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Tanya's avatar

I don’t find this description of Gaza as a prison of Israel’s making compelling. The Palestinian refugee crisis and the problem of statelessness is a regional issue for which there is so much blame to go around and yet the analysis I hear over and over never grapples with - heck, never teaches me anything about - the political choices of Jordan and Lebanon that have impacted the situation for the worse. You touched ever so briefly on Egypt here and then nothing. There are hundreds of thousands of stateless Palestinians (maybe half a million?) in Lebanon who are treated like crap, discriminated against, and also live in the conditions you decry (when they were in Gaza and blamed on Israel). And, by the way, what’s the excuse for the lack of human empathy expressed by Lebanon? Hamas doesn’t have “death to the Lebanese” in its charter, does it?

Honestly, the tragedy is Gaza is heartbreaking. Statelessness as a global phenomenon is a super important issue that I would love to know more about. In the Israel-Palestine context, won’t someone please shed light of the very underreported issue of how surrounding countries appear to prefer to stick it to Israel by obstructing the process by which these refugees of many generations can naturalize? And if it’s okay for them not to want to offer these people a path to full citizenship, please explain why?

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Gary Dean Deering's avatar

I really like(d) your writing when I first discovered it for me to read and enjoy (a couple of months ago). But this article is challenging that. Why do you assume that altruism--"The Gaza withdrawal was not an act of altruism"--is a virtue when it is a vice. Also why are you so damn good at pinning things to reality with your writing and along with it a real sense of "yes, this guy knows what he's saying", but then you are wishy-washy on the obvious: "Sure, religious extremism is a problem. And Islam does seem more susceptible to it than other religions." Does "seem" to be more susceptible to it than other religions--duh, how man heads have Christians cut off because they were dissed by infidels, or how many French people killed for the same reason. Not to mention to many other, Islam-Muslim “sentiments”: “... you dis me muther’f’r and I’ll f’g kill you for it for real, not just as a threat but as a real death and then I’ll get absolution from my moral authorities—who everybody is afraid to criticize, including, or especially (some) Western intellectuals ...”. Islam is a Medieval Religion--unlike Christianity that has gone through a at least two reformations—this means, re-formulations, that resulted in toning down their FAITH based “reasoning”. To my knowledge Islam has not gone through even one such re-formulation and when they say things like, "We love death more than you (Gary) love life” and “In our (Muslim) religion there is no room for Caesars (i.e., reason)” why do you refuse to see it? This is what baffles me—super duper smart people who can’t see the obvious.

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