The “Palestinian Cause” has left refugee residents stranded in Gaza and around Ramallah while failing to produce anything — anything — beyond “martyrs”, not that billionaires Mashaal and Haniyeh would wish to join them.
The failure over the summer of “Gaza Fortress” — credit Robert Satloff at TWI for that term — appears to have pushed Hamas to push itself where it has outside of (Judenrein) Gaza. Still, no matter what Hamas does, the cause is done, the encampments — as inholdings in Israel, as ghettos like Yarmouk in Syria — are maintained entirely not by disaffected Arab hands but by Arab kleptocrats hiding what they really do (how else become a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished?) behind cloaks, screens, and walls of disingenuous words.
Suzerainty might serve for Israel’s area of control to recognized international borders. The camps elsewhere want for a sea change in Arab heart and outlook. The twined ropes of national socialism and a strident Islamism have repeatedly served to aggrandize autocrats while failing, and in fact killing, their constituents.
It was never a real estate problem.
It isn’t one today.
It’s a problem about enmity founded in avarice and religious successionary ambition, old ropes tangled together by perhaps the Soviet encouragement of a thieving while patronizing “pan Arab nationalism” — of the sort pursued by Saddam Hussein (count the palaces built at the expense of the hunger of his constituents) — and a klepto-theocratic Islamism, the kind that sacrifices children to tunnel building and tells the mothers to regard their own innocent young as “martyrs”.
It should be over.
Someone needs to call it “over”.
No interest vested in sustaining the middle east conflict.
None, perhaps, hooked on one- and two-state real estate arguments care much for a responsible and, actually, liberating suzerainty with public courts and a press in which the tolerant among the curious are well defended and the reportage — clear, accurate, and complete — routinely notes not only the arrest but the cause of it as well.
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