Free Palestine! Ok, Now What?
Free Palestine.
Ok, now what?
You shouldn’t need to look at 99% of decolonized nations to understand that building a country is difficult. Building an army is easy: round up a bunch of bored teenage boys and young men, feed them, and give them weapons. Building a state is easy as well: make a pretty flag, build yourself a big government building and presidential palace, and use aforementioned easily raised army to cement your leadership over the surrounding area by threatening and shooting anyone who irritates you.
Congratulations, you now have a state; at least until a general launches a coup, extremists chip away at the corners of your state where your influence is low, or until the foreign aid runs out or is halted due to your aforementioned shooting of anyone who irritates you.
A state needs an army, a leader, and land.
A country needs an army and a leader, but funnily enough, it doesn’t need land.
A country needs a robust justice system. A country needs social services: health care, social security, welfare. A country needs a way to attract foreign investments. A country needs industry. A country needs basic infrastructure: sewage pipes and garbage trucks, radio towers and public transportation. A country needs paved roads and highways, rail lines, and transportation hubs. A country needs public education. A country needs to balance the growth of private enterprise and the limitations of governmental oversight.
A country needs an army, but it must be a stable army with a clear command structure, standardized equipment that can be locally produced or purchased from reliable sources, and acceptable working and living conditions for its soldiers. For these conditions to be met, the army needs a lopsided combat to logistics personnel ratio (soldiers can’t fight without cooks, gunsmiths, engineers, human resource personnel, technical experts, IT workers, and people to scrub the toilets). The army will need specialists, engineers, technicians, computer nerds, and construction personnel. In order to retain these specialists, the army will need to pay them more than they will make in the private sector.
A country needs an economy. A funnel of young people to schools, then to jobs, then to careers.
A country needs entertainment, arts and culture (all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy).
So fine, free Palestine. Now what?
Who’s paying for all the services and goods? Who pays to have the roads paved and criminals arrested. Who’s paying for Little Timmy to spend 12 years in school? Who’s paying for the teachers and professors to teach Little Timmy electrical engineering? What jobs will be available to Little Timmy? Will it be easy for Little Timmy to start a family? Or will it be so difficult that, like any South Korean or German, he just won’t bother.
Who is enforcing the tax collection to pay for all of this? And how are the people making enough money to afford these taxes?
What industry will be built in Palestine? What foreign company will invest in a country so prone to sudden and spontaneous combustions?
And with the Israelis gone, who’s employing all these unemployed young freedom fighters? Where will all the spare guns and bombs go, now that they are no longer needed?
Palestinians do run parts of the West Bank, and they certainly ran all of Gaza. Look at Gaza, and put it on a scale from South Sudan to Switzerland. Is it closer to the former or the latter?
I’m not interested in a Palestinian state for the same reason I’m not interested in creating any failed state. Failed states tend to be high in extrajudicial killings and low in Medicare benefits. In the West Bank there is a fund to support the families of men who are in prison for murdering Israelis, but no food stamp system for the poor to keep fed.
When’s the last time you heard anyone express an interest in taking a vacation to Burkina Faso?
And to the Palestinians: start building anything but a failed militant state in the land you do control, and we can talk about giving you more. Gaza is bigger than Monaco or Lichtenstein, but I know which one I’d rather take a trip to.
