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Category: International

16/02/2024

Gaza: The Final Solution?

15 February 2024

As the Israeli army threatens to invade the last part of Gaza, Australia, Canada, NZ, the UN and most of the world ask them to stop. The citizens of Gaza were already crowded into a very small area. Then they were moved to the South, then into ever smaller areas. Now military action will kill large numbers who have nowhere to shelter. It is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Netanyahu says that he wants to destroy Hamas and that the hostages must be there somewhere. Presumably as he has not found them in the areas he is already occupying.

He is still trying to defeat Hamas militarily and always has intelligence that they are hiding in the civilian population.

The idea that Hamas is separate from the population it governs is absurd. It may have a military wing, but it is a political party that was voted in. The reason that they were voted in was because the Palestinian Authority were seen as patsies for the Israeli government, corrupt and concerned with land rezoning kickbacks in the putative capital of the West Bank Palestinian state, Ramallah.

But even if the Israelis killed everyone associated with Hamas, their actions have guaranteed generations of hatred for the Israelis. The ‘war on terror’ was a silly slogan, as terror is a means of fighting that underdogs use, not a religion, a cause or a people.

Which begs the final question; what is Israel doing? Netanyahu is under a great deal of pressure personally in that he is facing corruption changes and he has actually passed legislation to disempower the courts. This was a cause of many demonstrations before the Hamas raids on 7 October that triggered the current war. He is also dependent for power on far-Right Zionist parties for the survival of his government. In a way he needs the war.

But I wonder if this final stage is actually the final solution of the ‘Palestinian problem’. Israel has pretended that there would be a ‘two state solution’ as it pushed Palestinians off their land and out of their Jerusalem houses, gave their jobs to immigrant guest workers so that they had no means of support, and kept them in a gated city, Gaza. Having deliberately made a two state solution impossible, they then made peace with adjoining countries and talked about a ‘regional solution’, which sounded very like ‘you take the Palestinians’. Now, they may be saying to the rest of the world, ‘Are you going to open the border and let these people escape to the Sinai or will we kill them all?’ Of course if they go to the Sinai they will be a huge refugee problem, but it will not be Israel’s problem, it will be the world’s problem- a ‘regional solution’, as Israel will not take them back.

Israel is already a pariah. It has nowhere to put the Palestinians and would have to rebuild Gaza, which it will not want to do. It cannot integrate them as is being attempted in post-Apartheid South Africa, as the enmity is probably now worse than it was in South Africa. And Netanyahu’s far-right religious backers probably see this as an opportunity for a final solution. Do we really believe the stated reasons for their actions? Who will blink first?

05/02/2024

Gaza Outcomes

4 February 2024

As Israel destroys all of Gaza and the refugees huddle on the beach one might ask what is the end point?

Israel claims it wants to destroy Hamas, because it is a ‘terrorist organisation’

But what does this mean? A terrorist is someone who uses attacks on civilians to create fear in a population to achieve a political end. One could ask if that was what the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was doing already, failing to recognise land title, awarding Palestinian-occupied land to settlers and then sending the Army to defend the donated land for the ‘settlers’.

But leaving that aside, it is true that Hamas or groups associated with it used terrorist tactics on October 7th. Terrorist tactics are almost always used by the weaker side for the simple reason that they cannot hope to win a more conventional conflict.

But Hamas were the elected government of Gaza, elected largely because the Palestinian Authority was seen to be corrupted by land development money and a patsy organisation for the Israelis.

Palestinians are actually quite an nonreligious people, but saw Hamas as at least on their side.

The Israelis response was at first called ‘self defence’ but the idea that killing 28,000 mostly civilians and flattening a whole city is an appropriate retaliation for 1,200 deaths seems totally unreasonable.

It is also unreasonable to think that Hamas can be defeated militarily. It is not a military problem. Even if every last Hamas member were killed, their ideas will never be separated from the rest of the Gaza population. They have witnessed this unrestrained killing and destruction of their homes- it would be difficult to believe that in the long term they will not hate Israel.

