Still 1949 in Gaza

With so many ties to Israel we are often asked “When will there be peace there?”

Its a good question we have no answer.

But we do have another question.

What date is it in Gaza and the West Bank?

Oh sure the easy answer is the time here and now plus nine hours.

But its wrong.

Actually the date is sometime in 1949 and it has been that way for 65 years.

In 1949 Israel and its Arab neighbors of Trans Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon signed a cease fire. The government of Palestine did not sign the cease fire because THERE WAS NO COUNTRY CALLED PALESTINE in 1949. Nor had there ever been one.

Thing about cease fires and lair armistices and later yet peace treaties. They are more than pieces of paper, they move time. There is a before and there is an after.

The 700,000 people who were later known as Palestinians but back then known as Arab refugees left either willingly or were in some cases expelled. They went to all of Israel neighbors with about half ending up in the Gaza Strip or what is commonly called the West Bank. Those two pieces of land were supposed to have made up the Arab country of Palestine but the Trans Jordanians took the West Bank for themselves, renamed their country Jordan and gave citizenship to their new subjects. Not all of them just the ones native to the West Bank. The other ones, the refugees, from the state of Israel were housed in refugee camps.

They became wards of the United Nations. The same thing happened to the refugees in Gaza except he Egyptians didn’t give anyone citizenship. The Egyptians kept the strip without formally annexing it and the native Gazans became stateless people with Egyptian overlords.

The refugees who ended up in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world were also wards of the UN whose lives and livelihoods who paid for by the UN.

And that is the way it has stayed.

A lot else has changed.

The biggest thing was that Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

But nothing really changed in either the West Bank or Gaza the refugees still were taken care of in their camps by the UN and the natives had Jewish overlords instead of Arab ones.

And something else didn’t change still no cease fire.

In 1991 finally there was a cease fire and like all cease fire Israel got a little and the Palestinians got a little.

The hard part is the peace treaty which both sides have to agree that hostilities are ended.

That was the major sticking point in the failed round of negotiations this year.

The Arabs could not bring themselves to admit that way back in 1949 they lost and the Jews won.

Be that as it may there is still more or less a cease fire on what is called the West Bank but not one in Gaza because the people running Gaza, Hamas can’t deal for religious reasons Jews existing.

Jews aren’t supposed to be here and now let alone have a state on holy Muslim land.

So no peace, no armistice and certainly no cease fire.

And so it will continue.

Until some son’s mother perhaps a lot of sons’ mothers waked and realize that 1949 has come and gone and tell her son his great grandfather lost the war.