Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Where Do They Expect All These Palestinians to Go?

Larry Auster, in his approval of a townhall.com article by Ben Shapiro, advocates the expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank. Here's a copy of the e-mail I sent him about what seems to me to be an oversight in that plan.

Hello Mr. Auster,

I read your response to Ben Shapiro's article on expelling the Palestinians out of the West Bank, and as difficult as any proposed solution to Israeli security would be to implement, this seems particularly implausible. Not only would Israel encounter resistance from the Palestinian population, but also any country to which the IDF would attempt to send the Palestinians would resist.

As much as Arab governments like to talk about the plight of Palestine, their not too fond of actual Palestinians, and few countries are going to be willing to take in 5 million poor and poorly educated refugees. Jordan, the most geographically convenient place to move the Palestinians, would obviously refuse since the PLO tried to overthrow their king in 1970. Israel would have to force open Jordan's borders in order to push through all the Palestinian refugees, and that would embroil Israel in a war with a country with which it has had a reasonably stable relationship for decades. The same is true of Egypt and the inhabitants of Gaza.

Given that the West Bank doesn't share a border with any other country, I don't see how these refugees can be moved to any other country short of flying them or trucking them en mass over Israeli soil to Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon, and I doubt that would be a logistically or economically possible thing to do to an unwilling population.

So where do you and Mr. Shapiro suppose Israel would put all of these people, and how do you expect the IDF to get them there?