So what is Israel’s objective? One could answer that it is the short-term survival of Netanyahu politically, but that is too simple. Israel has pretended it wanted a two-state solution, which means giving the West Bank to the Palestinians. Yet it has systematically placed 750,00 settlers on all the high points of the West Bank, supported them and armed them to the teeth. It has deliberately made a two state solution impossible as a policy for the last 70 years. As Netanyahu made good relations with Qatar, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, he started to speak about a ‘Regional Solution’ to the ‘Palestinian problem’. This sounded very much like asking his Arab neighbours to take Palestinians as refugees/migrants.

Now the Gazans will have nowhere to go. Their city is totally destroyed. Who would pay for its rebuild? Who will govern this wasteland?

It seems obvious that the Israelis want the Gazans to go into the Sinai desert in Egypt and then become a refugee problem for the UN and the whole world- i.e no longer a problem for Israel. It has worked with the Rohingyas in Myanmar.

Biden is talking about a two-state solution, and not having the Gazans go into Egypt. How realistic is this?

Fillipo Grandi was Commissioner -General of UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency) and visited Australia as a guest of the UN Association of Australia in 2012. He was Italian, a consummate diplomat and in charge of relief for Palestinian refugees. I chaired a meeting at the Sydney Peace Foundation at Sydney Uni where he was the guest speaker. He was extremely careful not to criticise Israel to the extent that I as a debater and politician marvelled at his skill as he fielded loaded questions from each side of the debate.

According to Wikipedia UNRWA now has 30,000 staff and employs a lot of Palestinian refugees to help administer their aid programme. This is hardly surprising. There are few jobs for Palestinian refugees and the UN needs relatively cheap staff. Naturally they would use Palestinians to help their own people. It is therefore hardly surprising that with Hamas as the Gaza government, some UNRWA staff would be involved with them, and also unsurprising that some would be sympathetic to Hamas.

We might ask who discovered the connection between a dozen UNRWA workers and Hamas? Israeli security? Now we see the US, Australia, the UK and others stopping funding to UNRWA. The Gaza refugees are already starving. Who does this aid cessation benefit? Israel of course. The last hope of the Gaza refugees is taken away.

It seemed that the only two possibilities for a resolution of the Israeli/Palestine problem were either a two-state solution or a one state solution as advocated by Jeff Halper in his book ‘An Israeli in Palestine’ which was an Apartheid reconciliation process similar to what happened in South Africa. The chances of either of these solutions seems remote now, so the Israeli solution, of bombing and starving Palestinians out of Gaza and into Egypt initially and then anywhere else may be the only one. In the West Bank, with their land taken and the menial jobs now being done by imported Sri Lankans, Filipinos and Indonesians rather than Palestinians, there will be pressure for them to follow their Gaza compatriots into exile.

I hope that I am quite wrong about this, but I doubt it.

Here is a new word for irreconcilably taking someone’s home, Domicide, in an article in The Guardian.

www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/jan/30/how-war-destroyed-gazas-neighbourhoods-visual-investigation?CMP=share_btn_link

16/12/2023

Power: the 50-25-25 rule

16 December 2023

When I was in Parliament someone said to me that big business had 50% of the power, all governments together 25%, and every other power group 25%.

It seemed a strange concept at first, but on reflection, I think it is about right.

Only after revolutions does it change much and historians argue over for how long.

Senator David Pocock, the Canberra independent, spent a lot of time trying to get the Government to release documents between Santos and themselves about the Barossa gas development in the Timor Sea.

THe reason for this was the Environmental Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) bill 2023.

Santos is the front partner and 50% owner of the Barossa gas field with SK E&S, a Korean company having 35% and JERA, a Japanese company, 15%. They wanted to develop the largest fossil fuel project in Australia, (natural gas), just when Australia is supposedly getting towards net zero carbon dioxide. Quite apart from the fact that methane burns to carbon dioxide, natural gas, having been formed from the decay of carbon products, is usually found with large amounts of carbon dioxide in with the methane. The Barossa gas is worse than usual at 16-20% carbon dioxide. Santos therefore wanted a permit to separate the carbon dioxide, capture it and store it.

Jennifer Rayner of the Climate Council is one of the many environmentalists who point out that CCS, Carbon Capture and Storage has never been done successfully and is just a fudge to continue fossil fuel use. But it gets worse. When the carbon dioxide is supposedly all captured, it is to be piped to a supposedly exhausted gas field, Bayu-Undan, in East Timor 100 km away and injected into the wells there. What could possibly go wrong? East Timor is not a signatory to the Paris Climate agreement. And if that were not enough, the pipeline to East Timor will not be finished until 5 years after the methane is being shipped, so 5 years worth of carbon dioxide waste is simply to be exhausted to the atmosphere.

