This is a war crime

[meadowlander]

72. We all have obligations to colonised, refugee states.

Gaza would not exist in the way that it does if millions of Palestinians had not been displaced by the formation of Israel and decades of war.

I'm not here to comment on the rightness or wrongness of that, but pretending that these are two independent sovereign countries on an equal footing that just suddenly in 2023 got into an argument is disingenuous.

Palestinians spent decades in refugee camps with their wealth completely stripped away from them and no opportunities to recover economically. They were disadvantaged by planning and zoning laws created by the colonising state that only recently left which saw what they did build torn down. So to say now "well it's their fault they didn't invest billions in water and power infrastructure for a strip of land in the middle of the desert off a tax base of refugees with 60% unemployment" is absurd.

The entire Gaza Strip is 141 square miles - a little smaller than Queens in New York with essentially no natural resources. Where are you supposed to fit 2.5 million people and also water reservoirs and solar or wind power farms, etc? Of course they aren't self-sufficient. The country is only 10 years old and has already been cut off and sanctioned that entire time.

That's not the same as economic sanctions on the largest country in the world that has alternative options for supplying its people. The inevitable consequences of cutting off power and water to Gaza is that vulnerable people will die by the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Russian sanctions are a punch in the nose, the sanctions on Gaza are not.