Rarely has a US president proposed an idea more repugnant than this Gaza plan, with its appeal to old enmities

The shock and awe continues and it only gets more shocking and more awful. These past few days, Americans have watched an unelected tech billionaire destroy large chunks of the federal government – Elon Musk bragged that he was feeding the life-saving USAid international development agency “into the wood chipper” – and yet that was not even the most outrageous event of the week.

That honour went instead to Donald Trump and his proposal to “just clean out” the Gaza Strip, by removing its people, bulldozing it and then redeveloping it as “the Riviera of the Middle East” under permanent US ownership. It was so staggering that it succeeded in dominating attention, at home and abroad, for several days rather than, as has become the norm in the less than three weeks since Trump returned to the White House, a meagre few hours before some new shocker took its place.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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