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.

Saturday, December 2, 1922. Kuwait gets axed.

The Uqair Protocol was signed on this day in 1922, setting the boundaries between Iraq, the Sultanate of Nejd, and the Sheikdom of Kuwait.

Basically, the British High Commissioner to Iraq imposed it as a response to Bedouin raiders from Nejd loyal to Ibn Saud being a problem.

Kuwait lost 2/3s of its territory in the deal, setting is modern boundaries.  It had no say in the arrangement, resulting in anti-British feelings in Kuwait.  It did establish a Saudi Kuwait neutral zone of 2,230 square miles which existed until 1970 and a Saudi Iraqi neutral zone that existed until 1982.

Country Gentleman had a winter theme, but the Saturday Evening Post and Judge were already in the Christmas spirit, even though this was still the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 1922.

May 18, 1920. Future Popes, Equine Events, and Middle Eastern Wars.

Karol Józef Wojtyła, was born to Emilia and Karol Wojtyla in Wadlowice, Poland.

St. Pope John Paul II's parents at the time of their wedding.  They are both presently candidates for sainthood.

He'd become St. John Paul II the Great, the most influential Pope of the second half of the 20th Century.

His early life was hard, in a country where life itself was hard.  His mother, who was a school teacher, died when he was 8 years old.  His deeply religious father was first an NCO, prior to his birth, in the Austro Hungarian Army and then a Captain in the Polish Army.   Upon his wife's death he worked close to home so that he could care for his young child.

His father died of a heart attack Polish in 1941.  His eldest brother, with whom he was close, died of scarlet fever after attended to scarlet fever victims in the early 1930s.   Upon his father's death he was the only immediately surviving member of the family.  

He entered the seminary secretly during World War Two, the Germans had closed them in Poland, and was ordained in Soviet occupied Poland in 1946.

He ultimately rose to become Pope in 1978, and occupied that position until his death in 2005.  Since that time he has had two successors, with the first perhaps ironically being German, thereby creating the odd situation of a Pope who lived under German occupation during World War Two being succeeded by one who had briefly been in the German armed forces (anti aircraft gun crewman) as a very young man at the end of the war.

The National Horse Show was going on in Washington D.C.

General Pershing's personal mounts Entered in the National Capitol Horse Show which opened today. On the left is Col. John G. Quekemeyer with "Jeff" and on the Right Lt. W.J. Cunningham with "John Bunny".

Col. John G. Quekemeyer and Lt. James H. Cunningham taking the jumps on Princess and Dandy, at the National Capitol Horse Show. These two hunters were presented by the English Government to General Pershings Staff and are entered with the string of A.E.F. Horses.

And Man O War, who had not run in the Kentucky Derby, won the Preakness.

Another event involving a lot of horses was the Battle of Hamdh, which occurred on this day in 1920. The battle pitted the Ikhwan, the putative National Guard of Saudi Arabia, against Kuwaiti forces. The distribution of manpower was lopsided in favor of the Saudis.  It was part of the Kuwait-Najd War.

The event was part of the Saudi effort to annex Kuwait and impose a strict religious regime upon them.  The Kuwaitis lost the battle after six days, but ultimately the British would intervene and end the war.  Kuwait was a British protectorate at the time.  Prior to that the Saudis attempted to dictate a peace requiring the eviction of Shias, adoption of Wahhabism, declare the Turks to be heretics, ban smoking, ban prostitution, and destroy the American missionary hospital in Kuwait.  The peace was imposed by the British in 1922 and it did not include those provisions, but Kuwait, which was not allowed to participate in the discussions, lost more than 2/3s of its territory.