I haven’t written about Operation Cast Lead – my main principled position on this sort of question is that we shouldn’t get too involved, although Britain has always been somewhat involved in this case, so I really don’t have anything useful to suggest.
I was particularly struck, however, by this report from the WSJ Europe, (via Neil Craig). The central claim being made is that the problem is not that Arabs and Jews are eternal enemies, or that Gaza is the front line between Civilization and Islamofascism, or that the Injustice of the creation of Israel is a wound that can never heal. The problem is that Gaza is one giant sink estate, a culture of benefit dependents who have nothing else to do with their lives than to cause trouble.
That’s a narrative that seems intrinsically more plausible to me than the others. Not that I have any, you know, evidence or anything, but it seems worth looking into.
If it’s true, I still don’t know what to do about it. This is the problem a welfare state causes. But nobody wants to cut off the aid money and watch people starve. The only palatable solution would involve turning Gaza from a sink estate into a functioning productive economy, without ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. If we knew how to do that, there would be a lot few problems all over the world.
That view strikes me as exactly the view that Mencius Moldbug would propose. The reason these people cause trouble (and by these people, I also mean the Israelis to an extent. Sometimes I think that the war is an important part of holding that country together.) is because when they create a ruckus they get attention. When they get attention they get money.
Being that Gaza is, at present, a piece of crap with no means of generating wealth on its own, this is the only economically viable activity going.