The Biden administration thinks that a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA) could run a post-war Gaza Strip at peace with Israel, but that ignores several inconvenient facts:
2) The same poll shows that 72% of respondents supported the massacre of October 7. But somehow a new Palestinian state in Gaza would embrace coexistence with Israel?
3) The PA has an abysmal track record of corruption and was too weak to prevent a Hamas-led coup in Gaza, less than two years after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. So why would the PA perform any better this next time?
4) The Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world and the problem will only get worse, thanks to an estimated population growth rate of 4% (among the highest in the world). A 2018 study by Mario Coccia found that “terrorism thrives … with high growth rates of population combined with collective identity factors and low socioeconomic development.”
5) The plan to create a post-war Palestinian state in Gaza would establish an unthinkable precedent with far-reaching consequences for global security: terrorist movements can now rape and behead their way to statehood.
6) There is no Arab or other power with the popularity, authority, and morality to educate for coexistence and to ensure that all reconstruction funds rebuild Gaza as Singapore instead of Somalia.
Yet the international community – including the U.S., EU, and U.N. – still clings to the delusional idea that if they just pressure Israel into accepting a future Palestinian state in Gaza, that the impoverished, overcrowded, and radicalized territory will suddenly flourish.
While Japan and Nazi Germany were successfully de-radicalized, that was only after the kind of absolute defeat and extended occupation that global opinion would never allow for Gaza.
Given the six inconvenient facts above, resettlement is the only solution that avoids perpetual war between Gaza and Israel.
Instead, the international community insists that Gazans stay in the overcrowded and now largely destroyed Gaza Strip, despite their hateful determination to keep attacking Israel. That’s even though leaving them in Gaza is a recipe for humanitarian disaster and endless extremism: a failed state with a fast growing population, no economy, no infrastructure, and now huge numbers of homeless. How is insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza actually helping them?
And the longer the international community coddles Palestinians with massive humanitarian aid and diplomatic pressure that prevents Israel from conclusively winning the wars that Palestinians start, the longer they’ll think that “resistance” might someday pay off – maybe by the 34th war, in the year 2075.
Why are Palestinians the only people not allowed to lose a war? What makes Gazans worthy of such preferential treatment? The Tibetans never blew up a bus in Beijing nor massacred their Chinese occupiers, and yet they must submit to China’s military superiority. But somehow Gazans have a stronger moral claim to a state and are therefore exempt from the rules of war and history?
Adding to the absurdity of insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza, they aren’t even indigenous to that land, which has been ruled and inhabited by countless peoples over the centuries, as this brief history explains.
Most Gazans are the children or grandchildren of people who arrived as refugees. Indeed, one of the root causes of the Israel-Gaza conflict is the conviction among Gazans that they are refugees who will one day return to live in the territory of sovereign Israel. Their real desire is not to live forever in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah, but to move to Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem (after removing the Jews “from the river to the sea”).
HUH? What in the world does he mean with that title? What is “on the face”?
In honor of Purim, continue reading and see how many Hebrew expressions and words are translated directly into English and how funny they appear in that fashion…enjoy! (Hebrew equivalent words listed under the post…try to do this without peeking first!)
——————————————-
I remember the day well; it really was on the face (1). When I first woke up, I really thought it would be in order (2), but as it turned out it was a waste of time(3).
I arrived at the office and saw what looked like a pretty(4) piece of cake on the table. Then, I put my heart(5) that someone was working on me(6). It was not cake at all! It was just a plastic blob that others wanted me to think was cake. Just then, Dave walked in and looked at my face and said “plaiiiiin!”(7) At first, I was angry on him but after a few minutes, I commented: “Biiiig! (8) You really worked on me! (9) Waste of time!” (10)
After that first, disappointing incident, I decided to flow(11) and see if I could also work on someone. And I knew exactly who I would work on: Yonatan! After all, he truly lives in a movie (12)and will not have any idea what I was up to.
International Man: Recently, the FBI raided 700 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills.
They opened and searched through the content of every single box, regardless of whether there was any probable cause that individual box owners had committed any crime.
The FBI then attempted to confiscate anything worth more than $5,000 through civil asset forfeiture proceedings. Again, this was regardless of whether there was any evidence of wrongdoing by the individual box owners.
What do you make of this story?
Doug Casey: This is another of many indications that the FBI is totally corrupt and out of control. There’s no indication the agent-in-charge was even reprimanded, much less fired. It’s just one agency, but the fifteen other Praetorian agencies are no better.
An even bigger problem is that the rule of law itself is dead. At this point, almost any federal agency can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it and want to fight them, it’s going to cost a ton of legal fees.
The federal government is now controlled by actual Jacobins. They’re inclined to engage in lawfare against citizens—especially those who don’t share their views.
What’s in it for them? When they perform a civil asset forfeiture, a certain percentage goes to the agency that does it.
That money can buy cop toys and training to pad their resumes. That gives them a personal incentive to do things that are, in fact, criminal. It’s a very serious matter. It’s only going to get worse when CBDCs are initiated—they’ll make civil asset forfeitures, fines, and asset freezes much easier when all your money is visible and available at the central bank. It’s one more reason to own gold—but not store it in a US safe deposit box.
Last week’s column started off asking: “What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done?” The answer is that human greed is what gets wonderful things done. I wasn’t talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behavior. I was talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves.
Think about greed and racial discrimination. In 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jackie Robinson, why did racial discrimination by major league teams begin to drop like a hot potato? It wasn’t feelings of guilt by white owners, affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws. It turned out that there was a huge pool of black baseball talent in the Negro leagues. It became too costly for teams to allow the Dodgers to gain a monopoly on this talent. Black players won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for seven consecutive seasons. Had other teams not stepped in to hire black players, allowing the Dodgers to hire them, it might have given the Dodgers a virtual monopoly on world championships.
During South Africa’s apartheid era, whites were in control, both economically and politically, and enacted some of the harshest racially discriminatory employment laws. There were job reservation laws that reserved certain jobs for whites only. Many white employers went to considerable lengths to contravene and violate those laws. White building trade unions complained to the South African government that laws reserving skilled jobs for whites had broken down.
What was happening? White contractors found out that often they could earn greater profits by hiring a black worker to do the job of a white worker for only a fraction of the wage. That raised the cost of discriminating against black workers. Racist white workers did what any good liberal or labor union supporter would do; they got behind support for minimum wage laws and what produces the same effect, equal-pay-for-equal-work laws. South Africa’s Wage Board said, “The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would likely be employed.” “Equal pay for equal work” became the rallying slogan of the South African white labor movement. They knew that if employers were forced to pay black workers the same wages as white workers, there’d be reduced incentive to hire blacks.
