Food aid needs to get to the right places for it to be any good, sure, but as you point out, there isn’t much arable land in Gaza at the best of times - two thirds of Gaza relied on food aid prior to the war, after all - never mind when it’s an active war zone, so I’d be disinclined to agree with the sentiment that, at least as it pertains to Gaza, it’s an overall bad thing.
Well, I would argue that what they need isn't food aid, which mostly seems to just exacerbate problems, but a functioning economy with actual supply lines. That's why I said before in the locked thread that the UN, or somebody, needs to man up and take control of the region - it should probably just be put under the administration of Egypt whether they want it or not (they don't). No dense urban agglomeration with no surrounding resource base has ever not been a disaster area. It's true that, in theory, they at least have gas resources to develop which they could then sell to support themselves if Israel were out of the way, but it's clear that they don't have the capital to do that on their own, either - and didn't since before Israel was on the map. Of course the present conditions make that worse because nobody wants to invest in infrastructure Israel might bomb, but the underlying problem would still be there. Even if that were somehow solved and Hamas was replaced by some peaceful government that other countries could trust with their investments, Gaza's
best available future is still probably as a colony of foreign companies that extract the gas using wholly owned foreign capital and offer a pittance to the natives - a well established model elsewhere.
Despite what many people seem to think, Israel isn't actually run by completely unreasonable psychopaths - just look at the Abraham Accords. Although by NOW the situation has deteriorated to the point where popular opinion in Israel strongly favors destroying Gaza until it stops bothering them, there was ample opportunity for an agreement if any of the rich Arab countries was willing to take responsibility for it and guarantee an end to the Hamas attacks - but two and a half million people crammed into less than a hundred fifty square miles, with no resource base to speak of, de facto run by a terrorist organization with a history of seizing foreign aid and foreign investments, will always be an albatross. Israel isn't helping, but they didn't make it that way either. Given the degree of pain the current situation is causing for Israel, too, in multiple domains, I strongly suspect that the current government would
still accept a two-state solution under diplomatic pressure if some adequate power was willing to provide that guarantee; nobody is willing to do it.
Regarding Egypt's border, I think we all know that's purely theatrical. It's easy to demand something that you know won't happen in exchange for something you don't want to do. At the end of the day, Egypt doesn't really care about Gazans either and is content to refuse to help them while letting Israel take the blame. Not only Egypt, but the US and other western countries could demand a humanitarian corridor too - well, maybe not the US, after our embarrassing pier debacle - if the
will were there. It's not because of loving Israel too much that they don't.
I guess I don't really have much of a point here, unless it's to say that Gaza, like many places, is just a terrible place to live by its inherent characteristics and there's probably nothing anyone can do to make it much better. I'll happily agree that that doesn't mean Israel should be making it worse either, but I just can't stand simplistic platitudes. It would be stupid to expect any country to sit idly by and allow an aggressive neighbor to behave the way Gaza has without responding, and it would be stupid to think Hamas would stop if Israel were nicer when they have repeatedly pledged otherwise; the only way the cycle of violence will end is for someone stronger to step in.
Author
Topic: Non-EU europe thread (with Russia, Israel and Australia included) (Read 273902 times)