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When they're the ones blocking all routes and all aid in, yes.
Does Gaza produce anything besides death cultist mouths to feed?
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
Even prisoners still produce toilet wine. Gaza seems to have been a total economic basketcase going back decades.
Toilet wine is not agriculture. It's a mere conversion of one food stuff to another, and doesn't produce nutrients. Toilet wine is made from food given to the prisoners by the guards, so it's a very poor argument in the context of food self-sufficiency of Gaza.
Keep in mind that Gaza is a desert region, so farming there is not easy. Especially since Gaza lies at the sea, so you have salt-water intrusion into the ground water. And the various disruptive behaviors of the Israeli settlers and government goes back for decades, which makes it a lot harder to farm. The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians. The population density of Gaza is slightly smaller than of Hong Kong, so it is effectively a city state. It is not reasonable to expect much agriculture with that level of population density.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect anything else given the conditions during those decades? For example, Israel never allowed Gaza to build a harbor so they could trade with other nations. If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
Letting Israeli settlers move to the Gaza Strip was policy after they took it from Egypt in the Six Day War in 1967 (Gaza Strip population 380 thousand), but that ended in 2005 when Israel withdrew unilaterally, leaving the Gazans (population 1.3 million) with everything within the Egyptian borders from 1948, all of which they retained for the next 18 years, until after October 7th (population 2.2 million, 40% 15 years old or younger).
Israel has been taking ever more land from the West Bank, but (correct me if I'm wrong!) the Palestinians there have generally been stuck in the enclaves there, not displaced to Gaza.
In charge de facto, with full popular support? It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent. The first Gazan rocket attack after the Israeli withdrawal was "several hours later"! Instead of setting internal security to torturing and killing political opponents and "collaborators", I'd reserve war-related prosecution and imprisonment for anyone who commits perfidy after the surrender.
Just "in charge" de jure, still having to negotiate peace and prevent violations of it but within a population that's still only 40% in favor of negotiations vs 30% in support of armed resistance? I'd probably shave my facial hair, try to buy a fake id, and otherwise "disappear" before the next war over who's really in charge or the victors' decision to execute me as a collaborator.
And then what? Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2? The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel. Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened. That is not how you get peace, but rather, how you get a forever war, where each new generation learns that there is no hope of a good life by doing the regular things to achieve that (getting an education and investing in companies).
The childish fantasy that each and every Palestinian would magically and suddenly stop believing in violence as a solution is not a way out of the conflict. It is as realistic as thinking that Israeli settlers would suddenly stop using violence against Palestinians, which Israel also has never been able to stop (but refuses to admit to that, because then it would expose their hypocrisy). So a total surrender, whatever that even means in the chaos that is Gaza, where central control surely doesn't exist anymore, will just lead to new forms of oppression of the Palestinians, that will inevitably cause people to rebel against that oppression with violence.
Fact is that the PA has been collaborating with Israel for a very long time, and Israel had (and still has) a perfect opportunity to gradually reduce restrictions on the West Bank, to actually give Palestinians a way out, by showing that there is an opportunity to build up a prosperous Palestinian state. However, instead, Israel is treating the PA like the Judenrat where the PA is supposed to keep the Palestinians compliant, while their land is getting taken from them, and they are being kept in a closed off ghetto with no prospect of building up anything.
The fact that Israel even threats Palestinian Israeli's as second-class citizens and that Israel is explicitly society that is only supposed to serve one race shows that there is inherently no desire to allow Palestinians to co-exist on an equal level. If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure, then it is absolutely no surprise that the only solutions that it is willing to accept are permanent ghetto's, ethnic cleansing and solutions of that kind, and not a reasonable solution for the Palestinians (whether that is their own state, equal rights within Israel, or whatever).
That is of course a complete nonsense. First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places. And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day. If Israel ever intended to be racially, ethnically or religiously purified, it is the most crappy purification job in the history of humanity. If you want any concept of ethnic or racial purity, Israel is the last place you want to look at.
