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Trump's Plan to Free Palestinians from Gaza
(Wall Street Journal) Elliot Kaufman - President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries. The real disturbance is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do. Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland. This is the worst kind of nationalism, an eliminationist one that brings its people only misery. But Arab states have long indulged it. It relieved them of the burdens first of resettling Palestinians and then of starting and losing wars to annihilate Israel. The world plays along. UNRWA was founded in 1949 to resettle the displaced from the defeated Arab invasion of Israel. The Arab and Soviet blocs made UNRWA into a permanent international commitment to the lost cause. Palestinians are radicalized in UNRWA schools and kept on the international dole rather than encouraged to build institutions of their own. That's the purpose of the Gaza. Trump now proposes to do the job UNRWA never would. The scandal isn't that displaced Palestinians now could be "transferred" voluntarily out of Gaza; it's that they have been forced to stay there. When Palestinians tried to flee the war, as is their human right, Egypt forcibly closed the border - with the support of the international community. Their incarceration by UNRWA and Egypt is the brutal status quo, strangely unchallenged until now.