{"id":108869,"date":"2025-01-26T16:36:59","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T23:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=108869"},"modified":"2025-01-26T17:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T00:10:11","slug":"on-emptying-gaza-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/01\/on-emptying-gaza-out.html","title":{"rendered":"On emptying Gaza out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
James Tissot, \u201cThe Flight of the Prisoners\u201d (1896), showing ancient Judean exiles beginning their journey from Jerusalem toward Babylon (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Hebrew \u201cNorthern Kingdom\u201d \u2014 often called Israel<\/em> or, after its eventual capital, Samaria<\/em> \u2014 was formed in the tenth century before Christ when the ten northern tribes rebelled against the political entity headquartered in Jerusalem, which thereupon came to be called the \u201cSouthern Kingdom,\u201d or the Kingdom of Judah. \u00a0But, after a three-year siege of Samaria, the Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BC. \u00a0The Assyrian kings Shalmaneser V, Sargon II, and Sennacherib deported many of the residents of Israel to the areas that are known today as Syria and Iraq.\u00a0 There, <\/span><\/span>the exiles were forced to work as agricultural laborers on farms that were owned by the king or other high officials or by the temples, and, over time, they were assimilated into Assyrian language and culture.\u00a0 (<\/span><\/span>Some Israelites remained behind in the former Northern Kingdom, where they became known as \u201cSamaritans.\u201d)\u00a0 The disappearance of the people of the Northern Kingdom gave rise to the concept of the \u201cTen Lost Tribes.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Fertile Crescent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The conquest of Israel (and of adjacent Syria) was part of the long-term expansion of a number of succeeding states within the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and then out of that region. \u00a0They expanded out of Mesopotamia, the area \u201cbetween the rivers,\u201d up and over the top of the Fertile Crescent and then down southward toward Egypt, the other great Middle Eastern power of the day.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the sixth century BC, a large number of Judeans \u2014 mostly residents of city of Jerusalem \u2014 were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which had succeeded the Neo-Assyrian Empire. \u00a0The Neo-Babylonian relocations occurred in several waves, beginning with probably about 7000 exiles after Nebuchadnezzar II\u2019s siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC. \u00a0They continued with further deportations (of indeterminate numbers of exiles) in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the razing of Solomon\u2019s Temple in 587 BC and again in 582 BC. \u00a0These deportations created what is commonly referred to as \u201cthe Babylonian captivity.\u201d \u00a0Anticipating the conquest and the forced exiles, and under divine inspiration, the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi and his small party voluntarily fled Jerusalem southward, away from Mesopotamian imperialism and eventually to the New World.<\/p>\n

The actual conquest of Egypt by the Achaemenids, who had succeeded the Neo-Babylonians by then as the rulers of Mesopotamia, occurred during the sixth century BC.<\/p>\n

\"West<\/a>
A map to give you an idea of where Gaza and the \u201cWest Bank\u201d are. (The \u201cWest Bank,\u201d by the way is specifically the west bank of the Jordan River.) \u00a0Wikimedia Commons public domain image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was immediately (and uncomfortably) reminded of the enforced exile of the peoples of the northern and southern Israelite kingdoms when I heard about President Trump\u2019s suggestion that the best solution to the current problem of Gaza would be to simply empty out the people who live there and then to distribute them between Jordan and Egypt. \u00a0(See, for example, National Review<\/em>: \u00a0\u201cTrump Floats Plan to \u2018Clean Out\u2019 Gaza, Send Palestinian Refugees to Jordan, Egypt\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 If you can\u2019t access the National Review<\/em> article, I\u2019m confident that there are plenty of other places online where you can read about Mr. Trump\u2019s proposal.) \u00a0It would be, in the most literal sense of the explosive term, a kind of \u201cethnic cleansing.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was also reminded of the infamous Munich Agreement \u2014 aka the \u201cMunich Betrayal\u201d \u2014 that was signed in 1938 between Germany\u2019s Adolf Hitler, Italy\u2019s Benito Mussolini, France\u2019s \u00c9douard Daladier, and Great Britain\u2019s Neville Chamberlain. \u00a0In hopes (on the parts of Chamberlain and Daladier, at least) of avoiding war, the signatories agreed to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia. \u00a0Strikingly and (to my mind) arrogantly, Czechoslovakia was not represented at the meeting in which the Munich Agreement was worked out and the fate of the country was decreed. \u00a0And, of course, catastrophic war came anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Mr.<\/a>
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
<\/div>\n

