OK, before you get all upset and say, “the Isareli-Palestinian Conflict is intractable and if experts in the field haven’t fixed it, you, Jane the Actuary, an armchair foreign policy analyst at best, have no clue”:
I know that.
But of the three major international issues brewing right now (by three, I mean Ukraine, Gaza, and the mass influx of immigrants from Central America), Gaza seems, at least, the more tractable of these.
I mean, let’s face it, to a certain degree, the “solution” is for Israel to just occupy them again, with a tight enough lockdown to eliminate the tunnels and rockets and all the nefarious thing Gaza and Hamas are up to. But that’s not a long-term solution.
And then there are the Swiftian solutions such as the one proposed at theothermccain.com this morning, in which, thumbing his nose at the open-immigrationists, he proposes simply relocating all the Gazans here to the U.S.
But I’ve been thinking about this, in light of the book I read the other day which proposes that Israel keep the West Bank and dump Gaza. And I pulled up the Wikipedia entry for “history of Gaza” which sure makes it sound as if Gaza has a long history as a city, located on a strategic trade route, trading hands with successive rulers, controlled by Egypt on more than one occasion — but that it stands alone culturally and historically, rather than being part of a historical/cultural/ethnic entity of “Palestine.”
So I really think we ought to give Gaza to the Egyptians. Well, OK, some might dispute that “we” can “give” Gaza to anyone. But the Allies assigned Eastern Europe to the Soviets at the Potsdam Conference, and agreed to the massive population transfers/ethnic cleansing that uprooted the ethnic Germans from their homes, so there’s precedent, right?
The “catch” of course, is that right now Egypt is ruled by a military government (well, basically) who’s fairly anti-Muslim Brotherhood and would likely be more than happy to smash Hamas, but there are no guarantees that this stays that way. But if Gaza was Egyptian, then the firing of rockets from a country that wants to claim to be civilized would be a bit awkward, and the Egyptians do need their foreign aid (and the foreign aid flows through more “normal” channels that mean that it could be suspended, as opposed to the fact that aid to Gaza doesn’t seem to be contingent on any sort of good behavior on the part of Hamas).
If Egypt doesn’t want Gaza, then perhaps we can pay them off, anyway. How much would Egypt want in additional foreign aid to take on the city/region? They’d have to confer Egyptian citizenship, and dismantle the “refugee camps” – or at any rate, convert them into ordinary municipalities.
And once Egypt has a firm hand on Gaza, then Israel could lift the naval blockade and — well, maybe there are enough civilized people there who want to make a decent life for themselves and maybe there aren’t. Of course, the other half of my solution is for the West Bank to be incorporated into Israel as an autonomous, but not independent region, so I suppose there could be some one-time population transfers, with, say, the extremist West Bankians moving to Gaza and the moderate Gazans moving to the West Bank (which would need some other place name — Palestine, and Judea-and-Samaria are both too loaded but the name West Bank sucks as a place name).
And that’s all I have for you, without further reading — but is it really so crazy to think that Gaza and the West Bank might have different futures?
(Update: I’ve gotten push-back, in comments on other blogs, along the lines of: but Egypt doesn’t want Gaza. See above: Egypt wants foreign aid money, right?)
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