Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
What countryside? Gaza strip is incredibly densely populated. There is nothing that can be properly described as countryside. If it were ranked as a country, it would be the third-most densely populated in the world at an estimated 6500 per square kilometer. To put that in perspective, it's 175 times the population density of the United States. Bangladesh is 6th on that metric, and often rightfully cited as an example of incredible poverty and dense urban squalor. The population density in the Gaza strip is more than 5 times that of Bangladesh. It is almost 2.4 million people living in an area about twice the size of Washington D.C.
The people in Gaza City can, and I'm sure some will, try to leave the city. But there's not much of anywhere for them to go, and meanwhile that won't exactly be a popular decision among many of the others there. They will be going to other areas short on basic needs that can't hande them, esp. in the required numbers.
In terms of going to the West Bank ... how? The short border with Egypt is not an open border, and every other direction is cut off by Israel via every potential method of travel. Gaza has been called an open-air prison for a reason; freedom of travel out of the strip does not exist for the people there. Trying to sneak past the barriers results in being shot on sight.
I was more referring to what Bishop said, but there's nowhere the people in Gaza can go. They could hand over every hostage they have, abandon Gaza City to the extent that is even possible tomorrow, and they are still screwed. They have no reasonable alternative that they can even try in terms of improving their situation that I can see. I'm not justifying the violence of course, I'm just more referring back to this just being a horrible situation all the way around.
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The Arab countries have basically never wanted them outside of Egypt temporarily at least allowing them to escape, they refuse to leave and give up the right to return, a one state solution that could lead to Palestinians outnumbering Israelis would never fly, and meanwhile the population in the pseudo prison that already couldn't support the amount of people has more than doubled since the Oslo accords and kept going up exponentially after Israel pulled it's army and all it's citizens out and Hamas took over 20 years ago. 45% unemployment rate, 75% of the population is under the age of 25, this was bound to happen. "Leaving" was only an option if it was negotiated as part of some peace process where an Egypt or Saudi Arabia or US can pay for them to be relocated, but that won't work if they refuse to admit defeat. Hama rules were always going to be the eventual outcome, by attacking indiscriminately in this manner and with the proliferation of videos now showing them killing or celebrating and parading around what are clearly civilian hostages Israel's gonna go scorched earth and probably take over military control of the territory again, but it will still never be resolved until those people are removed or accept defeat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bhlloy
The West: we don’t understand where all these refugees are coming from. Build walls to keep them out and weaken the human rights legislation we don’t like to make sure they can’t come here.
Also the West: if the 2 million Palestinians don’t like living in poverty, squalor and under constant risk of death due to the actions of their “leadership” they should just leave.
I don’t have any solutions either other than feel tremendous sadness and a fair bit of anger at the part my country of birth played in this absolute shitshow of a situation… but I also really don’t understand this point of view.
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Nah, not surprised at all where refugees come from, no problem taking some in or paying for them to be resettled elsewhere if it eliminates the problem, but it needs to be mutual and that section in particular has too many people who are convinced they can destroy Israel somehow. Someone compared it to South African apartheid and it's not, the West Bank under Fatah is like that, there is some political goodwill and the lives of people are much better (4x higher income per capita, etc). Not gonna pretend the PLA is completely non-violent or the ANC was but the ANC showed the playbook to win world support which is the way to win vs a state that is overwhelmingly militarily superior. The Gaza Strip is a terrorist enclave and you can talk about why many people are indoctrinated due to it being all they've ever known in their short life but they've voted for and supported Hamas at far greater than some 20/80 ratio. Congrats on catching Israel off guard (and whoo boy what an intelligence failure) and killing a few hundred Israelis, thousands if not tens of thousands of Palestinians are going to die due to that choice. Doesn't make me happy either but being angry at the US for this seems pretty misplaced IMO, YMMV. There were also 500k people who would have needed to be resettled in 1990, a million in 2000, over 2 million now, and it'd probably be over 5 million in another 20 years, let's deal with this now instead of waiting for the ridiculous fertility rate in a place that can't support it economically or geographically keeps exploding and the population gets even more restless and eager to break out of the containment.