The Gaza Post

 So, without getting too far into it, we’re crossing 500 days of war in Gaza. More than sixty thousand Gazans have been killed (almost certainly a significant undercount), and our best estimates of the Lancet and other journals indicate that approximately 300,000 excess deaths have occurred. Starvation, dehydration, heat, disease and violence have combined to make Gaza a death trap. 

Needless to say, it’s a complete and unending nightmare for the people of Gaza. 

There’s a hard, horrible truth here. Israel is beyond account. They have spent the past fifty years building political intrigues, military supremacy and a society that demands lebensraum at any cost. They know that their current superiority could shift and that this is their prime opportunity to get “everything” they want…living spaces and land and power and a pure, “clean”, peaceful and unified nation to live in. There’s no point in arguing it, it’s inevitable and no one on the Internet or even in the White House or Downing Street or the Kremlin is going to change it short of overwhelming force.

Gaza is destroyed and the Gazans will starve. That is the end point of Israeli policies. Likewise, the Palestinians of the West Bank will eventually lose their homes, their livelihoods and their land. All the outrage and protests and personal sanctions won’t matter a bit. Even economic sanctions won’t really hurt Israel- as much as we hate to admit it, the Israeli economy is at least somewhat functional on its own, and they can domestically produce or acquire the things they need. Militarily, Israel is locally supreme…and under their nuclear umbrella, there’s really nothing anyone can really do about them. 

The truth of it is that the two-state solution is dead. Israel declared it to be so today, when the Knesset passed a resolution stating that very thing and asserting Israeli (read: Jewish) sovereignty over the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. Settlements will appear and the Palestinians will be exiled. That’s the cold, hard reality. The Israelis will eventually have “peace”…at the expense of the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Lebanese and Syrians and Bedouins and whoever else the Israeli government views as a threat to their order. This post isn’t about Israel at all. Their path is set.

This post is about the Palestinians. 

They’re a proud people, with ancient roots in the Levant and a rich, diverse history. They’re a culture and a nationality and a society with their own roots and their own right to self-determination. They’ve spent centuries building their lives in a harsh place, and decades rebuilding their lives in exile under occupation. The fruits of those labors have now been destroyed, or are in the process of being destroyed, or will be destroyed, along with the people who made them in many cases. That’s one of the first prices of Israel’s peace. The only thing that can really change is how many Palestinians die in the making of that lebensraum.

Back in February, President Trump proposed a bold, radical and difficult plan- the permanent relocation of the Gazans to another place, with the transfer of Gaza to a “freedom strip” or Israel or America or ??? And its redevelopment as a tourism spot. The details are silly and don’t matter, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this case, Trump’s idiocy is actually the best answer. Namely, the Palestinians need to leave.

Truth is, Israel is a bad neighbor, and will continue to be. Palestinians are currently living in a relatively harsh desert, under Israeli guns, under the threat of pogroms and air strikes and arbitrary military executions or endless “administrative detentions” and land theft and who knows what else. Gazans get to do all of the above, but with extra starvation and the world’s largest population of pediatric amputees. This isn’t a winning situation, and quite frankly, the land isn’t worth fighting over. Instead of dying in a futile fight against a burgeoning fascist ethnostate over bleak, marginal desert, the Palestinians should be resettling in a place that will integrate them into their society, recognize them as people, and provides the short-term essentials of transition and facilitates their integration into their new homes. I have one suggestion: Japan. 

Japan is living in the future, and that includes a slow-detonating population bomb. An influx of Palestinians would give Japan labor, fertile youth and taxpayers for years; the overall number of Palestinians wouldn’t significantly change Japanese society. Along with this, the Japanese are one of the few societies on Earth that has really changed and de-radicalized, and that could provide a strong, positive environment to rehabilitate Palestinians and extinguish the worst revenge efforts. Thousands of miles of separation, clean and safe homes and a society completely alien to the dramas of three thousand years might be just the ticket. 

Palestinians don’t have much more time to make up their minds. At some point, the Israelis are going to start making the easiest answers for Israel the only answer for the Palestinians, and it’ll be lethal, inhumane and guaranteed to punish Palestinians for resisting. It would be better for Palestine to accept exile now rather than have it forced upon their survivors later.