It's Thursday, February 6, 2025.

I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Well, on Tuesday night, President Trump made history once again this time by suggesting that the United States might purchase or at least

gain the use of and then develop what is known as the Gaza Strip. The president was speaking at a

joint press conference with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and immediately the

chattering class, the intellectual elites and the mainstream media went crazy.

The suggestion was that this was an entirely crazy suggestion coming from an entirely unpredictable president of the United States.

Now, in one sense, it is unpredictable.

This is something unexpected.

When it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to this kind of media event,

President Donald Trump is different than virtually every other president. I have mentioned

before that at least a part of what he does is to think out loud in a way virtually no president

before him has ever done. He thinks out loud, he suggests things, and then he intentionally provokes some

controversy. He intentionally provokes a conversation. And no doubt, over the course of the last, say,

36 hours, there's been a lot of conversation. Most of it has been entirely dismissive of what

the president had to say. And there also been some predictable patterns in terms of the response.

But before we think about that any further, let's just try to gain a bit of historical perspective.

Because most Americans watching, most people around the world watching,

really don't have any idea what we're talking about or how the dynamic has come about. And so let's

consider that history for a moment. When you're talking about Gaza, you're talking about a land

that is often referred to by the people known as the Palestinians as Palestine. And it is now

known as the Gaza Strip because it is one of two territories in which have a very

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