There are no legions of “displaced persons” straggling around Europe, living in camps, surviving on rations; that existed in the post-war chaos of three-quarters of a century ago. And harrowed caravans of migrating Hindus and Muslims aren’t to be seen struggling across the Indian subcontinent making their way to safe territory; that was in Mahatma Gandhi’s day, again three-quarters of a century ago.
The only bizarre enclaves where time has stood still for over seven decades, where over two dozen refugee camps still exist to this day after a war fought in the same year Orville Wright died, are in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The world has rolled its eyes at or turned them away from the Gazans who for almost four generations haven’t flipped a single page on their calendars. For them, the Levant might as well still be part of the Ottoman Empire, their land grants, titles and deeds from a bygone era still just as valid in their collective minds as Confederate money was to die-hard Southerners of the 1860s.
Pretending and hoping, however, that sooner or later the Gazans would come to their senses, look to their children’s futures, put down their slingshots, cease and desist with the tunnel digging, and take advantage of their astoundingly fortuitous location astride the Mediterranean Sea, was a colossal failure. Indeed, nestled along some of the most stunning beachfront property on the planet, a potential cruise ship port-o-call and just a few miles from where the mouth of the world’s commerce is funneled through the Suez Canal, Gaza should have been transformed into another Singapore.
The Gazans opted for another course though, one that the world can’t ignore, sugar-coat, excuse, justify or explain anymore, not after October 7 – since it’s one so nauseatingly shocking as to include baby-beheading, mass sexual assault and frenzied slaughter of children, the elderly and the infirm. It’s crystal clear now that there will never be a Macao or Hong Kong rising upon this strip of land under the current residents, since the potential skyscrapers can’t be constructed upon foundations riddled with terrorist underground passageways.
But at least this realization is finally settling upon a world that is culpable in some way for having shrugged its shoulders and enabled a soul-crushing ennui to suffocate an entire people who determined to take not one step forward, consumed by a terrible hatred and malaise over a defeat suffered in the middle of the last century. The family of nations must now own up to their sleepwalking dereliction and in one voice say what should have been shouted decades ago: enough is enough.
It’s long past time to put this matter right once and for all, and of all the options available, the insane idea of rebuilding Gaza so that it can be destroyed again and again in the next and next rounds of bedlam, destruction and bloodletting is one that should appeal to no one but the lunatic fringe. What is required, rather than repeating the same blunders ad nauseam, is a stupendous undertaking, something workable and permanent, on the order of the Marshall Plan.
The great and wealthy powers – the House of Saud with its $1.5 trillion, the oil-rich emirates, the U.S., the EU, UN, China and Israel – instead of allowing this interminable conflict to turn into another Hundred Years War can and should step in and do the obvious: resettle the Gazans, now living in rubble and more destitute and hopeless than ever, yet in a way that should make the process uplifting, painless, and assuring of a positive and prosperous future.
If every household in Gaza were allotted $100,000 to make an effortless and respectable emigration to any of the dozens of surrounding countries, nations with the same language, religion, cuisine, ethnicity, traditions, dance music and culture, the bill would be a stiff one, some $28.5 billion, but not a sum beyond reason. California alone, for example, just flushed down the toilet $5.5 billion on its failed bullet train to nowhere.
There is good reason for every citizen of every state to support this since humanity having lived through one Dark Age is more than sufficient; no one wishes to go back to a time of rape, pillage, mass murder, torture and brutality. To permit what happened on October 7 to pass without the citizens of the Earth joining financial forces to stamp it out with immediate and relentless pressure is to invite more of the same.
It’s time to move on, Gazans; the era of camps, ruins, wreckage, despair and ceaseless conflict has run its course. The future is in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the future is bright.
