As a next resort: Trump’s vision for Gaza

0:28The Economist The countries are now allies, but Poland accuses Ukraine of playing down the massacre, and the row continues over where the bodies are buried.

0:41And if you've had a baby, you'll know that everyone wants to offer advice. Now all the brands are getting in on it too, with new tech, new kit, and extra special supremely exclusive$7 ,000 prams. Yes, really. Our correspondent inspects the baby business.

1:02But first... The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous, unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out. Donald Trump had been floating a vague version of this plan for a few days. Two million Palestinians would just clear out, making way for a development like just another New Jersey casino. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Well, not the people of the area.

1:46They're supposed to just go away, to be warmly welcomed in neighboring countries. Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land. He's going to need to speak to more people. As the increasingly improbable details of his plans spilled out in a press conference yesterday, it wasn't even clear how much he had spoken to Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus. Mr. Netanyahu was there to talk about the next stages of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. But watch the press conference. He was seemingly suddenly on the back foot.

2:25He has a different idea, and I think it's worth paying attention to this. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Often the way with Mr. Trump's musings. But from Mr. Netanyahu's perspective, this one may be throwing him a lifeline. To be honest, most people listening, whether it's us as journalists and certainly politicians and leaders here in the region, didn't take it very seriously. There was a letter from five Arab foreign ministers rejecting the idea. Anshul Pfeffer is our Jerusalem correspondent. But the details he brought up were simply staggering. Nobody had seen that coming. And it sounds like Trump has a whole plan of how to transform Gaza into what he called the Riviera of the Middle East and open it up to the peoples of the world.

3:13So for a start, let's go through some of those details that came out of the blue yesterday. What is he proposing here? So one of the biggest surprises was when Trump suggested that Americans would go in, he didn't actually use the words boots and the ground, but that seemed to be what he was referring to, and take over this massive construction project of clearing out the rubble and unexploded ordnance from this area of over 300 square kilometers. He was quite blunt that other countries would have to take in the Palestinians living currently in Gaza. And then he started rationalizing about these incredible opportunities to make Gaza this pearl on the meds.

3:53And for the sake of taking something unserious seriously for a moment, I mean, how plausible is any of this? Well, let's talk first of all about the implications of removing, and everyone's saying voluntarily, but remove two million people just like that. Quite frankly, that's ethnic cleansing. It's wrong, and I don't think any country should really be considering such a thing. And then there's the question of, okay, where will these people go? So Egypt, which is adjacent to Gaza, has already said very clearly that they won't take in two million Palestinians. Other countries which were mentioned by Trump, Jordan and Syria, have said the same.

4:31So even if you are going to take two million people out, where are they going to go? I mean, it doesn't look like America is currently accepting immigrants from the Middle East for sure. Is America really going to send forces into Gaza now and have some kind of Somalia scenario? I mean, this is everything that Trump has said he wouldn't do in his term. And certainly most of the people around him, J.D. Vance, the vice president, they've all been very adamant at not extending America's footprint in this way. It doesn't seem very feasible, not on a moral and not on a practical level. And Mr. Netanyahu was in town to talk, at least in large part, about the progression of the ceasefire agreement.

5:10This has been thrown on the back foot. Are these things connected in any way? Well, Trump was asked about the ceasefire, about the next stages of the ceasefire. We're still just in the middle of the six-week first stage. And he seemed quite adamant that the ceasefire should continue. But let's remember the ceasefire includes a third stage after an Israeli withdrawal where the signs of different players in the region are supposed to discuss the reconstruction of Gaza. This seems to be the Trump plan for that. He's thrown it out there and we'll have to see what the different players have to say.

5:42it's important to note that Netanyahu himself didn't respond to any of these details in his prepared remarks, in his talking points. It wasn't there when he was asked about it. He was kind of generally positive, saying, well, this is an interesting idea. We should think about it. We should listen to it. The president has incredible vision. He's taken it up to another level, and we should consider these things. But he was very careful not in any way to link himself to this plan, which I thought was quite interesting. Well, quite, because the ceasefire agreement is somewhat politically sticky for Mr.