It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks. True, not all states are national states - for example, in Europe some states gave up on the concept of national state and decided that territorial jurisdiction is all they need, and some states - like the US - have been built on a different model of nationhood. But nation state is still the most common example of how states come into existence, and there's nothing different with Israel - except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation. Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else, every commonplace economic inequality - which is extremely common in every diverse country, there are minorities which are more or less statistically successful - is looked at under the microscope and taken as proof of "second class citizenship", every common neighborhood quarrel between two loudmouth politicians is taken as the definite evidence of impending extermination of racially impure, even though it never happens, but the liars continue to lie.
You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions. In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space. Of course, claiming that Israel ethnically cleansed Israeli territory is utterly ridiculous - there are millions of Arabs living there. Claiming they are cleansing Arab territories is even more ridiculous - there's literally nobody BUT Arabs living there, and millions of them too. Now, if you said Gaza is a ghetto, where the Arabs is forcibly kept and prevented from leaving - what would be the solution? Of course, it would be to let them go. But this is exactly what they are vehemently opposed to! There was a lot of proposals to sponsor free migration of Gaza citizens to any place they like - except not a lot of places want them, and for those that do, they don't want to go there, and it'd be ethnical cleansing to allow them to go, right? This is a good example of how idiotic are the demands from Israel - if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves and completely cleansed from Jewish presence, that's a ghetto, bad thing. If you let them move whereever they choose, except of course eradicating the existence of Israel - that's cleansing. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Of course, the solution to this conundrum is simple. And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. They want Judenfrei from the river to the sea. Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead. It's not some "consequence of the occupation" - it has been like that for over a hundred years, way before the State of Israel existed (look up Hebron massacre of 1929). Is has been always the consistent policy since they started to formulate policies. That's their reasonable solution - that's their only acceptable solution. The final solution is the only solution for them. When you realize that, everything else is easy to understand. This is not all Arabs - those who do not subscribe to the final solution project, live peacefully as the citizens of Israel. Or moved on to live in other places. Maybe there's even some of such people in Gaza too, but the tiny minority. The majority identifies with Hamas project and their final solution. And until they stop doing that, they will be suffering the consequences of their choices.
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
Yeah, just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid. Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people, establishing a racial hierarchy, where other races were tolerated at best, with far lesser rights. Non-Jews are not treated as first-class citizens in Israel. So the goal was to create a racially pure society where the only equals that white people met would be other whites.
Note that this is not the same as a racially pure country, where only one race is tolerated in the country. Slave-era US states also had the goal of a racially pure society, but were obviously far from a single-race state.
And South Africa did its best to ensure racial purity by intermarriage laws. While Israel doesn't go as far, they do not have civil marriage, and all marriages must happen under religious laws that restrict intermarriage. And religion is of course very strongly linked to race.
No, you are torturing the definition of race. Greek citizenship is based on whether the person is legally living there, not their race. Greek nationality law does have a provision to expedite the naturalization of 'ethnic Greeks' according to Wikipedia, but that merely requires the person to have a parent or grandparent that was born a Greek national. So their legal definition of ethnic Greek does not seem to be actually ethnic. It doesn't matter if that parent or grandparent is ethnically Greek, Albanian, Roma, Jewish, etc, as long as they were born a legal Greek citizen.
This is different from Israel, where they will let in Jews who have been in the diaspora for very many generations, but not people who were actually born in the territory of current Israel, but that fled during the 1948 Palestine war.
All these 'insane and impossible standards' are only insane and impossible if you consider the goal of a racially defined state that gets to steal land from people to be legitimate. For example, it's basic international law that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes after a conflict, but in the case of Israel this is somehow suddenly completely unreasonable.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking, just like the international community is totally fine with Russia taking territory. Only Israel gets criticized, you see. No one is funding Ukraine so it can defend itself.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim. That way you don't actually have to defend the behavior, which is often indefensible.
False. Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
But most discrimination happens through laws that are ostensibly neutral, but applied unequally. For example, the law on removing the citizenship for 'acts of terror' is not applied equally to Jewish terrorists. In fact, Israeli soldiers have been known to just let Jews commit terrorist attacks: https://www.btselem.org/node/216862
So if an Arab commits a terror attack, he can lose his citizenship and be kicked out. If a Jew does so, the Israeli military is there to make sure that the terrorist doesn't get hurt. Very considerate.
