religious services, smuggling books into the ghetto, singing, sharing what little they had, looking after one another were all actions of resistance.
What forms of resistance can nations take? We’re going to find out, I guess. It’s not going to be pretty – people aren’t at all prepared for the hardship and difficulty to be managed when nations face bullying like trump’s. They’ll rage against leaders who resist, and many will scream and push for compliance, not understanding that caving in brings more bullying!
I wasn’t alive in 1938. I have no idea how the German population understood what Hitler was proposing to do to the “enemies within” and to national neighbours. Some obviously did – they emigrated as quickly as they could. This time, there is no place to immigrate to – where would you go to be out of reach of China or Russia or the US if it comes to that?
This is a stand and be counted moment, if there ever was one. At the end of week one I’m exhausted and overwhelmed and terrified.
As Maggie Muggans said: “I don’t know what will happen tomorrow!” It’s not looking good. Start making connections, keep an eye out for people and groups that will help you stand tall and strong.
One of the invisible costs of trump being elected appeared in my email today.
I subscribe to “Your Local Epidemiologist” – a blog (on Substack) by Katelyn Jetelina an epidemiologist who writes about epidemiology in understandable ways. Her piece today is sobering!
The U.S. election this week sent shock waves through the field of public health—not just domestically, but internationally as well.
For many in public health, like me, the prospect of national leadership by individuals with an established track record of ignoring the evidence is deeply disconcerting. This has led to anxiety (and even feelings of loss and sadness). So much is unknown about the future of this field—from policies like routine vaccinations, to the impact of falsehoods moving mainstream, to the resources available to hold up an “invisible shield” for the public’s health.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that we are entering a new world.
Public Health is one of those government functions that runs in the background. It provides what epidemiologists call “The Invisible Shield“. But public health, today, is increasingly under siege, underfunded, fighting hard to keep the public healthy in an environment of conspiracy theories, crackpot science, and a vaccine denier about to assume the responsibility for keeping the American public healthy!
Wanna bet there will be significant cuts to funding for the CDC? What about vaccine research (not just ongoing for COVID-19, but for flu, measles, RSV, all those regular viruses that come around year after year?). Forget about regular immunization for kids to attend school – that will become a thing of the past, I’m sure. Can you not anticipate how the health of the nation will fare?
Public health also oversees water quality, food safety, and on and on. Here’s a list from the American Public Health Association:
Every day, public health people are working – mostly behind the scenes – to prevent hazards and keep people healthy. For example, public health is responsible for:
Tracking disease outbreaks and vaccinating communities to avoid the spread of disease.
Setting safety standards to protect workers.
Developing school nutrition programs to ensure kids have access to healthy food.
Advocating for laws to keep people safe, including smoke-free indoor air and seatbelts.
Working to prevent gun violence.
Addressing the impact of climate change on our health.
All pretty important functions. All likely about to be curtailed to some extent or other.
I can’t imagine the exasperation, frustration, outright rage of public health officials who know what the impact of cutting public health funding and departments is going to have on public health!
And this is just a single invisible cost. I anticipate there will be so many others.
Let’s hope we don’t turn on our public health workforce here in Canada!
The substance of the piece comes about half-way through:
On it is Mr. Trump’s promise to impose tariffs on everything that enters the U.S., apparently from anywhere in the world, to pay for a wide variety of programs. He has vowed to “demolish” the country’s intelligence agencies, which he has portrayed as part of a politicized “deep state” out to get him.
His agenda also calls for mass deportations of undocumented people — a policy that is likely to prompt a wave of asylum seekers to Canada — along with other measures to restrict immigration, both legal and illegal. And Mr. Trump said that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to members of the NATO defense alliance that do not meet their unofficial commitment to spend 2 percent of their economic output on their militaries. Canada is prominent among them.
I recommend you read the piece in its entirety! It discusses trade talks (and concessions we’ll be forced to make); the influx of refugees from the US fleeing deportation (we’re not going to be able to reject the majority of these people). It forecasts the end of our supply management system (farmers you’re going to be forced to compete with the international market!). Maybe further oil development including a pipeline to the eastern seaboard (might there be a side pipe to eastern Canada? Probably unlikely – we’ll be selling our oil with high tariffs, though!). We’re also going to have to up our defence spending “hugely” – to reach the 2% the rest of NATO spends.
There’s nothing unexpected in that list, except all of it will make the cost of living in Canada rise further. The costs of refusing to reduce our carbon footprint will also climb as we pay for larger and more frequent natural disasters… What can I say?
Have you heard Poilievre offer policy on any of these issues? No. He’s running on an anti Trudeau platform. So how do you think he’s going to tackle what’s coming at us like a speeding train?
And none of that accounts for escalating war in several hotspots around the world and any unexpected events like another pandemic (always on the horizon, and we’re still completely unprepared to deal with anything like that).