All thai was pointed out in Parliament by Pocock and the Greens. There is a carbon offset scheme, where Australian Carbon Offset Units (ACCUs) could be bought, but estimates have been that not enough of these could possibly be created to offset the amount of gas produced by projects currently in the pipeline and the price of ACCUs would rise. The Sea Dumping bill was passed with support from the Coalition. The Greens and Pocock held out, unsuccessfully.

The government resisted releasing the Santos correspondence until after the bill was passed and the correspondence said that Santos’ decisions had already been made and considerable investments undertaken and it would upset the Korean and the Japanese investors if the project were stopped or delayed. It seems that the Koreans and Japanese pressured Penny Wong and the Foreign Affairs Ministry and overcame Chris Bowen and the Environment Ministry. .

All this happened at the same time as the COP28 (28th Conference of the Parties of the 1992 Agreement)in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). UAE is the second largest economy in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia and exports 3 million barrels of oil a day. The president of the COP meeting was Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also Minister of Industry of the UAE and head of the Abi Dhabi National Oil Company. How anyone could have expected a resolution to phase out fossil fuels to come from a meeting so constituted defies understanding. The whole setting seemed beyond satire. The final text, which seems very hard to get actually agrees to phase down fossil fuels but gives no timetable and allows gas as a transition fuel, which is effectively a loophole to increase gas production.

Environment Minister Chris Bowen said that it was ‘no small thing’ to agree to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. But what is all this worth with no timetable and no commitment to phase them out?

Pocock is an ex-Rugby player. My local rugby club has the motto ‘Facta non Verba’= ‘Deeds not Words’ and Pocock is true to the breed.

He said ‘As a country we’ve got to make the choice. Do we put our futures and the ..future..ahead of the short-term profits of a handful of companies like Santos?’

The answer it seems is ‘Yes’. Santos tells the Labor government what to do, and the Labor government does it. The Liberals opposed initially as they usually oppose everything, but when they found out about what Santos and the Japanese and Koreans wanted they quickly came on board.

The rule about 50-25-25 seems to hold good. 50% quickly became 75%, then 100%.

It is very hot today, and summer is not yet here. It would be nice to think that next year will be better, but it won’t, maybe ever…

Here is the story in The Saturday Paper. You might wonder why it is not in the other papers.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2023/12/16/emails-reveal-labor-caved-santos#mtr

26/11/2023

What is Israel’s End-Game?

25 November 2023

It is hard to see an end to the Palestinian conflict.

Zionists believe that God gave the Jews the historic land of Palestine, and this idea has been supported by some Christians who took the Old Testament literally.

After WW2, the Zionists did terrorist attacks on the war-weary British who let them return to Palestine. In 1948 they ‘Declared the State of Israel’ when they were about a third of the population, killed a village of Palestinians, which made the others flee. They then said that no land title prior to the State of Israel existed and all land titles had to be re-registered and all unoccupied land belonged to the State. They have then declined to register Palestinian-owned land, so they can give away farms in the West Bank or even unoccupied houses in Jerusalem. Settlers, especially from Eastern Europe, are willing to fight to retain land that they are given on the West Bank.

In Jerusalem, the Palestinians had the menial jobs, which made it hard to pay the high rents there, and more recently Sri Lankans or others are given the jobs, so the Palestinians have to go to Ramullah to find work, which does not pay as well, so they have trouble paying their Jerusalem rent. If they move out or do not visit much, as checked up on by their electricity, water or phone location records, their houses are ‘unoccupied’ and given away. The bottom line of all this is the Palestinians being gradually squeezed out of the West Bank and Jerusalem. If they ever leave Israel they may not be permitted to return.

The settlements on the West Bank are now in a pattern on the high ground linked by roads so that the Israeli military can support any settlers troubled by the Palestinian farmers, now defined as terrorists, who try to defend their land. In Jerusalem, Jews own the West side and now take houses in Palestinian East Jerusalem, house by house.

