Monday, November 22, 1943. The Cairo Conference, Lebanese Independence, Tarawa.

The Cairo Conference on the war against Japan commenced with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek in attendance.

Lebanon was granted independence.

Lebanon was not a French colony, but a League of Nation's mandate.  The event was nonetheless a clear signal that France's grip on its overseas colonies was rapidly slipping.

It was day three of operations on Tarawa.  On that day, Japanese Rear Admiral Keiji Shibazaki, who was directing the island's defense, was killed with his staff when a Marine spotted his staff walking to a secondary command post and called in Naval gunfire on the location.  He had boasted that the US couldn't take Tarawa in 100 years.

It in fact took four bloody days.

The RAF struck Berlin in a massive nighttime raid.

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part X, Declarations: 

October 15, 2023

Hamas v. Israel

Egypt has completed a concrete barrier to block Palestinian entrants from Gaza.  Their border is very small, so they will be able to enforce it.

Qatar has refused to take Palestinian refugees.

Why have I linked this in, well to demonstrate part of the problem.

Bernie "I knew Lenin when he was just a baby" Sanders has called Gaza an "open air prison".

It isn't, but if it is, the guards aren't just Israeli, they're also Egyptian, and quite frankly, the Arabs in general.  

Nobody wants the Palestinians, as by this point, to put it charitably, they're acclimated to living off the dole and are inclined to violence. They're like the residents of Northern Ireland at one time, on spades.

We went into the complicated history of what is now Israel the other day, but to unfairly summarize it, the problem was created by this.

Ottoman Palestine.

Jewish immigrants legally started migrating to the region when it was an Ottoman province, and then when it was a British League of Nations Mandate.  When the Jewish population became noticeable, in a region we might note that not only had an Arab population, but an Armenian population and a Greek population, the Palestinians began to worry and demanded that it stop.  They turned to violence in the 1930s/

Prior to this time, it isn't as if it was an independent country and indeed, as the map above shows, is borders weren't really what they are now.  Israel had been an independent kingdom in ancient times, but it had been conquered by numerous ancient empires and kingdoms during its history.  Rome put an end to Israel, as we discussed the other day, until 1948.  Like much of the pre World War One Arabic Middle East, it was ruled under Ottoman rule by various tribal families.  

The period after the Great War was transformational due to the high levels of Jewish immigration, and World War Two made a push towards a restoration of Jewish Israel inevitable.  After over a millennium of being murdered for no reason whatsoever, the Jewish people wanted a homeland of their own. And, by that time, they had the population base in Palestine to demand it.

The Palestinian Arabs simply couldn't accommodate themselves to the thought, and the non-Palestinian Arabs couldn't either. They made a bad bet.  Had the Palestinians imply gone along with it, quite frankly, by now the demographic impact of their higher birth rate would mean that Israel would have a majority Palestinian population. But they didn't, and in becoming refugees they became wards of the world.

Today, inside the Palestinian Authority, they suffer high unemployment, particularly in Gaza, which is an unnatural economic unit. The Arabs, and Iran, support them, but they've largely gotten over Israel by now and they don't want the Palestinians in their country. They'd rather back them economically than let them in.

But, if there's a solution to this, they probably need to.

Following World War One, largely due to Woodrow Wilson's view of how the world should work, everything pushed towards nation states.  Due to the Great War, Germany and Russia were pushed out of Poland. Finland, the Baltics States, and the various Slavic states that hadn't been independent, became independent.  Ireland became independent.  Colonialism started to become a dirty word.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed and Middle Eastern kingdoms, imperfectly drawn, sprang up. 

And populations were somewhat moved.  

After World War Two, this was very much the case again, although mostly due to the Soviet Union seeking to redraw is territory on ethnic grounds.

None of this is pleasant, but the solution to this may be here.

Israel isn't going to go away, and is not going to let itself become an Arab dominated state.

The Palestinians aren't going away either, but their territory, and they aren't getting Palestine back, isn't viable.  They've never, moreover, really had any sort of independent state in the first place.

They are also a Mediterranean people, which means that they are largely a Sunni Muslim (some are Christians, but they're disappearing as a demographic as Islam is hostile to them and for that matter the Israelis aren't keen on them either) Arab coastal people.

