‘The Golden Girls’ joked about ‘giving the Palestinians Greenland’ — 4 decades before Trump’s gambits
“With the proper clothes, they’ll be fine,” Betty White’s character joked on the episode “Empty Nests”
Actresses (L-R) Rue Mclanahan, Betty White, and Bea Arthur pose for a portrait on the set of the Golden Girls circa 1987, Los Angeles. (Mark Sennet/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Is Donald Trump a fan of “The Golden Girls”? The famously progressive woman-of-a-certain-age sitcom pilloried him in 1992, so probably not.
But it seems like there may have been a chance he was watching. The show contained a bit in 1987 about letting the Palestinians move to Greenland — foreshadowing two of Trump’s least expected and boldest gambits in his second term as president.
In the two weeks since Trump took office, he first sent foreign policy shock waves by announcing an intention to acquire Greenland, the Danish territory that is the world’s largest island but is home to just 57,000 people. Then, this week, he delivered an even greater shocker: He announced that “all” Palestinians should leave Gaza, which has been pummeled by 16 months of war with Israel, and the United States would “take over.”
For some fans of “The Golden Girls,” the announcements brought to mind the final episode of the show’s second season, long panned for introducing a new character simply in order to spin off a new show.
In the episode, the new character, Renee (played by Rita Moreno), is griping about how her husband is frequently out late.
“At two in the morning, waiting for George to come home, I called a radio talk show. I gave them the solution to the crisis in the Middle East,” Renee says.
“Giving the Palestinians Greenland?” asks Rose (Betty White), who evidently was up to hear the broadcast. She adds, “I didn’t know that was you. You were great!”
There’s a pause. Then Dorothy (Bea Arthur, the Jewish actress who died in 2009) repeats the proposal with obvious disdain: “Giving the Palestinians Greenland?!”
Renee responds, “It’s a big place. Nobody uses it.”
Dorothy snaps back, “You would take a desert people and put them in the ice and snow?”
Rose steps in to deliver a laugh line: “With the proper clothes, they’ll be fine.”
At the time the episode aired, in May 1987, hope for Middle East peace had dimmed since the heady days of the Camp David Accords eight years earlier. The beginning of the first intifada — the yearslong Palestinian uprising that resulted in the deaths of 200 Israelis and nearly 2,000 Palestinians — was months away.
Little could the show’s writers — led by Susan Harris, a Jewish pioneer in TV comedy — have known that nearly 40 years later, the throwaway joke would be a mashup of two of the zaniest ideas to drive American foreign policy.
Indeed, even a few years ago, the idea seemed so far-fetched that it was comfortable fodder for a social media joke by Martin Indyk, who twice served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, both under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Indyk died last year.
Trump’s Deal of the Century revealed on the Golden Girls: Greenland for Palestine! pic.twitter.com/SzQsfku7Fz
— Martin Indyk (@Martin_Indyk) August 23, 2019
“Trump’s Deal of the Century revealed on the Golden Girls: Greenland for Palestine!” he posted on Twitter in August 2019 along with a clip of the scene, yielding hundreds of shares and comments.
Among those replying to him was Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was not laughing. “Better then your plan: Israel for Palestine.” he wrote.
The scene is not the only piece of popular comedy to have anticipated Trump’s proposals. As the Forward noted earlier this week, the very first episode of “Saturday Night Live,” which turns 50 this year, included a sketch in which Israel and the state of Georgia announce that they will swap places.
Trump has not proposed sending the Palestinians to Greenland, but Netanyahu has pressed countries outside the Middle East that have criticized Israel’s war effort to accept Palestinian refugees. So far, all have declined.
