Northern Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. Who will take these people in?
National Post, 12 November 2023
Palestinians have long felt the Arab world does not care for their welfare. Now is the time to prove them wrong
There is a story told, perhaps apocryphal, about the late Bob Strauss, the longtime backroom operative and presidential political fixer, who served Jimmy Carter as a cabinet-level representative for international trade negotiations and George H.W. Bush as ambassador in Moscow. Carter appointed the Texan in 1979 as his personal envoy to the followup negotiations after the Egypt-Israel Camp David accords.
Many stories about Strauss are likely apocryphal, and almost all of them exaggerated. But it is said that on an early visit, he was flown over the Gaza Strip to see it for himself. Looking down on a land area smaller than the largest ranches in Texas, Strauss drawled to the effect, “Can’t say as I know why, if you didn’t have it, you would want it; or if you had it, why you’d want to keep it.”
Strauss was not successful in his diplomatic efforts.
Yet there remains truth in that some 40 years later. Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israel took the Sinai and Gaza in 1967. When Egypt and Israel made peace in 1978, Egypt reclaimed Sinai. They didn’t want Gaza back and left Israel with it. In 2005, Israel unilaterally got out of Gaza. In 2006, Hamas was elected the government of Gaza and in 2007 deposed the Palestinian Authority Fatah party in a civil war, expelling them from Gaza. Since then, Israel and Egypt have blockaded Gaza, neither desiring Hamas to extend its influence. What Gaza has, nobody wants.
That may now include Gazans.
It is clear that northern Gaza, and Gaza City, will become an impossible place to live normally. The uprooting of Hamas and degrading of its offensive capabilities may leave much of northern Gaza a rubble heap. So ordinary Gazans have to leave.
There is a strong international consensus that Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas should permit civilians to safely evacuate Gaza City and northern Gaza, where Israeli forces have surrounded the territory where Hamas is dug in — or dug under, better to say, in the tunnels. This is an acknowledgment that Hamas embeds its fighters and weaponry amidst the civilian population, making high civilian casualties inevitable.
Israel has left a corridor open for Gazans to leave the north and move south. The Americans have pressed Israel for a several-day “pause” to allow, more or less, the entire population of the north to get out. Israel has agreed to a four-hour pause each day when Gazans can move without fear of live fire.
Soon Gaza’s population of some 2.2 million will be cramped into half the area, blockaded by both Israel and Egypt, with only a trickle of aid getting in through the Rafah border crossing in the Sinai.
It is not sustainable. Gaza can no longer be home for its population. It is plausible that many of them would prefer to live elsewhere, with more room to breathe and away from the toxic air of Hamas.
Where then shall they go?
The Arab world must step forward with a moderately sized refugee resettlement program. Could Arab countries from Tunisia to the Gulf take in 1.5 million Gazans?
Easily. Indeed, Egypt — population 113 million — could take them all.
Wars — including civil wars — create displaced populations and refugees. They are then accommodated.
Some six million Ukrainians fled westward out of Ukraine in 2022. All of them were accommodated in other European countries without recourse to refugee camps. Polish families were heroic, taking millions into their own homes.
Continue reading at the National Post.