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by Jasim Al-Azzawi

Mr Trump,

You will meet Benjamin Netanyahu. Cameras will flash. Words will be exchanged in polished rooms, polished suits, polished lies. You will talk about “security,” “alliances,” “regional stability,” and all the hollow, sterile phrases that sanitize horror and suffocate truth.

But I want to talk to you about tents.

Not metaphorical tents. Not symbolic tents. Not poetic tents. Real tents. Fabric huts. Plastic roofs. Human shelters. The kind of tents that hang between life and death.

In Gaza, rain does not fall. It assaults. It slashes. It invades. It turns the ground into a grave of mud and disease. Children are sleeping in rags under tarps shredded by storms. Infants wake screaming, not from nightmares, but because their bodies are soaked in sewage. Mothers hold babies wrapped in blankets sodden with foul water and human waste. They whisper prayers into the night air that smells of death. Wind tears at canvas walls while hunger gnaws at their bones.

And the world shrugs.

We were told Palestinian families would receive tents and caravans with every agreement, every deal, every negotiation Israel struck with Hamas. Promised. Documented. Repeated. Lied about.

Those caravans are there. They exist. They stand mere kilometers away — pristine, dry, safe — imprisoned by checkpoints and political indifference. They are not being delivered because the suffering of Palestinians has become a bargaining chip. A tool. A punishment.

And while two million human beings live in filth, drowning in misery, freezing in cruel winter wind, you are planning to build a ballroom. Marble floors. Crystal chandeliers. Velvet drapes. A palace to ego while children cough blood in swamp water.

America — the nation that once claimed to be a moral compass — now walks willingly into contradiction so obscene it cannot stand upright.

READ: Netanyahu ‘Wanted’ posters plastered across London

Has the United States truly fallen this low? Has its heart calcified past redemption?
Has the “shining city on a hill” dimmed into a glittering tomb?

Mr Trump, Netanyahu promised 600 aid trucks per day. Not as generosity. As a necessity. As a minimum survival. Some days now, there are barely 120 trucks — if Israel allows them at all. Hunger swells. Hospitals collapse. Food rots behind borders while stomachs collapse inward.

You will sit across from Netanyahu. You will look him in the eye.

Will you speak? Or will you bow?

Are you afraid of angering him? To risk access? To disturb the sacrosanct theater of political allegiance? Is the relationship that fragile? Is your courage that conditional? Or is Palestinian suffering simply beneath the dignity of conversation?

History will remember the lie that civilization tells itself: that this is complicated. It is not. It is brutal. It is deliberate. It is man-made.

Do you know what the Greeks once called Arab desert tribes? Saracens — people of the tents.

Look at Gaza now. Zionism has not merely dispossessed Palestinians. It has hurled them two thousand years back into history, stripped them of walls, roofs, identity, security, dignity — and left them to rot in filth that only war and cowardice can create.

But do not romanticize these tents. These are not proud desert shelters. These tents are soaked in excrement. Their beds drip with disease. Their blankets stink of rot. This is not poverty.This is engineered humiliation. This is political cruelty masquerading as policy.

And so I ask you, not as a partisan, not as a critic, but as a man addressing another man whose decisions will echo long after his voice fades:

What are you going to do, Mr Trump?

READ: Israeli prime minister departs for US to meet Trump

You live in gilded spaces — towers, mansions, palaces of marble and polished gold. Your life is wrapped in velvet. Gaza is wrapped in sores. And yet, the lives trapped in those tents are no less human than the ones who dine in your ballrooms.

They are pleading for one million tents and 600 caravans. Not tomorrow. Not next month. Now. Their children do not have the luxury of political delay. Their lungs are drowning. Their bones are thinning. Their hope is cracking.

Will you order those caravans through? Will you pressure Netanyahu to open the gates? Will you let those shelters roll forward instead of rotting behind barriers of arrogance and calculation?

Or will you remain silent and let winter finish the work that bombs began?

You have been handed a moment history rarely grants: the power to choose compassion over alliance, humanity over political comfort, moral action over moral collapse.

Redeem something. Redeem anything. Redeem at least one shred of the idea that America can still mean something beyond brute power and selective grief.

Do not tell the world America is strong. Show it is capable of mercy. Do not boast of greatness.
Demonstrate decency.

Let the convoys through. Let the tents rise. Let children sleep dry for once. Let the name “American” mean rescue rather than ruin.

The Palestinians have screamed for decades into a deafening world. Today they scream again:

We need shelter. We need dignity. We need life.

History is watching, Mr. Trump. So are the dead.

OPINION: America’s double game with international justice: When power poses as principle

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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