Trump's Gaza
And a fantastical hypocrisy detector.
The announcement by Trump to relocate the Palestinians outside of Gaza has been met with nothing short of outrage. It’s been labelled as ethnic cleansing, a human rights abuse, and my favourite, ripping the indigenous people from their land of which they have strong historical and cultural ties. But is it really all that bad?
Sometimes when I’m daydreaming, I dream of little bolts of lightening, coming from the skies and zapping people who make ridiculous conflicting statements. I like to think of it as a ‘hypocrite detector’. No chance to back pedal or justify your ridiculous claim — just Zap! Gone in a puff of smoke!
I wonder if my imaginary hypocrite detector would be enough of a deterrent to stop people regurgitating rubbish that contradicts basic reason? Or that contradicts what they claim to support? Probably not — but I can dream.
The entire Palestinian story is so full of contradictions and hypocrisy it’s hard to know where to start, but here goes.
So let’s start with the perpetual refugee status of the Palestinians. The very definition of a refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their home country. Yet now suddenly, when Trump offers to relocate them, to peace and prosperity, they have a deep connection to their homeland? I hate to state the obvious, but if you are already IN your home country, you can’t be a refugee at the same time. Zap!
The world average for people holding refugee status is around 15 years. Not the Palestinians however, their refugee status is passed down through generation after generation. You see the whole idea of being a refugee is for you to be resettled somewhere safe. Which brings me to my next thought. During the past 15 months, whilst Israel and Hamas were trading missiles, Gazan citizens have been begging and pleading for refugee status in Australia and other countries.
Gofundme’s for desperate, destitute Palestinian families have flooded social media attempting to escape the war zone of Gaza. In fact the Australian government has been handing out Visa’s like candy. And the waiting list is long.
So I’m confused. If they have strong ties to the land, why are so many refugees seeking Visa’s out of Gaza? Is it that they only want out of Gaza if it means entry into a free democratic country with benefits? Is that it?
Poor desperate refugees one minute, indigenous with historical and cultural ties to the land the next. Zap!
We have all heard the ‘open air prison’ story. In fact just today I had a ‘friend’ private message me, perplexed at the stark contrast of what a ‘lovely person’ I was compared to my views on Israel.
He was upset that I corrected some unverified memes he posted. I was polite, but pointed out that the information was incorrect, and where fact verification could be found. He sorrowfully asked how could I possibly not see the truth! He informed me that unfortunately I was ‘unfriended’ on facebook because my facts were upsetting his terror-supporting buddies. But secretly he still liked me.
I will try to carry on through this dark day of being ‘unfriended’.
I almost felt sorry for him, I could almost see his brain twitching trying to connect the conflicting pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit. Almost. Zap!
Call me superficial, but if I was starving in an ‘open air prison’, my home and entire community turned to rubble, I would get down on my knees in gratitude if someone offered me the chance for my family to escape the chaos of a war zone and have an opportunity to live a better life in peace.
If my children were starving and someone offered them food and safety, I would take it in a heartbeat. No patch of dirt means more than the prosperity and health of my children. I was born in a town called Geelong, about 60 kilometres from where I live now. My family have lived in this region for quite a few generation now. So what? Would I risk my children’s life to stay here if it had been destroyed? Not a chance.
And here is another pesky fact. Gaza is a disaster, and has been a disaster many years. Many people have tried to solve the Palestinian problem over the years by pouring billions upon billions of dollars into the sinkhole of Gaza. Summit after summit of leaders, peace advocates, Prime Ministers and Presidents have attempted peace negotiations and failed.
So I will let you in on a little secret. The Palestinian conundrum is not that Gaza is an ‘open air prison’, or that it’s been turned into rubble, or that it is under Israeli Occupation. The problem with Gaza is that the Palestinians are not interested in peace. Hatred of the Yahud has become their entire identity — they have no desire to let it go. They are not interested in trading their victim status for peace. That would mean taking responsibility for their own lives and future — it’s far easier to suck on the tit of the international communities endless charity and pity than to take account of your own decisions.
Trump has envisaged a bold plan. A plan to lift Gaza out of its poverty ridden third world reality and make it into something better. The Palestinians have had 75 years to make something out of Gaza, with billions of dollars in aid and support, and they have failed. UNRWA has failed. The international community has failed.
Will Trump’s plan be any different? Time will tell, but doing the same thing time and time again and expecting a different result in the definition of insanity. Maybe it’s time to try something different.