As all this has gone on incrementally for years, Israel has pretended that it has a ‘two state’ solution, as it put the 700,000 settlers in the area that could or would have been Palestine. In other words it was happy to pretend that there was a ‘two state solution’ as they systematically made it impossible.

Hamas recognised that this was a nonsense. They won the elections in Gaza because the Palestinian Authority was corrupted by land deals. Israel bullied Jordan and Egypt into compliance then started making wider friendships with Qatar, Dubai and Saudi Arabia and started to talk about ‘regional solutions’ to the Palestinian problem. It looked like the ‘solution’ for them was to go as refugees to anywhere but Israel. This is why Hamas struck. Naturally everyone is upset about this, but no one suggests what they might have done as an alternative. Perhaps just attack an Israeli military base?

Now Israel has struck back. It is hard to see that flattening Gaza is a rational response. Netanyahu, being personally corrupt, has retained power by sharing it with evermore dodgy coalition partners, from the fanatical Zionists to the fanatical Right wing. He has also tried to undermine the judiciary to avoid personal corruption charges. Now the much-vaunted Israeli spy network has been caught off guard, probably because they relied on AI tracking of Palestinian communications networks, which Hamas, sensibly enough, decided not to use. Netanyahu, who was in trouble already and will now be blamed for the Hamas success has hit back to be the strong man. But simply flattening a city with all its civilians may be revenge, but it is not a solution. He has flattened the Northern half of Gaza, while telling the citizens to move to the South, but cut off all food, water and medical supplies. Now he is bombing the South as well.

Where to from here? Israel seems more bent on revenge than having any rational policy. The other possibility is that they will make Gaza unlivable, and force the US and UIN to allow the Gazans into Egypt as refugees, which will start as temporary and become permanent as Israel does not rebuild Gaza, or let them return to Israel. Israel will be pariahs, but they are already, and the refugees will be someone else’s problem. Numerically there are as many Palestinians as Jews and even if the Gaza population were moved, the West Bank Palestinians would remain.

The other alternatives are:

The ‘Two State solution, with Israel either moving its 700,000 settlers from the West Bank, or getting them to live with the Palestinians sharing the land that they once owned or
Israel grants equal rights to Palestinians within Israel, admits it was an apartheid state and has a reconciliation process based on the South African model.

In that the ‘Two State Solution’ and the ‘Apartheid reconciliation’ model both look absolutely impossible with the bloodshed, killing and bitterness that has been rekindled as never before, it is very hard to see a solution. Yet there are still those who want Israel forced into a ‘Two State solution’ by sanctions, as seen below:

Two solutions for the “Question of Palestine”

25/11/2023

Argentinian Populist Wins Election

25 November 2023

I visited Argentina, Uruguay and Chile for 4 weeks over Christmas 2018-9.

Argentina was a pleasant, orderly, developed country. The people were friendly, and you could sit in cafes in town squares where flamenco dancers performed, supported by tips from the enthusiastic locals and tourists. The main part of Buenos Aires had been built, modelled on Paris around 1900, when Argentina was relatively rich because of beef prices. As commodities fell in price relative to manufactured goods, their economy has suffered. But the fine buildings in the centre of the city remain. They have alternated between leftist governments that nationalise and take resources from the foreigners and right wing governments, usually supported by the US, who privatise and encourage foreign investment, then use repression to control the people.

The government, when we were there was middle of the road, but having trouble controlling inflation, which was at around 40%. From a visitors point of view, things were cheap, a meal for two with wine less than half what it would have been in a Sydney pub. We did not feel unsafe.

Because of the concerns with the inflation problem, there were worries about democracy in the future, given the history of right-wing coups in many South American countries.

There had been a military coup in 1975, which seems to have been US-facilitated and the military junta had been in power from 1976 to 1983. Approximately 30,000 people who had been arrested ‘disappeared’. They were part of a wider ‘Operation Condor’ to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil by the right-wing governments in those countries. The US CIA provided the database so was well aware of what was happening.

Even now, every Thursday at 1pm the mothers and sisters of ‘The Disappeared’ dress in white and walk in pairs around a statue in Plaza de Mayo outside the Parliament. The women had started protesting in 1977, but anything more than two people walking together was termed a crowd’ and thus illegal. Of those who perpetrated this atrocity only one soldier actually told the tale of what happened. Some of the disappeared had simply been shot in mass graves, but others went to the Naval training headquarters in Buenos Aires where they were kept in the attic and tortured in the basement. Some were released, but others were drugged with thiopentone, loaded into trucks, then planes and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Some were made to call their families with a gun at their heads and say that they could not talk, but they were happy in a new life in Paris or some other unlikely tale.

