Whither Gaza?

 

I guess Hamas knew or should have known, as attorneys are fond of saying, that after its brutal attack on a country with a fully developed military, the response would be having a lot of things blown up. Even before Israeli troops started entering Gaza, there were days and days of air strikes, producing death, destruction, and displacement. I am not going to weigh in on whether this was militarily necessary or morally correct. But much of northern Gaza has been turned into rubble. Who’s going to clean it up, and how long will rebuilding take? (Questions that apply to Ukraine too, by the way.)

Maybe I’m raising this issue a little too late or much too early. But from what I’ve read and heard, Gaza wasn’t always the world’s largest open-air prison, as commentators often say. It was once talked about as the potential Singapore of the Middle East.

If you look at a map, there isn’t much to Gaza geographically, but it has miles of coastline in an area which has one of this planet’s most desirable climates. One would think that hotel developers would have been savoring the prospect of building resort properties near the beach.

Shifting gears: These days, we hear the term “anti-Semitic” to describe people who hate Jews. But who were the Semites, in the original meaning of that term? People who spoke any number of regional languages in the Middle East, including both Hebrew and Arabic. The Semites included Assyrians, who lived in parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, among other places. The country boundaries now generally recognized were not drawn up until after World War I by Western colonial powers. Ethnically speaking, maybe the folks who live in this region are a lot closer than they like to think.

The Bible tells us that the Jews, after escaping slavery in Egypt, advanced to the Promised Land by smiting a lot of tribes on the way, but they still faced domination at times in varying degrees by the Persians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Turks, and even the British. They didn’t get a country of their own, called Israel, until 1948, and they had to fight to keep it. But ancestors of those now called Palestinians lived in this area too. Not all Israelis are Jewish, and not all Palestinians are Islamic, but all have legitimate reasons to be where they are. We can only hope that all sides will tire of the conflict, and to borrow phrasing from Rodney King, all just get along, if that’s now even possible.