Although Gaza was already an overcrowded, poor, and unpleasant neighborhood long before the recent Israeli incursion into it, and even before the loathsome ascendancy of Hamas over it, I would be enormously surprised if the people of Gaza would willingly be uprooted and handed out to other nations. \u00a0As the late Achilles might have said, it\u2019s a poor place, but it\u2019s theirs<\/em>. \u00a0Furthermore, although the people of Gaza are Arabs, Arabs aren\u2019t fungible. \u00a0They\u2019re not mutually interchangeable, any more than \u2014 merely because they all speak English and share traditions like the common law \u2014 Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Oregonians are interchangeable. \u00a0Palestinians aren\u2019t Egyptians or Jordanians, let alone Iraqis, Algerians, Tunisians, or Moroccans. \u00a0They have their own distinct culture and their own very distinct dialect. \u00a0Indeed, on account of the prolonged separation between them, the Palestinian colloquial Arabic of Gaza has even begun to diverge from that of the West Bank. \u00a0And families within Gaza intermarry, as do West Bank families. \u00a0But, because they simply can\u2019t<\/em>, residents of Gaza and residents of the West Bank seldom socialize with each other, let alone marry each other. \u00a0They are growing apart.<\/p>\n

And would Jordan really welcome them? \u00a0Jordan has already experienced stress between its deep-rooted Jordanian natives, who tend to dominate the police and the military, and its multi-generational but still relatively recent Palestinian refugee population, who are disproportionately successful in business and education. \u00a0(It\u2019s probably not purely coincidental that King Abdullah of Jordan married a Palestinian \u2014 although the fact that Queen Rania<\/a> is extremely beautiful probably helped the medicine go down.) \u00a0How many more hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could Jordan readily assimilate?<\/p>\n

And would Egypt welcome an influx of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? \u00a0The country is already overcrowded and poor. \u00a0Furthermore, it has faced challenges from radical native-born Islamic fundamentalists for many years (since long before the dramatic assassination of Anwar Sadat by members of an Islamist cell) and allowing remnants of Hamas to enter its territory, as they surely would, would almost certainly threaten its stability.<\/p>\n

But what bothers me most about Mr. Trump\u2019s proposal is the sheer master-of-the-universe arrogance of it. \u00a0I\u2019m hoping that it was nothing more than a casual off the cuff remark, rather than a serious policy suggestion. \u00a0 I\u2019m reminded of the mid-level Foreign Office bureaucrats in London after World War One \u2014 the Great War, remember, \u201cthe war to end all wars\u201d \u2014 who, it is said, drew up some of the boundaries of newly-invented countries in the Middle East using only a straight-edge and a pencil. \u00a0They had absolutely no first-hand knowledge of the Middle East and, being classics graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, not much book-learning about the area. \u00a0(Having read Xenophon\u2019s Anabasis<\/em> in the original Greek just doesn\u2019t quite cut it.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to avoid politics here. \u00a0Especially on the Sabbath. \u00a0But I felt that, since I\u2019m a sometime observer of the Middle East, this was one topic upon which I couldn\u2019t really avoid commenting.<\/p>\n

Posted from Bountiful, Utah<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 The Hebrew \u201cNorthern Kingdom\u201d \u2014 often called Israel or, after its eventual capital, Samaria \u2014 was formed in the tenth century before Christ when the ten northern tribes rebelled against the political entity headquartered in Jerusalem, which thereupon came to be called the \u201cSouthern Kingdom,\u201d or the Kingdom of Judah. \u00a0But, after a three-year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":108875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[951,36854,3571,1579,81,719],"class_list":["post-108869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-egypt","tag-gaza","tag-jordan","tag-palestine","tag-palestinian","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nOn emptying Gaza out<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  The Hebrew "Northern Kingdom" -- often called Israel or, after its 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