Curated World - Gaza, Ukraine, climate-March 21
First edition of an experimental assemblage of world news with my topspin: this week, the Gaza real estate opportunity and other cynical ideas. Heavy on links and ways in which you can go deeper.
Gaza: Mediterranean real estate — a real fixer-upper
Even by the standards of his own and his extended family — his crooked Dad and his abominable father-in-law, Jared Kushner went there this week, telling an interviewer the coast of Gaza could be great real estate.
“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said at Harvard University, The Guardian reported.
He also suggested Israel move the population of Gaza to its own Negev desert to make way for the redevelopment of the Gaza strip along the Mediterranean: “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there. I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”
As ghastly and cynical as it sounds — and it was both — he isn’t entirely wrong. It could be a beautiful coastline and for the Palestinian kids who used to swim there and the fishermen who went out into the Mediterranean each day (limited in scope by Israel) it was a playground and a source of fresh food.
Kushner was also right in his weird way to note that Gaza could have been more beautiful, livable, and economically active had Hamas not directed so much aid and energy into building an arsenal and fortifications against Israel and to attack it.
In the immediate aftermath of the outrageous attacks of October 7, Hamas published a video showing its preparations and the extraordinary ingenuity that went into its rockets and defenses. It was striking to think how much that ingenuity and skill could have done for Gazans if directed towards their economic betterment and development.
Gaza really does have potential — or at least had it until it was turned into a virtually uninhabitable demolition site by the Israel Defence Force and the scorched earth strategy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is a strategy that the International Court of Justice has accepted could be a “plausible” case of genocide.
Qatar has poured billions into Gaza since Israel withdrew its citizens and forces in 2005 while effectively enforcing its containment. When I visited Gaza as a reporter many years before it was low-rise and felt temporary and strangely vulnerable despite being one of the most crowded places in the world. Before October 7 Gaza City and other cities — several large outgrowths of 70-year-old refugee camps — had become sprawling high-rise cities though still with that half-finished look, not to mention damage from periodic Israeli strikes over the years.
Reconstruction of Gaza, if it could be achieved, will be a central part of ceasefire talks and any return to the idea of normalising relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the prospect of which appeared to be one of the triggers to Hamas acting when it did to scupper any chance of further rapprochement between Israel and Arab states.
That is also why the Kushner remarks are more interesting than they might otherwise be. In one of the genuine diplomatic landmarks of the Trump presidency, Kushner used real flair to bring about the Abraham Accords to start to normalise diplomatic and economic ties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
Gaza, which has unexploited gas fields offshore and that Mediterranean coastline, surely has the potential to be a sort of Beirut (as it was before its disastrous explosion in 2020 and the 15-year Lebanon civil war) if only its Palestinian population — presumably in a post-Hamas era — could get the help to have the hope to do it.
Yet is seems clear that Netanyahu is in mood for destruction and a forced exodus rather an immediate aid let alone long-term reconstruction, saying (according to a translated X post) this week about the US efforts to build a wharf to deliver aid to Gaza: “As far as the State of Israel is concerned, there is no obstacle for the Gazans to leave, maybe even the port they are building could be used for this.”
Go deeper on this subject
Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer? (giftlink)
More than five months in, Israel has neither a military strategy for eliminating Hamas nor a political strategy for living with Gaza - an analysis in The Atlantic by former US State Department official Andrew Exum.
Here is the original and full interview with Kushner from Harvard on YouTube.
Putin doubles down on nuclear rhetoric after sham election
Fresh from a not entirely hard-win 87 percent landslide share of the vote in a ludicrous sham election, Russian President Vladimir Putin doubled down on his supposed readiness to use tactical and even strategic nuclear weapons.
“Weapons exist in order to use them,” the former KGB agent told his pet Russian broadcast journalist Dmitry Kiselyov who has himself talked of turning the United States into “radioactive ash”, The Times reported.
Putin boasted that Russia had nuclear weapons more modern than the United States. He reiterated what is known but recently updated Russian military doctrine that Russia would use nuclear weapons in a situation when it felt threatened.
Asked how that doctrine might apply to the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin, The Times reported: “I don’t think that everything is rushing directly towards this, but we are ready,” He warned, however, that Moscow would view any deployment of US troops to Ukraine, including to occupied territory that Russia claims as its own land, as an unacceptable intervention in the conflict. “I have said many times that [Ukraine] is a matter of life and death for us,” he said according to The Times.
Go deeper on this subject
FORTIFICATIONS, MANPOWER, AND MUNITIONS IN UKRAINE’S DAUNTING YEAR AHEAD: War on the Rocks is a nerdy podcast on warfare, tactics, and gets truly experienced experts to analyse conflicts. This episode on Ukraine is illuminating.
Also on my list: 46C summer days and ‘supercell’ storms are Britain’s future – and now is our last chance to prepare
Aimed at a UK audience but an alarming set of predictions by a leading climate scientist, Bill McGuire, writing in The Guardian.
‘It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40C for eight days running: they peaked at 46C, and remain above 30C in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.
No, this isn’t the beginning of a dystopian drama, but a snapshot of a mid-century heatwave unless we prepare for the increasingly extreme weather that will be driven by climate breakdown.’ — that is just a taster of what he sees coming.
Reading this reminded me of the lead for this Times story. I can't understand why they chose not to lead with destroyed schools and hospitals, but with a resort: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/01/world/middleeast/Israel-gaza-war-demolish.html
What do we call a Substack inside a Substack — a Sub-Substack?
That's a revealing comment by Netanyahu regarding the use of the US-built port (“there is no obstacle for the Gazans to leave, maybe even the port they are building could be used for this”). Aaron Maté and others have said that it's clear that the main purpose of the US-constructed port is not for the delivery of aid but for the expulsion of Palestinians. I've read reports that the port was Netanyahu's idea and that the most extreme members of his cabinet who support a total blockade of Gaza (including keeping all aid out) see the port as an opportunity to force Palestinians into boats and push them off. Perhaps you could discuss this on the Hoon later today.