Wealth & Money Quote by Geraldo Rivera

A trial balloon dressed up as pragmatism: Rivera’s “perhaps” and “could be exchanged” soften a proposal that, in plain terms, imagines trading inhabited places like real estate. The language is telling. “Areas of Israel where current large Palestinian populations and demographic realities exist” avoids saying “Palestinian citizens” or “towns,” substituting a census-style abstraction that makes people sound like an inconvenient statistic. “Demographic realities” is a familiar euphemism in Israeli-Palestinian discourse, signaling anxiety about who counts where, and how national identity is maintained through borders.

The structure of the sentence quietly loads the dice. The “exchange” is framed as a reasonable swap, but it smuggles in asymmetry: Palestinian-populated areas inside Israel are floated as negotiable, while “Israeli expansion into the West Bank” is treated as the natural counterbalance. “Expansion” is a blunt word, yet it’s normalized by pairing it with “to include most of East Jerusalem,” the most symbolically radioactive terrain in the conflict. “Most” does a lot of work: it implies generosity without specifying what would be excluded, and it primes the reader to accept partial annexation as a middle path.

As a TV journalist-pop figure, Rivera’s intent reads less like a legal blueprint than a provocation engineered for the kind of punditry that rewards audacity. The subtext is demographic management: keep Jerusalem, consolidate settlements, and redraw borders so sovereignty follows preferred population ratios. It’s the rhetoric of “peace” that never quite says the hardest part out loud: who gets moved, who gets absorbed, and who gets to decide.