Survivors described how they had a hood over their head at all times and could only see their feet. They described the steps and the colour of the walls, and where the phone was that they had to speak on and the lift next to the phone. Later, the government came, took out the lift and the phone and painted the walls of the Naval training centre a different colour, so that the building would not match the descriptions of the inmates. Naturally there were no plans of the building changes available. The area was a museum when we were there and there was a small research area, still trying to identify individuals and what had happened to them. They were worried that the government would defund them and close their museum.

Now a far-Right populist, Javier Milei, has won the election, promising to abolish the Central Bank, change the currency to the US dollar, privatise everything and make guns freely available. He denies climate change and the crimes of the previous military junta. He has been congratulated by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the recently defeated populist from Brazil. He also wants to re-take the Malvinas aka the Falklands. There is little hope of this simplistic nonsense improving anything in Argentina. The worry is not only that the ‘Museum to the Disappeared’ will disappear, but that it will all happen again.

www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/argentina-presidential-election-far-right-libertarian-javier-milei-wins-after-rival-concedes

23/11/2023

Climate Change- a Depressing Update

23 November 2023

In Australia the Labor government struggles mightily to get legislation through to allow Woodside to pipe carbon dioxide to East Timor’s territorial waters for supposed CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) to allow them to develop a new gas field. East Timor is not a signatory to the Paris Accord- convenient eh? Supposedly the carbon dioxide will be pumped into a reservoir that used to have gas, but Woodside has a track record of not meeting its CCS targets; if you think CCS is a real thing and not a cop-out farce.

Evidence suggests that the world is on target for a 3 degrees temperature rise, which may make human life unsustainable in its present form. Petrostates are installing lights at beaches so that people can go for a night swim to cool off because it is too hot in the daytime!

The graphs below show world energy consumption tripling since 2000 and continuing that upward trajectory. If one considers that the production of energy by a human is about a kilowatt a day, one realises that the amount of energy consumed now per person is many times that, and far higher in developed countries, the situation is unsustainable. The invention of the steam engine in 1690 and the internal combustion engine in 1872 and the use of fossil fuels, which has resulted in the energy and carbon dioxide stored as carbon over tens of thousands of years being released in a century. It is ridiculous to think that reforestation can capture this amount of carbon as the total area of forests in the world is still declining.

COP28 (the 28th Conference of the Parties) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will start on 30 November in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE state oil company ADNOC. How much good is this likely to do?

COP-out: Why the petrostate-hosted climate talkfest will fail

23/11/2023

Myanmar- some hope in Rebel Victories.

23 November 2023

Three groups in northern Myanmar have joined together in Operation 1027, after the day they launched their offensive (27 October). They have been very successful against the hated military dictatorship. The question is whether this will be the beginning of the end for the junta, who have been helped a great deal by the Chinese, presumably for economic concessions. But the Chinese may not be happy with the regime, as it has tolerated a ‘scam industry’ near the Chinese border, and it may also be that the Chinese are not sure that the junta have enough control of the country to allow a rail line to be built to a port on the Myanmar coast, which the Chinese want to use to export via the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean without needing to go around the Malay peninsula.

It is speculated that the Chinese have given tacit support to the rebels, and if this is the case the junta will have more trouble.

I visited Myanmar in 2017 when Aung San Suu Kyi was theoretically in power, but with the unpopular military junta still really in control. (There are a number of posts on my website, chesterfieldevans.com if you search ‘Myanmar’).

There was a coup in 2021 and Aung Sang Su Kyi was forced from her figurehead power and charged with treason because she had a few walkie talkies to talk to her staff, which were made ‘illegal’ because the junta could not eavesdrop on them. There was some resistance to the coup and unarmed people were shot, but it has led to more organised resistance.