I left this comment on another substack. I'm reposting it here and I hope you don't mind
As an American I am not going to waste my hard earned money or the lives of my soldiers on trying to teach Palestinians not to be assholes. Billions of my dollars have already been wasted on Gaza and they thanked us by butchering Jewish babies.
Now to the real issue. Ethnic cleansing. Refugees by their definition are not living in their homeland. You cannot ethnically cleanse someone from someone else's homeland or Turkey and Europe would not be expelling syrians now the Assad regime has fallen. Or is it ok for Turkey and Europe to ethnically cleanse itself of Syrians but Trump cannot ethnically cleanse gaza of Palestinians?
The truth of the matter is that the Palestinians in Gaza are not refugees. They are citizens of gaza. They have been living there for generations.They are Gazans. Plain and simple. It is time we applied the definition of refugee to the Palestinians as we apply it worldwide to everyone else.
Another issue is one of sovereignty. If there is a sovereign nation you cannot ethnically cleanse a population because they have a verified nation state/culture/government that is attached to that part of the world with verified boundaries. So if it is ethnic cleansing to move Palestinians then they are living in a sovereign nation, hence the State of Gaza or Palestine run by a sovereign government, Hamas. A nation that openly declared war on a neighboring state and has kept itself in a state of war with Israel since it became the elected government back in 2006. (no occupation either since they are a sovereign state running all their own affairs)
On another issue, sovereign states also pay a price for starting wars of genocide, which is what Hamas did. After WW2, millions of ethnic germans were ethnically cleansed from other states because nobody wanted them to live near them. After the War in Iraq, Kuwait ethnically cleansed 200,000 Palestinians because they did not want an enemy group living within its sovereign territory. So it is fair to say that after starting the October War, the Hamas government of the State of Gaza/Palestine is going to pay a price. Whether its moving the 'refugee" population to another place so that rebuilding can begin, or its formulation of a plan for the citizens of gaza, remains to be seen.
So the questions remain:
Are Palestinians refugees? If so they have no claim to ethnic cleansing since Gaza is not their homeland. If they are refugees then they can be freely moved out of the territory, so which is it? You cannot be both a refugee and a citizen of a nation.
Is Gaza a sovereign nation? if so and then there can be no ethnic cleansing because this is a verified nation state, then the people of gaza need to be held responsible for the genocidal war that their government began and there needs to be consequences. They also are not refugees but citizens of the nation of Gaza/Palestine. What those consequences should be is anyone's guess, but I would look toward how the allies dealt with Germany and Japan after WW2.
So which is it - refugee or citizen? Nation state or refugee camp, albeit a refugee camp with a tourism bureau (videos were up on YouTube), mansions, equestrian clubs, designer malls, and luxury cars, but a refugee camp anyway?
So here is the interesting thing- there has been 2 tiers of refugee status in the world since 1948. There is the refugee status of the Palestinian arab who even though a citizen of a country say like the US they are still considered refugees, or the rest of the world that once a person gets to a new country and are processed into that nation, and their future children are born, they are no longer refugees but citizens of their new country. They lose refugee status. Maybe it's time that the world makes the Palestinians follow the rules that everyone else in the world follows. If this is the only thing to come out of Mara-Gaza it would be just fine. That is what the world needs to teach the Palestinians, not Jeffersonian democracy.
Palestine is the tip of an Islamist spear pointed directly at the heart of the Judeo-Christian world, weaponised by Marxists to destroy the Western capitalist system and bring about a proletarian revolution. You only have to examine the post-1970 history of Iran to see how the union of Islamists and Marxists works in practice, for those who threw their lot in with the Khomeini revolution were quickly dispensed with by the Islamic revolutionaries.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 to reconstitute the Islamic caliphate in the wake of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. The Muslim Brotherhood received funding and support from Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, its foremost figurehead being Haj Amin al-Husseini, a relative of Yasser Arafat. It therefore comes as no surprise that Mein Kampf remains a best seller not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but in many other Arab countries.
Both Hamas and Fatah are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel and harbour a visceral hatred of Jews. The only thing that separates them is the question of the use of warfare, to which Hamas is wedded, while Fatah today prefers lawfare.
Make no mistake that anyone who espouses the cause of Palestinianism is either a committed Islamist, neo-Nazi, or Marxist, or else a useful idiot willing to be exploited by these extreme forces, who remain dedicated to the cause of extinguishing the Jewish people.