A Gaza Solution: Hamas Swaps the Hostages for Exile

This is the only way to save civilians in Gaza.

Tribalism is a human constant, born of two economic predicates. It’s easier to take than to make. And, There’s strength in numbers. Once Eve stole that apple, the game was up. No more paradise, no more free lunch, no more benevolent blinders. Life turned nasty and brutish, with might making right.

Some 300,000 and counting wars later, humankind is still tribal to the core — broken into camps, with each superior to the next. We humans love to hate. The Greeks hate the Turks, the Hutus hate the Tutsis, the Sunnis hate the Shias, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, the Turks hate the Armenians, and all vice versa. The Irish Catholics hate the Irish Protestants, the Cherokee hate the Chickasaw, and the Roman Catholics hate the Eastern Orthodox. The Brits hate the French, or used to. The Irish hate the Brits. The Whites hate the Blacks. And everyone hates the Jews.

Actually, there is much less hate than meets the ear. For every hater there are tens of thousands of lovers — people who like, if not adore those from other tribes. Unfortunately, sociopaths hate the most and are highly proficient in attracting followers. We know where that leads.

Of course, haters always have their reasons. Jews, antisemites tell us, rule the world. That’s a tall order. Jews are only 0.2 percent of the world’s 8 billion people. I’m a Jew. I can’t even get my cat to come when I call. But, then again, you can control the world with money and Jews have all the money.

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. He controls the media through X, outer space through SpaceX, and transportation through Tesla. A Frenchman named Bernard Arnault is the second wealthiest humanoid. He controls something really big too — luxury goods. Third place? That’s Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He runs a vast and growing monopoly over everything we buy. The next three richest people are Larry Ellison, followed by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Together, they control our computers, the internet, and Wall Street.

There you have it. The six richest people — the ones maliciously dominating all of us, even my cat — they’re all Jews!

Well, except they’re not. Ellison was adopted by a Jewish family, but no Nazi would count him a Jew. But if you live in a fantasy world of hate, you’ll claim they are all Jews because, well, facts don’t matter.

Underneath the hate is envy, regret, indoctrination, and bad history. Y has more than me. Y is stronger than me. Y is inhumane. Y took my land — land that my god gave to me and only to me.

Unfortunately, the world has lots of gods — roughly 5,000 at last count — each with their own office of deeds — deeds that allocate every square inch of the planet to their believers and no one else. Since appealing to one’s god doesn’t win any arguments, people appeal to history.

Native Americans “owned” North American before the British, French, Spanish, and “Americans”. By rights, they can claim the entire continent for themselves. Some surely do. But Native Americans weren’t the first humans in North America. The Clovis People were here before them. But from whom did the Clovis People steal the land? Perhaps mastodons. Surely, we should retrieve DNA from frozen mastodons, grow a community of these creatures, and then vacate the continent after offering a proper apology. We can hang a sign around their necks — From the Ocean to the Ocean.

Injustice is crystal clear in the eye of the beholder. Hamas says Jews occupied Palestine and they own every inch of Israel. And they have a deed signed by Allah to prove it. But religious Jews claim a much older deed — one signed by Yahweh himself, not his messenger.

The haters might take a break and note that, in fact, no one “owns” anything. Jews own the State of Israel not because they have a better claim granted by their favorite of the 5000s god, but because they have the power to keep it. We Americans “own” the United States not because it was our manifest destiny, but because we largely exterminated native Americans and then took what the Brits claimed was theirs, which native Americans claimed was theirs, which … . We own the country because we have the power to keep it. Jews own the land of Israel because they can. It’s that simple.

Even people smart enough to attend Harvard should get this. So should all the antisemites across the planet. Like it or not, Israel is not going away. Jews don’t and can’t rule the world. But they can rule the land of Canaan.

Hamas, on the other hand, is in the process of going away. It decided that committing unspeakable atrocities was its god-given right and also a winning strategy. It was neither. Now Hamas is being hunted down like rats in their tunnels with terrible collateral losses to civilians among whom it’s hiding.

Hamas should have watched this video of how Americans fought the Japanese on Okinawa. Our military didn’t drop leaflets, make phone calls, or send other warnings to the civilian Okinawan population. Instead, we used flamethrowers and all manner of other terrible weapons to kill Japanese of any age, gender, and physical condition, knowing that Japanese soldiers were hiding among them and had turned very young children into suicide bombers, greeting our soldiers with hand grenades. After Okinawa, we dropped some leaflets and then quickly killed a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the time it took to say “bombs away.”

Israel isn’t dropping napalm on Palestinians in Gaza, as we did to the Vietnamese, let alone using atomic bombs. But the whole world can see a civilian population without adequate food, water, medicine, and shelter, let alone a truly safe place to hide. It also knows that Israel can change that reality — if need be by parachuting supplies and tents into Gaza and asking other countries to temporarily evacuate woman and children — on a voluntary basis.

Yet, whatever additional humanitarian steps are taken, civilian casualties will grow until all members of Hamas are dead or imprisoned. At this point, Hamas is no different from the Japanese holdouts on Okinawa — essentially all of whom died for their tribe. Hamas can choose this fate or it can hand over all hostages in exchange for exile to, say, Turkey. Turkey’s President, Erodogan, seems very fond of Hamas, calling them liberators. Surely, he can find one of Turkey’s 500 island to house his heroes.

If Hamas released all the hostages in exchange for safe passage to Turkey or, perhaps, Tunisia, where the PLO took refuge, the war would instantly be over. Palestinians could, at long last, choose co-existence, indeed, prosperity, even though its not their dream solution. After centuries of being massacred, Jews are back to where they call home and they aren’t leaving. And anyone who attempts their elimination does so at their extreme peril. It’s that simple.