6:16Netanyahu at home, right? He's losing the far right parts of his coalition because they don't like the sound of it. I wonder how much of this might be a distraction in the way that many of Mr. Trump's pronouncements are. Well, it will certainly be a very useful distraction for Netanyahu because emptying Gaza of its population is a dream for the far right in Israel. This is something that they want to see happening. So if President of the United States has suddenly put this on the table, they won't be rushing out of Netanyahu's coalition now when this is a possibility. So actually for Netanyahu, this is a political lifeline that those ministers in his government who are threatening to bring down the government if the next stage of the ceasefire takes place, now they have an incentive for staying here, this hope that somehow the Trump plan can be realized.

7:03They're already obviously thinking of building settlements in Gaza. This is not what Mr. Trump suggested, but from their perspective, this is something that they would very much like to remain in government to see happen. So for Netanyahu, this is a good thing in the short term. It keeps his coalition afloat at least for a few more months. Well, if anything actually happens with it and if anyone takes it at face value, I mean, you're there on the ground. How's the response been so far? Well, from the far right, there's ecstasy. They see this almost as a biblical prophecy coming true. Bitzel Smotrich, one of the main far-right leaders in Netanyahu's coalition, was tweeting verses from his alms, thanking both God and President Trump for this wonderful idea.

7:45So from that part of the Israeli political spectrum, it's certainly something that they would love to see happening. I think for the rest of Israel's political establishment, there's more of a feeling of bemusement now. We've already heard some statements from the centrist parties in the opposition who are saying it's interesting, we certainly need to discuss whatever President Trump thinks, but it's more important now getting Israeli hostages out of Gaza and working out this ceasefire and working out what's going to happen next. They don't want to be seen as in any way criticizing or going against President Trump, but I think they all have a clear idea that this is not very practical.

8:21But what about outside Israel? What's the view so far from the wider Arab world? Even before yesterday's press conference, Five Arab countries put out a statement saying that they reject any idea of removing the Palestinians from Gaza. And I don't think that position is likely to change. The appearance of somehow collaborating with the uprooting of the Palestinians from Gaza is something that Arab leaders, I think, don't want to risk, whether or not they do sympathize themselves with the Palestinians. And they don't want to be the new hosts of the people of Gaza either. But I think there is also a possibility that they will see this as a bargaining ploy from Donald Trump.

9:00Trump wants a grand alliance in which the Saudis and the Israelis and other pro-Western regimes in the area join together against Iran, perhaps against China as well. This is a major part of the Trump foreign policy plans for the second term. And if he's put this already out there, and this is something they can't accept, then they will have to be more flexible on other parts of this alliance. They will have to make perhaps less demands of Israel on a possible Palestinian state. Other things that Trump wants from them that they're less eager, they may have to now accept. So I think the feeling in the region, and this is still very early, so people are just absorbing this, is that this isn't going to happen.

9:40But this will be something that they may have to show flexibility on other matters to make it go away. Angel, thanks very much for your time. Thank you for having me, Jason.

10:03Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky recently hosted a rather strange press conference with Poland's President Andrzej Duda. They began to work. There are special working groups on this issue. And I think that they stay together, work together. Working groups, ministries of culture, and now both presidents, are tied up in calming a historical feud that dates back to the Second World War. This spring, the Polish authorities want to begin exhuming bodies from mass graves in what is now Western Ukraine. The aim is to shed light on historical events that have never been properly told or commemorated.

10:42Because for today, it's very important that we will not have any questions about history. To the outsider, it may seem baffling to focus on a decades-old war that risks destabilizing a critically important alliance between the two countries. But for many Poles and some Ukrainians, the events of the seemingly distant past aren't easily forgotten or forgiven. My producer Taras and I were driving through western Ukraine this winter looking for signs of an earlier war, a war that precedes the one that Ukraine is fighting today by 80 years or so. Our correspondent Pyotr Zalewski went to try and find out why exhuming bodies is so political.

11:26We came upon a village called Visneviets, about an hour's drive from Vyth, where we met a lady named Hanna Petrivna, age 91, who helped us shed some light on what happened in one of the less known tragedies of the Second World War, a tragedy that has become the subject of a political and historical dispute between Ukraine and one of its key allies in Europe. Hala is 91 years old today. She was a little girl in 1939 when the war broke out. The Russians found a way to drag them out of their traveling fortresses. They used their cities as strongholds and made the blitz come to them down alleys. At the time, Vishnewitz was part of Eastern Poland.

