End the Occupation?

What is "occupied territory"? This seems an important question when looking at the issue at hand. The "occupied territories" -- in modern US vernacular -- mean the Gaza strip and the West Bank (of the Jordan river). Definition 4 of occupied on dictionary.com says:

To seize possession of and maintain control over by or as if by conquest.

Problems like this one happen in the United States all the time. People live in perfectly good homes in perfectly fine neighborhoods that have the misfortune of lying in the path of an oncoming freeway. Because the fifth ammendment of our quaint consitution doesn't allow the gumment to take property "without just compensation." We pay them fair market value for their property (plus a little extra for their trouble) and use it for the public good.

And because we live in a tolerant, varied, and busy country, those displaced folk have lots of possibilites about where they can live. They pick a state, a city, a neighborhood, and tell their real estate agent that they would prefer something with "old world charm", rather than a brand-new skinny house. But it has to have DSL.

Movers haul in the big stuff, friends help them decide how to organize the kitchen. The owners run around in a frenzy deciding where to put what. Then they order out for pizza, flop exhausted into bed, notice for a few moments the novel sounds of their new abode, and fall asleep hoping that they'll remember where the bathroom is at 2am.

In the US, such displaced persons don't pine away, raving about right of return and occupaction. They wake up the next morning and go to work or school or Home Depot. They get on with their lives.

At first glance, you might say that the situation of the Palestinian refugees is more analogous to the poor who get kicked out onto the street when their apartment goes condo.

There were 700,000 or so Palestinian refugees after Israel failed to fold against the combined might of its massed Arab neighbors in 1948. My 2002 Time Almanac informs me that Palestinian refugees now number 4,000,000^*. The asterisk indicates that: "sources vary widely in number reported. I seem to recall that the UN pegs the number at more like 1.5 mil. The territory that Israel claims as Israel-proper has not grown appreciably since 1948, so the refugees have clearly found at least one way to pass the time.

Billions of dollars, shekels, riyals, and (now) Euros have flowed into these refugee camps. Israel has offered compensation packages, and the saner among the refugees took the money with a smile and got out of Dodge.

Atif A. Kubursi makes some assumptions and walks us through how he calculates total compensation required as $327 billion. Some of that includes pain and suffering. Sondra's 12C tells me that that comes out to $81,750 a head, if you go with a 4 million count. I have some major reservations about his numbers. He assumes 4% economic growth since 1948, for one. My almanac says that Jordan had 2.0% real growth in 1999. The oil-tick Saudis grew at 1.6%, Israel managed 2.1% that year. Syria stunk it up at 0% but Egypt managed 5% probably by dint of an awful 1998. We cranked it up 4.2%, by comparison. Those were the days.

In the US we don't hold on overmuch to our homelands. That doesn't seem to hold true in all societies.

No more "occupied territories"

We didn't hear of "occupation" when Jordan and Egypt annexed and controlled the West Bank and Gaza for nearly 20 years. When Nasser called for the elimination of Israel, kicked a UN peacekeeping force out, massed troops on the Israel/Egypt border, and committed an act of war (closing the straits of Tiran) in 1967. The Arabs and Israelis got into a little scuffle. In the process, Israel conquered the entire Sinai penninsula along with Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Israel didn't set out to grab this territory. Indeed, they showed remarkable restraint in their grabbiness.

Historically, when two or more countries fight a war and one country wins, the winner wins. It wins what it won. Israel won that land and there are millenias of precedent that would indicate that they get to keep it.

Indeed, they traded the vast majority of it (Sinai) for peace with Egypt in 1979. How do you trade something that you don't own?

It seems that many Israelis are throwing up their hands and saying that a Palestinian state is more trouble than it's worth, in fact, it might lead to less stability, rather than more, given the Palestinian's ultimate goal.

When you're negotiating with an impossible partner, it's like.... It's like.... It's like dealing with a kid throwing a tantrum. Eventually you realize that you're getting nowhere, that you have to stop and change the dynamics of the situation.

They've tried that with their recent "incursions" into territory that's arguably theirs to incur upon. It's cleared out much of the roughest of the riff-raff, but it hasn't brought peace, that's for sure.

So, what to do? It's too late for me to finish this post, so I'll leave you hanging and get back to this tomorrow. Today, actually.