The Palestinians Are People, Not Pieces In Your Game of Diplomacy
Everyone talks about them, but nobody cares about them
I’m not going to rehash what has happened over the last month. You surely know the story. Hamas conducted an invasion of Southern Israel and massacred 1,400 people, many of them civilians, some of them children, some of them teenagers at a rave. Israel has responded the way it always responds, by laying siege to Gaza, cutting off water and electricity, attacking targets that are in some cases filled with civilians (which Israel states is justified because Hamas embeds itself with civilians). Demonstrations were set off throughout the world, and a bunch of academics and others who aren’t as smart as they think they are came up with incomprehensible theoretical reasons why we are supposedly not supposed to blame Hamas for mass murder while Israel surely does not have the right to anything in response. Everyone’s free speech is now being violated, people are being doxxed and losing their jobs for expressing opinions, etc. We’ve gone through a month of this.
Meanwhile, if you are an ordinary Palestinian, life sucks. And I don’t just mean because of the Israeli occupation, although in the case of Palestinians on the West Bank, that’s part of it. Israeli settlers who are attempting to colonize the West Bank, with the full backing of the Israeli government, have taken to violence against the Palestinians whose land they are encroaching upon. And because some of the Hamas terrorists obtained intelligence for their attack from West Bank Palestinians with permits to enter Israel to work, tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians have been shut out of their jobs in Israel for a month and have lost their income source.
But it isn’t just the occupation that immiserates Palestinians. Hamas does too. Hamas controls Gaza, which Israeli withdrew from in the mid-aughts. And while Hamas does very well for itself— its leaders live in luxury in Qatar, and its fighters inhabit a set of impressively developed subterranean tunnels stocked with supplies and even comforts, the citizens of Gaza live in abject poverty. Even as compared to their cousins in the West Bank, they are poor, and compared to even residents of developing countries around the world, they are destitute. Hamas has run Gaza as nothing more than a base of operations for its fighters; the people living there are stuck.
And they are stuck for another reason. The world, including especially Israel’s neighbors but the rest of the world too, is just fine with Palestinians being stuck starving and dying in Gaza. The way something like this would normally work is that this situation would create a stream of refugees, who would leave the area and find refuge in other countries, whether legally or illegally. We understand this full well in America because it is exactly what is happening in Venezuela. The formerly fairly well off country is run by a socialist tyrant, Nicolas Maduro, and this has generated an endless stream of migration out of the country, with Venezuelan expatriates landing in every country in the Americas, including the United States but also notably Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and other parts of the hemisphere.
The world doesn’t exactly honor its commitments to refugees and the asylum system, despite their foundation in international treaties. Those treaties arose from the sorry pre-World War II history where Jewish refugees were turned back by many countries, including notably the United States, and allowed to die in the Holocaust. As a result, now every country has a responsibility under international law not to turn away people fleeing legitimate persecution.
But even beyond that, as much as people decry illegal immigration, it has a role in the flow of people away from situations where it is impossible to live. For instance, there is very much a debate in immigration law circles about whether all the Venezuelans actually qualify for political asylum or refugee status. But even if some of them simply live as undocumented immigrants somewhere (as is happening in various places), they still have a chance to build a better life than they would have under Maduro.
Meanwhile, these options are basically closed off to Gaza. The proximate reasons are that Israel is run by people who are extremely concerned about demographics and terrorism and thus don’t want to create refugee camps in Israel proper (to be clear, I think this is a violation of international law; if you make war on a neighboring territory, even justified war, you have a responsibility to protect civilians including by letting them cross the border and providing them shelter), while Gaza’s other border is with Egypt which doesn’t want Palestinian refugees either.
The Left, which makes many bad arguments about Israel-Palestine, makes one in defense of Egypt— they say that if Egypt were to take Gaza refugees, Israel would never allow them back and this would allow Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza. This, of course, is not a viable excuse under international law. Given the international laws in question were created in response to the Nazis, I think a violation of Godwin’s Law is excusable here— imagine if all the people who refused to take Jewish refugees pre-World War II had said “we can’t take these refugees, because it would ratify Germany’s ethnic cleansing of Jews in its territory”. Do you really think the international treaties regarding refugees and asylum were meant to include that defense?
But beyond the legal issue, the “it would ratify Israel’s ethnic cleansing” argument is grossly immoral. Remember, nobody would be required to leave Gaza. If people want to stay, they can stay. This is about people who want to leave. Basically, people halfway around the world living comfortably would be upset if poor desperate people tried to better their lives, because that would make it somewhat harder for them to prosecute their theoretical case against Israel’s policies.
