4 Mini-Essays on the War: #2

This is a more difficult post to write, emotionally, because it gets into questions no one wants to think about. It takes a bit of courage to make these points among liberals, and it will inevitably make people who read it angry. 

Honestly, what could you possibly think would happen if Israel left Gaza to its own devices? 

It already has. 

I'm no fan of the New York Times's in-house conservative, Bret Stephens, but he had a very good column that everybody ought to take into consideration. 

The column is about tunnels: 

In a territory that is 25 miles long, there are somewhere between 350 and 450 miles of underground tunnels. Fathom that for a moment. The London Underground (its subway) is 249 miles. There are 5,700 entrances to Gaza's tunnels discovered so far. The central node with the most entrances is Gaza's main hospital. In other words: the very doctors who can best treat the wounded are human shields.

Israel recognized the need for a Palestinian state in 1993. Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005. The Palestinian Authority was given literally $40 billion in the years after 1993. What's been done with this money? Among other things, a city of tunnels. 

What is done with these tunnels? Well, some of them are for smuggling in provisions, but considering the state of Gaza, even before 10/7, it's worth asking what provisions are being smuggled in. For years, we heard that we should let these tunnels be because they were used to bring in food, textiles, household chemicals, all of which Gazans can acquire in a black market that is almost literally underground. And clearly that's part of the tunnels' purpose. I even advocated that for a while. 

But when you have 40 billion dollars in initial seed money, you don't need tunnels. Even a generation after that initial $40 billion, you don't need tunnels. Even if Gaza had not received a cent of international foreign aid in the decades after 1993, and it's received billions, there would be no need for the tunnels. If there had ever been leadership in Gaza that was even semi-corrupt or semi-authoritarian, leadership that occasionally prized the common good over their own acquisition of more power, there would be no need for tunnels like this because life, however difficult, would be semi-bearable.  

There is no constructing these tunnels without a significant chunk of that initial seed money and an equally significant chunk of all the foreign aid thereafter. How many billions of dollars went into paying Gazans to dig these tunnels? How many billions went into construction equipment? How many billions went into paving the tunnels with concrete and metal? How many billion went into making the weapons the tunnels housed? How many billion went into building underground depots to store weapons? How many billion went into building underground training facilities so that Hamas's soldiers would know how to use them?  

It's just too easy to say 'there is no prosperity in Gaza because Israel hasn't allowed it,' or 'there's no prosperity in Gaza because Israel's destroyed it,' that's no less unfair than saying 'there should be no accountability for Israel's war actions because Palestine's actions are barbaric.' Part of the responsibility is on themselves, not the whole responsibility, but part, and a significant part. 

Everyone in the world is simultaneously acting in the context of their surroundings, and also responsible for their actions alone. 

Just as Israel persists in the illusion that it can fight a perpetual war for its security without eventually losing, Palestine persists in the illusion that it can fight a perpetual war for its liberation without eventually having no state left worth fighting for.