A popular opening in debates about the fate of Gaza and its people is that it's an open air prison. Beyond being a prison, however, we have to accept that most of those there have never been permitted to move anywhere else, but not because of any "crime" beyond being born in Gaza (not a crime).
A kind of malign neglect and condescending authoritarianism forces them to stay in place. The United Nations is complicit.
This is how it is in many nations, not just for those in Palestine: you're born in Bangladesh, so you must stay in Bangladesh; you're born in Sri Lanka so you must stay in Sri Lanka... and so on. In that sense, Gaza is hardly the largest open air prison. Pick any nation that keeps its people locked inside its borders.
But then who is keeping the Gazans locked up, or the Bangladeshis for that matter? People in other parts of the world. Various people with titles have decided they're in charge of human traffic patterns. If you hope to move, you'll need to pay them. They're in control of the documentation.
Gazans have to stay in Gaza because the world says so, and not just because of Israelis. Actually, many Israelis say they'd like the Gazans to leave Gaza. Allow Gaza to be gentrified and push the poor people out, many of the real estate minded are thinking. This happens around the world. Slums get cleared for New York freeways.
The do-gooder world then smugly steps in, presuming it's speaking for all Gazans, in standing up to the Israelis and saying "forced displacement" is ethnic cleansing, which is a crime. Which is worse, "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" or is your vocabulary so corrupted you don't see the difference?
Were not Libyans forcibly displaced, and the Syrians? How about the Ukrainians? In the face of violence and famine, looming wars, these peoples became refugees and fled. That's what humans do in the face of disaster. They escape. One could say voluntarily, in light of the alternative. At least they could exercise that one remaining freedom, to avoid death.
Yet the Gazans are not supposed to flee for any reason. They're exceptional. Or if they flee, they all have to move en masse to some singular camp in the Sinai or whatever. Why on earth is that so? Why not let them disperse, as innocent free agents who have committed no crimes? It's their planet too ya know.
Many unionists in the north thought the slaves should stay put, and not make a mad dash for freedom. Sure, abolitionists hoped the slaves would escape and formed their underground railroads, but these were in the minority.
If slaves did get away, many unionists were in favor of rounding them up and sending them back to their open air prison cotton fields, as that's where they belonged, right? Why anger the south unnecessarily, and provoke a civil war? Civil rights for Blacks were not a priority for most northerners.
Likewise, once the slaves were emancipated, a lot of unionists, including Lincoln, imagined them moving en masse, as a group, to Liberia, or maybe to Haiti. "You're free to go guys, pack your things". Few left. Few had the means to leave.
I understand taking a gamble and moving to a faraway land, even leaving most family and friends, would not be everyone's choice. Not everyone joins the navy, or enrolls in that year abroad either.
This is how the New World was populated by Anglo-Euros in the first place: by the risk takers who saw few prospects in staying put in the Old World.
Having worked the fields and fought in the war in many cases, Blacks felt as entitled to a place in the sun as any newcomers to the Americas. The immigrant whites had no more claim to the place than anyone else who came over, unless you believed in their Doctrine of Discovery (which none had heard of back then).
I certainly get why many freed slaves felt that way about their newest homeland, never having seen another. Indigenous peoples, many ethnically cleansed from their ancestral spaces, likewise hoped to regain some lost freedoms, such as fishing rights and some control over land use and zoning (with some success in some cases).
So does New Palestine need to be a large contiguous piece of land in the Middle East? It isn't today. Palestinians are scattered around the world. Many are Christians. Many live in North America, or in Jordan, or in Kuwait. Does that mean they can't have a Bank of Palestine?
Likewise Jews are spread around the world, as are Muslims. The various ethnicities do not all get their own jigsaw puzzle piece on the United Nations map of nations, which never holds steady in any case. I'm a proud Pythonista, yet Python Nation is but science fiction in geek lore, with a legal headquarters in Delaware. What if I got my basic income from there, as some do from owning shares? Global Data Corporation.
Many subcultures have no need for, and no desire for, their own nation. Why bother, when you can form a supranational corporation, or religious sect instead? I'd put the Quakers in this category, after the experiment we called Pennsylvania, a wannabe utopia eventually overrun by degenerate Indian War proponents, typical Manifest Destiny ethnocentric Anglo-Euro types (blech), proto-imperialists.
The inhumane treatment of the denizens of Gaza, not only right now, but up to right now, is testament to the abject corruption of the whole idea of open air prison nation states, and what they do to us humans, how they make us miscalculate and mistreat one another. I'm glad Quakers don't have a nation state in this day and age, when they're so obviously dinosauric.
Nations dumb us down. They turn us into bumbling clowns serving in ridiculous organizational charts, behaving according to dangerously obsolete paradigms. Buggy programming. GIGO.
That is, unless there are forms of nationalism that are likewise responsibly global. We see some glimmers. USA OS.
Palestine might be an example of such a globally responsible, borderless, Diaspora Nation, with properties all over the world, including many office towers in various capitals.
I'm waiting to see if we get campus buildings in the UAE for example and/or in Singapore. Perhaps we already have several, I wouldn't know. I'm far from omniscient on these matters.