I’m not feeling upbeat today (I wasn’t yesterday, either). So I’m off to teach a class to a group of women wanting to learn how to use their serger sewing machines. I can at least make myself useful and help them get a handle on how to thread the machines and what you can do with them.
Later this afternoon, there’s a party at the Craig Gallery to celebrate my Fibre Art exhibit. That will lift my spirits a bit.
Find someone to do something for today. Be a good friend. It will make you feel better, too!
All day I’ve been feeling like someone close to me has died. It started, of course, around midnight last night when it was becoming obvious Trump would likely win the election. I went to bed, fell asleep actually, but woke around 3:00 am to go to the bathroom and on my way back to bed I took a look at 538.com on my phone and although Trump hadn’t quite got all the electoral college votes he needed he was almost there, with Clinton having no chance. I couldn’t fall asleep so I watched a movie on Netflix until 5:00 am dozed off and got up about 8:00 this morning (having made sure I wouldn’t hear the 8:00 am news with Trump making his acceptance speech) feeling such a sense of loss.
I’m Canadian – I didn’t, couldn’t, vote in the election but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a personal stake in it. Like everyone else around the world I will be personally affected by decisions this president-elect will make and there is no reason to believe he will make a 180° turn now.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
Donald Trump cannot be a winner unless he undergoes a radical change in personality and politics and becomes everything he was not in this campaign. He has to become a healer instead of a divider; a compulsive truth-teller rather than a compulsive liar; someone ready to study problems and make decisions based on evidence, not someone who just shoots from the hip; someone who tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear; and someone who appreciates that an interdependent world can thrive only on win-win relationships, not zero-sum ones.
I can only hope that he does. Because if he doesn’t, all of you who voted for him — overlooking all of his obvious flaws — because you wanted radical, disruptive change, well, you’re going to get it.
And I just got an email from a Canadian friend who got the following from a Canadian friend of hers:
This morning I feel like the loss you feel after losing a family member in an horrific accident. I guess we have. Careful reflection will be needed in the grieving process to be sure it is not instead a fatal epidemic.
Feel free to pass on the message and to join me in this time honored expression of grief.
Jane
So I’m passing on her message and while I may not wear a black armband I’m certainly feeling the loss.
Nov 6 2024
Today I’m grieving. What else is there to say?
Nov 6 2024 @ 9:15pm
I had this to say to a friend who’d written me during the day:
I have nothing new to say! I said it in 2016.
Grieving, angry at people who can’t see what’s coming at them. There’s been plenty of warning.
My friend Ruby, 92, has a friend who is also 92, born in Holland in 1932. She spent her early years living through the build up to WWII. The family owned a farm. During the fighting, they sheltered downed allied pilots. She remembers taking food to Canadian airmen hiding under the floorboards of the barn where the cattle were housed.
For the past months she’s been worrying about what she clearly sees is coming. She lived through it then. Ruby said the other night she (her friend) was in tears and feeling terror like she experienced as a small child. There are too few of these people left alive.
I was born in 1943. I don’t remember the actual war, but I remember the troops coming home, and I remember the years immediately after the war – the late 1940s and what people wrestled with and tried to understand.
There is no reasoning with those folks who voted for hatred and division. They will feel it when their health care is diminished if not eliminated. They’ll feel it when the crazy tariffs raise prices like nothing they’ve seen yet. They’ll feel it when actual people they know are deported. They’ll feel it when climate change escalates bringing more fire and flood and hurricanes and tornadoes and drought because the administration refuses to admit such a phenomenon exists. They’ll feel it when allies back away and strengthen ties among themselves isolating the US. They’ll feel it when more and more women die needlessly because of a lack of women’s health care… I could go on and on. Maybe then, they’ll take a look at what’s happened to them and understand it was the choice they made.
We’re not far from the same situation here in Canada.
The western crazies aren’t going away. Poilievre is going to puff up his chest and swagger about imitating the idiot to the south. He’ll bad mouth Trudeau and because people are tired of Trudeau they’ve stopped listening/hearing his message of building for people and will support the “hate and division” parade.
Here in the east there’s a lot of scepticism about Poilievre – a reasonable number of people may be reflecting on what’s happened today and believe we need to take another path, not the one that denies climate change and won’t plan for it. Some people will understand we (Canada) need to scale back our dependence on gas and oil and continue to accelerate green options. They’ll be concerned about housing and food costs and the limited availability of both for many. They’ll think about how to help with the medical emergency across the country. They’ll think about inflation and tariffs and maybe understand we need to disentangling our trade dependence on the US and look for allies and customers and partners elsewhere in the world. Even though most don’t listen to CBC they might think about how that organization still ties us together across the country.
At least I can hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
The election results, while a cheap and easy high to red voters in the moment, will prove to be a mirage that gives way to a grim reality that no rally speech can distract them from.
