Has Donald Trump turned tasteless AI Gaza video into stroke of genius? Critics are raging but it’s raised valid point
THE Israeli jokers who created the soft-focus, AI-generated “marketing” video for “Trump Gaza” intended it as a piece of biting satire, drawing its source material from the US president’s famed ego.
It imagines the bombed-out Gaza strip reborn as a capitalist paradise, complete with a tall gilded statue of Trump himself.
Elsewhere, a child can be seen holding a gold-painted balloon in the shape of the president’s head.
Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are even shown sipping cocktails on the beach while the streets brim with Teslas as Elon Musk throws fistfuls of money to passers-by.
Some see it as ridiculing Trump, depicted as he is in a preposterous cartoon-ish fashion.
But it is hard to take the mickey out of a man with an ego the size of Trump’s.
Rather than let the world chortle at him, he himself posted the video on his Truth Social account – effectively owning it and making his critics splutter with rage.
Speaking on the Today programme the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet could hardly contain her sense of horror.
But it is possible to see strategy as well as vanity in what Trump has done.
While the vision created by the video is of course tasteless and over-the-top it has succeeded in making the whole world stop to think for a moment and wonder what Gaza could be like had it not been impoverished under Hamas control.
The suggestion that Trump made in a press conference with Netanyahu earlier this month – that the US would take over Gaza, relocate its population to other Arab countries and then redevelop it as a wealthy enclave — is, of course, unacceptable.
It would constitute ethnic-cleansing.
It was pure Trump, grabbing attention to himself by making an outrageous proposal.
But that, combined with the AI video, should be making us imagine how Gazans might rebuild their home were they to be freed from the yoke of rule by fanatics.
What if Gaza had an enterprising leadership which pursued economic betterment rather than a military junta preoccupied with trying to drive its neighbour, Israel, into the sea?
At 25 miles long, Gaza isn’t large but then neither are Monaco, Singapore, Dubai and other small enclaves which have made themselves fantastically rich by attracting wealthy individuals and corporations to invest in them.
Like the others named above, Gaza has an enviable location and climate.
In better hands, investors would flock there.
It is all perhaps too much to hope that Gazans will turn away from Hamas and turn their land into a place of wealth and hope.
But this satirical video has inadvertently made the point of what could be possible.