The Gazans still represent themselves as winning the War Tekumah against Israel.  Though this author has in the past described them as the undead, they are quite alive; their population is burgeoning, and in an unprecedented development in world history, these terrorists and their supporters are being offered a free ride to a better life.  All poor people should be so lucky.

What has saved the lives of the Gazan people, even though, throughout history, when a much weaker nation repeatedly attacks a much stronger one, the former is annihilated?  The Gazans are still alive and multiplying because the divine heart of Judaism is a singular reverence for human life.  How the Jews got stuck with such an inconvenient viewpoint, God only knows.  But the Gazans just might be getting tired of being a professional death cult perched on a pile of rubble while faceless young brutes nightmarishly clad in black spandex declare they are winning, winning, winning. 

When a house has long been used for violence and crime, it becomes unsellable.  It has to be razed to the ground and replaced.  Gaza is not an open-air prison; it is an open-air crime scene.  Every hospital and school in Gaza is tainted with criminal conspiracy.  The air hangs heavy with dejection and despair.  Nevertheless, the Gazans are a pitiable people.  The malevolent funding that enabled their decades of stupefied self-imprisonment, punctuated by up close and personal barbarity against Israelis, is coming to an end.   

The president just repeated his threat that all hell will break loose on the Ides of February if the remaining hostages are not released.  This follows a general proposal by President Trump for the United States to take over and rebuild the Gaza strip.

Let’s assume that whatever “all hell breaks loose” means, there will be surviving Gazans.  The following is a vision board for rehoming Gazan survivors, which a few years ago would have seemed absurd, today is far-fetched, and tomorrow could happen in a Trump New York minute.

The president could appoint a commission of leading spiritual and intellectual leaders to swiftly provide a plan for safe evacuation and resettlement of surviving Gazans around the world.  There will be no right of return, and travel restrictions will be imposed for the first years after resettlement.  Measures will be taken to ensure that only combatants are left should they wish to continue winning, winning, winning.  The commission will negotiate with the many stable democracies throughout the world that have a history of welcoming refugees and of legally enforcing religious tolerance.  The remaining Gazans should not be sent to the neighboring Islamic countries that exploited and weaponized them into their wretched lives of predation in the first place.

The Gazan tragedy was a problem created by money, and any problem created by money can be solved by money.  The committee will form a March of Dimes–type charitable foundation that collects private contributions, large and small, from people around the world in order to compensate nations for accepting Gazan evacuees.  Such a charitable foundation would be capable of raising trillions of dollars.  The most costly discretionary enterprise in human history is war.  Volodymyr Zelensky is miffed because some butterfingers just misplaced 130 billion dollars, presumably on its way to the crimson wheat fields of Ukraine.  Aren’t there dominions in this world willing to resettle a community of the wretched for $130 billion?

The Gazans need not be helplessly frog-marched anywhere unless they choose to be.  In the resettlement process, they can group themselves into kinship and community blocs, which can be aggregated into larger groups depending on workable arrangements of resettlement.  A model that parallels college applications could be used to enable blocs of people to express relocation preferences with rank ordering of choices first, second, third, etc.

The greatest mercy for the Gazan people is for the pulverized rectangle of land they cling to to be rendered physically unlivable, as it has been morally unlivable.  Palestine is no more; Palestinians are no more.

May the descendants of Palestinians now in Gaza rejoin the living and heed the sound of distant caravan bells as their ancestors did.  Follow the words of Jelaludin Rumi.  “Come to the caravan, come.  Wanderers, worshipers, lovers of leaving, come to the caravan.  Even if you have broken your vow a thousand times, come to the caravan, come.”

Image via Pixabay.