Qatar is a coastal, Sunni Bedouin Arab nation.  So is Saudi Arabia. So is Kuwait.  So is Dubai.

All of these countries have a labor shortage.

A solution, and perhaps the only one, is to resettle the Palestinians in those countries.  Not in one country, which will create all kinds of problems, but across them.  

They will not mix in immediately, but they would in fairly short order.  

Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine, Poland, etc., 75 years ago do not look back and wish romantically that they could reclaim lost occupations and lands. Frankly, in 75 years, if this was done, Palestinians wouldn't either.  For that matter, in a fairly short period, they'd be fairly mixed with the local Arab population in any event, their identify less of a thing, and their futures better.

Of course, nobody is proposing this, even though many are secretly thinking about it.  Simply pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza has come up as an Israeli solution before.  The Egyptians fear a lot of Palestinians heading their way, and they cannot accommodate them.  That Qatar would reject their entry at this point shows that a lot of Arab states have this on their minds.

And the Palestinians, clinging to a pipe dream, probably wouldn't want to do it either.

Related threads:

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

People seem shocked to learn that Egypt isn't letting Gazans in.

Saturday, September 29, 1923. Mandates and Floods.

April 25, 1920. Settlements that didn't settle.

April 8, 1920 More Strife

The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

March 21, 1921. The New Economic Policy.

Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, a short run return to capitalism under state control.  It was essentially an acknowledgment of the complete failure of communism in the economy and darned near the complete failure of communism in general.

The policy was primarily an effort to revive agricultural production, which had fallen off dramatically. The mass of the Russian peasants were overwhelmingly opposed to Communism and were resisting collectivization.  80% of the Russian population was rural and support for Communism was nearly completely centered in urban areas, an interesting example of people basically voting for what they could get, as Communist appropriations benefited only the urban working class. Russian peasantry, in contrast, had viewed the Revolution as simply a chance to get formal ownership of the land they were working, a process that had in actuality been going on by default, but which was not yet completed, for some time. 

Lenin thought that ultimately collectivization would occur, but only after the NEP had built up rural areas over a period of decades.  He oddly acknowledged that creating a functioning capitalist economy, but under state control, would lift the Russian economy out of the basement, but he believed that by doing that the entire state would be educated in the benefits of Communism and then would convert to complete state ownership thereafter.  It was a peculiar belief, as it welded the reality of the present with a clinging belief that somehow collectivization would ultimately benefit everyone.

Upon Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin, who had favored the NEP over objections like those of Trotsky, would reverse course and force collectivize agriculture, resulting in a massive man made famine.  This isn't the only area where Stalin would follow a path first suggested by his arch rival, and it should make fans of Trotsky, who have traditionally assumed he was a more benign malignancy than Stalin, pause.  In reality he was an even bigger fanatic.  At any rate, the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1920s through the early 1930s, which took that long, resulted in a massive death toll from starvation.  What remains surprising is that the Soviet populations didn't rise up in rebellion at the time.

Lenin fans have continued to note that Lenin, in his political will, suggested that Stalin be sidetracked and that if he had been, Communism would have succeeded.  This is probably completely incorrect, however.  In reality if the NEP had progressed in Soviet Russia a capitalist middle class would have developed. Where the country would have gone from there is unclear, but it wouldn't have been further into Communism.

Indeed, there's reason to look at modern Red China as a state employing what is essentially the NEP. The present leaders of that state have expressed the view that the NEP better represented what Communism was supposed to be about and have basically employed elements of it in their economy.  How that will play out for them remains to be seen.  At any rate, modern Red China's state run capitalism is similar to what the NEP imagined, and imagined would then go into full collective ownership.

Soviet gold backed note.  The NEP reintroduced gold backed currency in Soviet Russia.

The Constituent Assembly of Georgia held its last session, and then abandoned the country to the invading Soviet Union.

The British changed the Mandate for Palestine to allow for the creation of Transjordan, which is now Jordan.

The most successful Irish Republican Army raid in County Kerry occurred when the IRA ambushed a British troop train at Headford.  Like most IRA/British battles, there were low casualties.

August 24, 1920. The first issuances of Palestine postage stamps.