Myanmar is a very divided country so there are different ethnic groups and armies resisting with varying success in different parts of the country. Not much news of this has been in the mainstream media here, until this rebel success. The military are universally feared and hated, which was evident even to the most casual tourist. They are not done yet, but if they lose Chinese support and the people believe that they can be overthrown, they will be.

https://thediplomat.com/2023/10/operation-1027-a-turning-point-for-myanmars-resistance-struggle/

18/11/2023

Israel is Developing East Mediterranean Gas fields without Palestinian ownership

18 November 2023

One of the interesting stories that has had little attention is that Israel is developing a major new gas field in the Eastern Mediterranean and selling the gas to Egypt. Naturally, this is off the coast of Gaza, but as Gaza is technically part of Israel and Palestine still does not technically exist as a country, it is not sharing the wealth with the Palestinians.

There have been demonstrations in Jordan, but the Western media has not even mentioned the gas field as far as I have seen.

www.newarab.com/analysis/palestinians-denied-drilling-rights-mediterranean-gas-fields?fbclid=IwAR28q511gNLgvm02ScTZcMRlRNH3eciM2BS7_ProcX8b7sKdUMQ1vm4aGM8

10/11/2023

A Legal Test Case on Freedom of Speech

10 November 2023

Freedom of speech is much-praised, but with the rise of social media, which allows unusual or non-mainstream opinion holders to meet and amplify their voices, there have been discussions of the need for censorship of opinions likely to be detrimental to society as a whole.

This censorship voice was amplified by some significant events:

The FBI alleges that the Russians interfered in the 2016 US election via social media to sabotage Hilary Clinton and helped Donald Trump to win.

The myth that the 2020 US election was stolen and that Trump won was perpetuated by some, even by Fox News, which was scared of losing its audience (and the ad revenue it derived from them) if it did not give credence to the theory. This helped the assault on the Capitol, which made the US look like a tin-pot dictatorship.

The COVID epidemic, which initially had no cure, led to a number of conspiracy theories, largely spread by social media which significantly reduced acceptance of the vaccines, particularly in the USA.

This has led to calls for social media to be responsible for the posts that they transmit. Algorithms were devised to shut down certain opinions and there are groups tasked to do this. One such group is Newsguard, which tried to stop articles on Ukraine from a left-oriented alternative news site, Consortium News. If a news organisation is classified as fake news, its credibility is undermined and it is not transmitted by media platforms. Its circulation and revenue suffers accordingly.

Consortium News is small and its chief editor is a very experienced ex-Wall St News journalist, Joe Lauria. They sued Newsguard for defamation, then discovered that Newsguard had a contract with the US government to shut down sites that were not conducive to its interest. Effectively the US government had a privatised censorship agent working for it.

Ironically it is the US Democrats who are mainly in favour of censorship, largely because of the events described above, whereas the right-wing Republicans are more for freedom of speech, never mind the consequences. So most of the support for the left-wing Consortium News is coming from the right-wing Republicans. There is quite a lot of interest in the case, as it will determine how censorship is done.

It might be noted that Newsguard also put a warning label on Wikileaks.

Consortium News Sues NewsGuard, US Government For Alleged Defamation

10/11/2023

Is Expulsion of the Palestinians the Israeli End-Game?

10 November 2023

It has been said that Israel has no long-term strategy to deal with the Palestinians within Israel. But Netanyahu had spoken about a ‘regional solution’. The ‘Two State’ solution, where Palestinians were given the West Bank, has been systematically undermined by Israel, which has been settling Jews in a strategic pattern on land that was largely Palestinian occupied for many years. (The Palestinians were not said to own it because all land title prior to the declaration of Israel in 1948 was declared null and void. But in all reasonable assessments they should own the land that they had occupied).

Gaza has been termed a prison. With every aspect of its life determined by Israel including trade, and with a very high unemployment rate this was not an unfair description. Now that it is a flattened and uninhabitable mess, is it not possible that Israel wants to push the Palestinians into the Sinai desert, give the whole problem to the UN as a refugee issue, then offer to buy some land and resettle the Palestinians? There was not much going for Gaza before and there will be less now. Israel is already an international pariah, so what does it have to lose? It is likely to be easier to manage a hostile external force than a hostile internal one. If the Palestinians find jobs and make lives in Egypt all these things may be forgotten in a generation or two?

Here is evidence for the proposition that Israel simply wants to expel the Palestinians:

New Document Leak on Plan to Expel Gaza Population