And this gets to the title of my piece, because I think this is how much of the world, including ostensible supporters of the Palestinians, treat Palestinians. Like pawns on a chessboard, rather than human beings.
If you actually care about Palestinians, your first concern should be getting as many of them who are currently in danger to safety. How do you do that? By taking them as refugees. If Egypt refuses its obligations, and Israel refuses its obligations, you can either point fingers at one or both of them, or you can do something about it. The US, UK, and EU should ignore the “it will facilitate ethnic cleansing” argument and start getting people who want to get out of Gaza out of Gaza. We can worry later about whether they want to come back. But these are human beings and they deserve better than to be stuck in some place just because their presence fulfills some folks’ geopolitical fantasies.
If you actually care about the Palestinians, your second concern should be to figure out a way for Israel to punish Hamas that doesn’t involve killing a bunch of civilians in Gaza and stripping people in the West Bank of their right to work. How do you do that? Well, getting those guys living comfortably in Qatar might be a starting point. So might destroying all the Hamas tunnels. Offering rewards for the apprehension of Hamas fighters. Be creative. Think of ways to make it impossible for Hamas to ever attack Israel again.
Of course, a lot of Palestinian “supporters” don’t want that, because Hamas represents their only chance at attaining their dream of Palestinian control of the entire land of Israel, from the river to the sea. That’s obviously why so many people came out in support of the Hamas attack, and why so many people immediately called for a ceasefire before Israel could engage in any retributive action at all. But at some point people need to start asking whether that dream really does any good for the people of Gaza.
The underlying premise of many of Gaza’s residences is that they are “refugee camps”. They are not camps- these are ordinary apartments as you might find in any city in the world. But the fiction is that these are the people (or the descendants of the people) who were forced out of Israel in 1948. They are refugees, you see, because they are waiting to get their homes back.
But they aren’t getting their homes back! Israel is not going anywhere. Israel is a nuclear power with amazing technology, one of the most effective militaries in the world, and the best intelligence service in the region. And they’re just not going to let the Gazan “refugees” back. Not now and not ever. That may offend your sense of justice— personally I think the statute of limitations has run on stuff that happened in 1948, though you may differ— but it’s the truth. So what good does it do for these “refugees” to be stuck in immiserating conditions, living under a nihilist, terrorist, fundamentalist government which hoards all the resources for itself, with no countries available to actually take them in and allow them to build a new life, and “friends” who stay they must stay there and be cannon fodder for the Israelis?
Similarly, out on the West Bank, the maximalist dreams have carried a high cost. Palestine could have had a state 25 years ago and probably again 15 years ago; it didn’t happen because many Palestinian leaders and almost all of Palestine’s “friends” throughout the region and the world pushed a maximalist strategy where Palestine could never settle those Gaza “refugees” and give up their claims to their ancestral homes, perhaps with compensation paid by Israel or the international community. Had Palestine taken a state-- any state, even one dotted with Israeli settlements— it would have gotten enormous support from the international community. A whole lot of people throughout the world want Palestine to succeed. Even Gaza has potential— it has beautiful beaches facing the Mediterranean Sea that could draw plenty of tourist income if it were peaceful over there.
A state, even a state that makes massive territorial and security concessions to Israel, solves many Palestinian problems. Most importantly, it freezes settlements— once Israel formally cedes territory to a State of Palestine, it can’t build anything in that territory. It also unfreezes Palestinian building permits, currently frozen by Israel in many regions. It also makes foreign investment more possible and more attractive. It allows Palestinians to divert resources currently committed to the armed struggle against Israel, towards helping its own people and building an effective government. Almost any state, for the Palestinians, is better than no state.
The point is, the Palestinians are cursed with a bunch of “friends” who are, in fact, fake friends. They don’t care about the Palestinian people and their impoverished living conditions— they care about geopolitical and religious theories where Historic Palestine plays a central role. They want the Palestinians to enact their part in a drama where what they see as an alien invading force— Jews, Israel— gets ejected from the land that it has usurped, occupied, and colonized. And the problem with enacting grand historical dramas is that nobody ever cares about the people on the ground.
I played a bit of “Diplomacy” and “Risk” as a kid. I wasn’t really any good at either of them. But what’s notable about them is that they present the world’s power struggles as if we are just moving pieces on a board. And I really think that’s how a lot of people think about these things. Certainly, the British, who bear substantial responsibility for creating the Israel-Palestine conflict, thought of it that way— I don’t think people like Winston Churchill gave two hoots about the people in the Third World whose lives he was manipulating with his policies and intrigue. But living in an era where we actually see the human cost of conflict, we should know better. We should be thinking “what would make the Palestinians better off?”. But too many people are too invested in the grand historical battle to ever ask that question.