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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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"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?"

Thanks for this reply, it's given me some points to look into. But my immediate answer is that a) many Palestinians want to live in their actual homeland, not in some nearby country, b) this would be givng the Zionists exactly what they want. In fact, they've been "encouraging" Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank for years, I can understand why Palestinians don't want to give them their land, and c) it is not the responsibility of neighbouring countries to solve the refugee crisis. It is the responsibility of the country that created the refugee crisis.

The reason the Israel receives the bulk of the criticism is that the region was mostly stable before Zionism. Jews, Christians, and mostly Muslims, lived there for hundreds of years mostly in peace. Then a bunch of Zionist Jews decided, as Ze'ev Jabotinsky put it (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ze%27ev_Jabotinsky), that because the Zionists couldn't "offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine [...] Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population."

Everybody has their perspective on who has committed the worse atrocities or who is the most intractable, there's plenty of blame to go around for the violence over the past 76 years. But as for what triggered it, it was Zionism. I truly don't see any way to dispute this.

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