12:21But with the start of the Second World War, it was the Germans who invaded Poland from the West and the Soviets who invaded from the East. And as a result, Vizhnovitz and, more broadly, the regions of Galicia and Volinya fell under Soviet occupation until 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, which is when they fell under Nazi occupation. And they remained under Nazi occupation until 1944, which is when the Soviets recaptured the area. These three successive wartime occupations, first Soviet, then German, then again Soviet, unleashed a cycle of genocidal violence. And it was over the course of the Nazi occupation that Volunia and Galicia and some outlying areas were the site of horrific massacres by the nationalist Ukrainian insurgent army, which had collaborated with Nazi Germany.

13:22It's not for naught that this region, or more broadly, Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, is collectively known as the bloodlands.

13:39So Hannah, who is Ukrainian, was born and grew up in Vyshlyvets and spent her whole life in the village. We met her at her home as she was introduced to us by her son. So I wanted to ask her, I mean, what does she remember about what happened to the Polish people? She was wearing a yellow headscarf, and her cat kept her company throughout her conversation.

14:09Hannah remembers one day in the winter of 1944, when she was 10 years old. Lories packed with dozens of Polish civilians pulled up near her home, and outside a local Polish church, Wysniewicz. Hannah says she wanted to go and see what was happening, but her mother kept her inside, saying it was too dangerous to come out.

14:36Pointing to what remains of the building, Hannah remembers the Ukrainian insurgents herded the Poles into the basement of the church, threw some hay inside, and burned them alive.

14:51What Hanna had witnessed that day was part of a much wider massacre, in which up to 100 ,000 ethnic Poles had died at the hands of the Ukrainian insurgents and Ukrainian villagers across Volodya and Galicia in 1943 and the early days of 1944. Polish resistance fighters, during reprisal attacks, killed thousands of Ukrainians, and the Polish communist government after the Second World War deported some 150 ,000 Ukrainians from eastern Poland. So Poland has long accused Ukraine of playing down the scale of the massacres and impeding the search for victims. Ukraine says the killings were part of a wider conflict with death and mass displacement on both sides.

15:44But in Ukraine and in western Ukraine in particular, Leaders of the Ukrainian insurgents, including Stepan Bader, the group's ideological leader, have become increasingly popular, especially over the past decade since Russia's annexation of Crimea and its invasion of the Donbass in 2014.

16:10On January 1st in Lviv, Bander's birthday is celebrated by crowds at the enormous monument that remains in the center of the city. A symbol, they argue, of the forebears who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviets, even if it meant a line with the Nazis. Ukrainian insurgents fought the Soviets at the end of the Second World War. They fought the Soviets even after the end of the Second World War. and they are, to some extent, a necessary symbol of resistance in a country that is facing renewed Russian aggression. In Poland, meanwhile, the Ukrainian insurgents and Bandera are seen as war criminals.

16:52Late last year, some Polish lawmakers tabled a bill that would make it illegal to glorify, quote-unquote, Ukrainian insurgents and it would in fact make any such glorification a punishable offense. The problem is that neither side seems willing to see things from the other's perspective. And there is obviously more than a grain of truth in each narrative. But awareness of what happened in Volhynia is, as Ukrainian historians themselves acknowledge, is quite low in Ukraine. And if Ukrainians back Bandera or if they view him in a positive light, it's not because of what happened in Volodya, but largely despite what happened.

17:37Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This history, meaning the Volodya massacres, the issue of the exhumations, it somehow disappeared from the agenda, which was something I think that also was not appreciated fully in the West. But as time passes, Polish support for Ukraine has been slipping. 87 % of Poles favored military aid to Ukraine in 2022. That number has now slipped to 60%. And it seems that the row over the Volodya massacres and the exhumations is partly to blame. There's some fear that elements on both sides, including Poland's far right and Polish nationalists, will seize on the issue of the exhumations and the Volhynia massacres more broadly in the run-up to presidential elections in Poland in the spring.

18:29There is even a bigger fear that Russia will use this as a propaganda tool against Ukraine, and that will also use this issue to drive the wedge between Ukraine and Poland even further. To both countries, history matters. They're never going to see eye to eye, But both sides do recognize that as long as they fight about the exhumations, as long as they argue about history, the only winning party will be Russia.