So when Hitler was using ghettos to isolate the Jews from support by non-Jews and to make it easy for him to implement his final solution, he was actually accidentally protecting the Jews by putting them into the ghetto?
An interesting take on history to be sure.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Anyway, my claim is not that the Israeli leadership has a singular goal. They have more and less radical elements. Some want mere ghettos, some want ethnic cleansing and a few seem to want a genocide. None seem to want a viable Palestinian state (or states).
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto. Setting up a straw man where you, without any evidence, claim that I would call a free Palestinian state a ghetto is not a basis for a debate.
You are treating a diverse group of people as a single hive mind, which is just another form of strawmanning. I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews. I find it extremely unlikely that is the case. But please provide the proof if you have any.
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Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time (albeit not as much as it would have if Gaza still had 20% of the population), once it's not repeatedly reset, and sitting next to a Mediterranean beach can't hurt.
I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute, but they were selling Gaza a third of its power while still getting missiles fired at them; that's a lot better than the US would have treated any adversary in the same circumstances.
Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.
More recently, Hamas proudly publishes video of digging up water pipes to turn into rockets. There's a weird example of horseshoe theory here, where fellow travelers sound affronted at "Hamas would do X" while Hamas brags "ha ha, look how awesome we are at X!"
This is why a surrender is a prerequisite to building up an economy. You need investment to support subsequent investment, not to be dismantled when there's enough of it to turn into another volley of pot shots.
Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours. This is the sort of thing that requires a source.
Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.
I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation; that magnitude of error is often a good warning sign that you've been deriving facts from conclusions rather than vice-versa. Discovering that just once should provoke introspection akin to finding "just one termite" in your walls. But the correction doesn't seem to have nudged your perspective at all, and now we see it didn't even elicit politeness, so further corrections this far down-thread probably won't be productive either. I'll stop here.
Not really when the 'grass gets mowed' every so often and everything that is build up is razed to the ground. And then there are all the restrictions that mean that they simply can't use the money to build a solid economy. From my perspective, all that aid just goes into a black hole.
Note that Israel has now been systematically destroying Gaza, so it takes enormous resources just to build back housing, hospitals, schools, etc. So even getting back to a aid-dependent economy with basic needs being met, will requires enormous investments.
You really think that after just razing most of Gaza to the ground, they will spend a lot of money to rebuild it???
It is very obvious that there is a conflict happening where both parties distrust each other immensely and use violence against each other. You keep spending effort to prove this (albeit in a rather biased way), as if it is in doubt and as if scoring brownie points about this matters if the goal is actual peace.
You undermine your own point with your 'inductive reasoning,' because if you limit yourself to extrapolating short term trends then your fantasy that a unilateral surrender is a reasonable thing to demand and would solve the problem is absurd. Because inductive reasoning would not make one conclude that the Palestinians would give up violence, especially when an oppressive regime governs them. And inductive reasoning would not lead one to conclude that Israel would suddenly change course and allow the Palestinians to actually build up a proper economy.
I put two hyperlinks in my previous post, and I can see yours.
That's an unreasonable request when it is a pattern of behavior that goes back a long time. Besides, modern search engines are fully enshittified now, so finding proper evidence has gotten ever harder.
It is a criticism of your beliefs, which is not a personal insult, unless you believe that I may not dismiss your beliefs.
Ultimately, the idea that all Palestinians can suddenly be made to no longer be violent, is absurd. It either requires the belief that the Palestinians are a hive mind, or that Hamas or whomever have a perfect way of controlling the behavior of every person. If your solutions are build on such absurd beliefs, then I cannot take them seriously.
Note that it is just as absurd to think that Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers can be made to suddenly stop using unjustified violence against Palestinians.
Sorry for not fisking your entire comment. After all, even if you were right on this point, it still would not actually disprove my claims, that merely require that overpopulation exists, not a specific cause. But you are wrong:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/g-s1-59633/gaza-buffer-zone-israel-military
And note that I never claimed that this is the only reason for overpopulation.
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I do not see Israel as a society that aims to be racially pure, because Jews pretty transparently aren't of one race.
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