And maybe, just maybe, in the coming weeks and months when there is no Democratic president or congress to lazily blame for the fact that they can’t pay their mortgage, afford their medical bills, sustain their business, or provide for their children, they might actually be ready to stand alongside us and defeat the real enemy within.
Here’s hoping when that times comes, it won’t be too late.
MAGAs have lost, too. They just don’t know it yet.
If you listened, read, paid attention to what trump said, if you took any time to read synopses of Project 2025, you’d have realized what is going to happen over the next 100 days. They said it out loud. They shouted it from the treetops!
In my newsfeed from the New York Times this morning was this article by Carlos Lozada:
An immigrant from Peru, Lozada details the conundrums he faces daily regarding his immigrant identity. I was deeply moved by his writing. Moved enough to write a personal note to him at his email address at the NYT. (I don’t expect him to answer.)
His opinion piece evoked a memory of what Joy Kogawa had to say in Obasan, her novel written in 1981. I felt compelled to find those words again and share them with Lozada.
Here is the letter I wrote him:
Carlos,
As I was reading your piece, I can’t tell you how it resonated for me. What’s interesting is I was born here in Canada, my mother was born in Canada, my father was an immigrant as were all my grandparents; I personally feel more “immigrant” these days than at any other time in my life (I’m heading toward 82!). In today’s actively antisemitic world I feel my token “jewishness” separating me from my “christian” friends and neighbours. The conundrums you describe are present in my life in such subtle ways but they are there.
I feel my “immigrantness” weekly when I visit two young Afghan families recently come to Canada. I spend a couple of hours a week with each family chatting in English, reading children’s books in English, to help them learn a language they are working so hard to learn. I visit weekly for these young women to help them overcome the isolation a lack of common language forces upon them. These new permanent residents to Canada have become like grandchildren/great-grandchildren in the almost two years I’ve known them.
I can’t imagine their decision to leave Afghanistan and their families behind. I know the facts of their escapes through Iran, arriving in Turkey as illegals, the unimaginable luck of making contact with a Canadian citizen sponsorship group who helped bring them to Canada. I’m not an official part of that group (my youngest sister is), but through my investment of time these past two years, I have come to feel a small bit of what my grandparents must have experienced, who knew they would never see those they left behind, many of whom a few decades later would have ended in Nazi crematoria. Both sets of grandparents left Lithuania and Poland/Ukraine respectively and arrived in Canada in the early 1900s. I have no names of those left behind but I am absolutely certain many relatives did not survive WWII.
Canada, like the USA, is a nation of immigrants, yet so many people seem disconnected from that reality. In Canada, we’re a bit more aware of our crimes against the First Nations people – our halting attempts at reconciliation keep reminding us that we displaced them, disenfranchised them, demeaned them and that everybody else has immigrant origins from all over the world.
We are experiencing in Canada a growing sentiment that we don’t want more immigrants, we need to keep “these people” out – they’re taking “our” jobs (in spite of the fact that Canadians don’t want to do the jobs they are willing to do), making housing impossible to find (that’s really the fault of those of us who made development decisions fifty years ago), overrunning our healthcare system (who actually made the decisions to cut back spending on medicine, education, dentistry, social work, … forty years ago?). We need these new people for their willingness to work hard, for the cultural diversity they bring to us, for their talents and skills which enrich our community.
Shortly after it was published (1981) I read Joy Kogawa’s novel “Obasan” – there’s a passage in it that has stayed with me these 40+ years – written words of the Aunt (Obasan) who had been born in Canada but sent with her family to a Japanese internment camp during WWII:
—————————————
“The entire manuscript was sixty pages long, I skimmed over the pages till I came across a statement underlined and circled in red: I am Canadian. The circle was drawn so hard the paper was torn. Three lines of a poem were at the top of the page.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said: This is my own, my native land!
The tanned brown edges of the page crumbled like autumn leaves as I straightened out the manuscript.
The exact moment when I first felt the stirrings of identification with this country occurred when I was twelve years old, memorizing a Canto of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”
So many times after that I repeated the lines: sadly desperately, and bitterly. But at first I was proud, knowing that I belonged.
This is my own, my native land.
Then as I grew older and joined the Nisei group taking a leading part in the struggle for liberty, I waved those lines around like a banner in the wind:
This is my own, my native land.
When war struck this country, when neither pride nor belligerence nor grief had availed us anything, when we were uprooted, and scattered to the four winds, I clung desperately to those immortal lines:
This is my own, my native land.
Later still, after our former homes had been sold over our vigorous protests, after having been re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped and restricted, I cry out the question:
Is this my own, my native land?
The answer cannot be changed. Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian.”
—————————————
Securely Canadian having been born here myself, I still feel Obasan’s struggle as somehow my own.
Your NYT piece has evoked all those same feelings about country and belonging that I found those many years ago in Kogawa’s writing,
jmn 