Gaza, In Context
Let's apply our zoom control to this.
The Gaza Strip was home to 2.1 million people, surrounded by a hostile nation state with a population five times its size. I used past tense here because it’s not clear how many of them remain alive, a year and a half into Israel’s genocide.
Israel is home to 10 million people, surrounded on all sides by potentially hostile nation states with whom they have battled in the past. Geographically Israel has a similar shape to the Gaza Strip.
Nine hundred years ago there were four Crusader States along the coast of the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Catholic kingdoms thrust into the middle of the Muslim world, as a relief valve for Europe’s second sons. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was the last of them, finally extinguished in 1291.
Today the world is at an inflection point. Israel’s war on Iran has gone well thus far, but they want to draw the U.S. in under the pretext of needing our strike capabilities to finish off the Iranian nuclear program. I wrote about this when I offered my somewhat dated Persian Gulf Google Earth File. I presumed that the plan would involve B-2 bombers and the GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrator.
The big worry is that some drunken juicer with crusader tattoos will contrive a way to get a B61-12 nuclear weapon on an aircraft. This latest update adds a JDAM style tailkit to our dial-a-yield gravity bombs. They can be turned down to as little as 0.3 kilotons of yield, which steroid ragers feel is just right for the problem at hand.
I look at the shape of Gaza today, then the shape of Israel, then the historical shape of those Crusader States, and I get a bad feeling. We already screwed up in a generational fashion with India, and if we let the nuclear genie out of the bottle in Iran, what’s to stop that happening in the Indus river valley? Or the plains of Ukraine? Or the mountains of the Korean peninsula? Or in a surprise fashion somewhere between China and Taiwan?
Nuclear winter doesn’t take a full throttle U.S. vs. Russia throwdown. If India and Pakistan use a third of what they’ve got, estimates indicate one sixth of all of us could starve after the soot from the fires blocks out the sun for a year. And it won’t be the one sixth most culpable for the disaster.
I wrote Why Gaza Is Screwed thirteen years ago and my conclusion stands: too many people, not enough fresh water. Perhaps we should spend a little time contemplating the closure of that article.
Two state solution? One state solution? That is the will of man. Mother Nature might impose a no-state solution, similar to what we see in Somalia today.
Allah desiccates whom he pleases. God help us all …
We could just replace “desiccates” with “irradiates” …