19:18What you're hearing here is an advert. It's for this trendy Dutch brand called Artie Popper. Avantika Chilcotti is our global business correspondent. There's a woman wandering around carrying her child in a baby sling. She's got the most incredible scenery behind her. There's mountains and waterfalls, and she seems to be reciting a poem in French. The lines are about flowers dancing and about autumn's melancholy.

19:49so what this brand actually produces is baby slings they're pattern baby slings and i've seen them in leopard print i've seen them in houndstooth and they cost about 420 dollars if you're a mother or a father or a soon-to-be mother or father nowadays there's all kinds of stuff you can spend on there's a dior pram for about seven thousand dollars there's an endless stream of baby tech. What I found is that new parents are spending more than ever before. Wow, a$7 ,000 pram. You'd be surprised, Rosie, people are just spending a huge amount on their children. The best data we have is on British parents, and it's from an insurer.

20:31And it found that there's been a huge jump in the amount that people spend. They're spending over£1 ,500 in preparation for the arrival of a baby. The data isn't totally up to date, but all signs are that it's going up and up. There's a research house called Mintel, and it counts just how much people spend on disposable baby products. That's things like nappies and wipes. And in America alone, that will be$10.7 billion. That's gone up from$8.5 billion five years ago. And bear in mind that the birth rate in America is actually dropping. If you think about FMCG firms, you know, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, they make almost 10 % of their revenues from baby products.

21:11So this is big business. Avantika, you don't have to spend that much money. So why has spending on baby products gone up so much? There's social pressure. So there's lots and lots of survey data saying that people feel judged when they become parents. It seems to be the one area of life where everyone still seems to think that they can pass judgment on how you're doing things. And that pressure has gone up and up. So first take demographics. People are having children later in life. The average age of a first-time mother in America is now 27.5 years old. At the turn of the millennium, that was 24.9 years old.

21:46So if you're having kids later in life, you've generally got a bit more money to spend. And the other thing is people are having fewer children. So if you're having fewer children, you are probably more willing to splash out on each child. There's a certain amount of gear you do have to get, but it sounds like this is more than that. Yes, there's two other big structural things at play here, which is the second reason why people are spending more and more is just the rise of the internet. When people had children 10, 20 years ago, you didn't have e-commerce. At all points of day and night, you can just buy something.

22:18If you are struggling to get your baby to sleep at 4am, on Amazon, a£100 baby monitor might seem like a really good idea. You have social media, which means you're constantly flooded by mummy bloggers and daddy bloggers who look very well dressed and very well rested recommending baby products to you. And the third thing, and this is I think what you're getting at Rosie, is there's just more you can spend on. Baby tech is absolutely huge. You get these cribs that are electronic and they rock so they can rock your baby to sleep. You get baby monitors that are actually a sock that they seem to keep track of your baby's heart rate, sort of oxygen levels.

22:55There's all this technology and at my hunch it's a generation of millennials and Gen Z who've seen technology solve problems from payments to ride hailing. They've got to the age where they've had children and they're coming up with tech solutions to help parents. And with all of these products in front of you as a parent, it's almost impossible not to just throw money at it when you're at a moment of panic or despair. So maybe that's fine if they want to spend that money. What's the problem with it? The trouble is not everyone, of course, can afford this. The products I'm talking about are open to the richest of the rich.

23:27And we are actually in the middle of a cost of living crisis. So what you're seeing is actually a bit of pushback to this. If you go on Mumsnet or you look at parenting magazines nowadays, there's a lot of these conversations around, hey, what do you actually need? And there were some great tips I saw. There was someone saying you will never use a baby changing table. You can just use the top of a chest of drawers. You can use your dining table. You've got people saying just wait till you've had the baby and see what you actually need. Only 64 % of people in America living with children under the age of 18 said they felt like they were financially all right in 2023.

24:01That share is going down and down. People are really struggling to make ends meet. And what you're also seeing, which I think is really interesting, is the rise of secondhand. People say secondhand baby grows are softer. They'll say, hey, look, even as you have the pressure on the wealthy to spend money, you have all of these budget options with people pushing back against that pressure and saying, hey, I can be a really good parent without spending thousands of pounds. Avantika, thank you. I shall contemplate my next purchase. Thanks for having me, Rosie.

24:45That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

24:57Thank you.

25:27you