Catch-Up Time: What’s Going on in Gaza?

Remember a place called Gaza? It’s a small piece of sand about 15 miles long and two miles wide which juts out into the Mediterranean between Israel and Egypt and used to contain some two million Arab settlers, many of whom were recent arrivals from a place known as Palestine or Samaria-Judea, take your pick.

Anyway, this place known as Gaza may now have a hundred thousand less residents not because any of the Arabs who live there have gone to live somewhere else, because in fact if you happen to be an Arab who has been living in this shithole little location, you can’t just pick up and go somewhere else. You are stuck there whether you want to be there or not because the border around Gaza is not an international border between two countries because Gaza isn’t a country.

The place called Gaza is some kind of territory which Israel has controlled since 1967 when Israeli troops entered the area during the Six Days War, and while the IDF contingent was pulled out in 2005 and political authority is now exercised by something known as the Palestinian Authority, in fact to quote Grandpa, Gaza is ‘nisht zehi, nisht zaha,’ (read: not this and not that) neither an independent country nor a sovereign part of either Israel or Egypt.

A few years ago, the Palestinians were granted ’observer’ status at the United Nations, which means…