The humanitarians have called for a 24 hour evacuation period for the Gazans, with the United Nations (not NATO) providing the logistics. Unless some planning body had been using the last ten years to plan for this contingency (I'm not privy to such plans), it's unlikely that 24 hours is a sufficient mobilization time, except for the lower inertia objects, meaning wagging tongues.
By wagging tongues and nimble fingers, I mean those of us who share the latest buzz, including regarding the massive logistics undertaking the United Nations is now initializing, expecting help from all its member nations, to whatever level said nations are willing to be heroic and demonstrate their prowess, when it comes to removing innocent civilians from harm's way, by air, land and sea.
We've already been debating the ripple effects and implications in the space of these journals. I'm not pointing to myself as the answer man, but as one who recognizes the plight of refugees is a core topic in sociology that has shaped our institutions up until now, meaning we're no strangers to this plight.
A core challenge is to keep families together, while acknowledging that sometimes families agree to split up, sometimes (not always) with the explicit mission of helping each other later, depending on which took the best course.
Imagine being lost in the mountains, confronted with forks. Groups often intentionally split at such junctures, perhaps with scouts, or runners, for some distance, although preferably with telecommunications and why are these people without GPS devices and accurate maps?
What I'm saying is, when one undertakes to rescue people from a dense community of neighbors and interlocking families, is it not the goal to replicate these neighborhoods on the other end? The whole circus is nomadic, not just the individual acts and animals, not just the tents and the elephants.
Nuclear families are not the sub-units of migration so much as the barrios, neighborhoods, entire zip codes, but then out to what scale?
Are we building a New Gaza somewhere in the Caribbean? On the African continent? Is it supposed to have statehood? Who governs?
I'm aware that in speculating about a New Gaza, far from the current one, I'm sounding like one of those old timey pre Civil War Quakers who didn't align with the "immediatist" ranters, the ones into criminalizing slavekeeping yesterday (even "right now" was "too late").
"Round 'em up and send them all back to Liberia" was a divergent intellectual current back then (long before my time), and has a shameful ring to it, next to a prouder "stand your ground" i.e. don't let them round you up and move you yet again. Isn't evacuating Gaza just pandering to unscrupulous real estate developers?
I'm countering that perception with the realization that "going West" is no longer what it once was. Populations have spread around the world and are increasingly fenced in, with many calling for closed borders and walled neighborhoods where none were formerly present.
We may insist on more conformity and obedience in accordance with a sense that our truths need to be taken more literally and less as if they're just in our heads (so to speak). We get more fundamentalist.
We need a more organized approach for dealing with the n% of humans in refugee mode at all times, for whatever reason. Intake and relocation might be the core business of some "switchboard" cities, designed to serve the needs of transients (those in transit, tourists, backpackers...) seeking new more permanent circumstances.
Opportunities for trafficking? How about escaping being trafficked? Cities help people mix it up and flee captors. Identities created, identities erased.
We call them refugee camps today and Gaza is one of them, but in a global system that's stagnated, turning camps for transients into dead end prisons. To the extent refugees get swept under the rug and forgotten, the whole idea of nation-states is undermined. Suspending disbelief gets too hard and is shrugged off. The pomp and circumstance all dissipates.
We've seen wave after wave of refugee migrations all through recent history, right up to the present. Germans, Syrians, Somalis, Vietnamese, Libyans, Guatemalans... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Filling an entire Asylum City, or good portion thereof, with a cohesive ethnic mix, a semi-cohesive body all airlifted and/or ferried from danger, and therefore already knowing one another and bonded through common narrative, solves a lot of problems. The refugees come and go, in large groups sometimes, not just as loners. Sometimes they return to a homeland, refurbished. That's not always the outcome.
Humans are masterful when it comes to exploding infrastructure and displacing populations. Plans for those thereby displaced tend to be ad hoc and cursory. Humans express malign neglect for their extended family and give up on themselves and their capacity to not be inhumane.
Since when have camps ever helped people? I'm thinking of some cases. People voluntarily sign up for camps of all kinds.
Even if we've been a Ghetto Planet, we're not condemned to always be one.
If the UN gets its act together around a "rescue fleet" of some thousand ships, for the thousand thousand passengers that might need sudden transport, then that's a fleet to be used again.
And no one is closing the door on New Gazans going home to Gaza later.
At this point in time, we just want to build our muscles and ability to coordinate on saving people from getting stuck in combat and/or natural disaster zones. Prospects for returning to the scene later will vary from case to case.
