Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".
Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.
To me "occupied" means there is control enforced by troops on the ground. Israel didn't have any control of what went on inside Gaza.
Gaza was blockaded. Israel tried to control who and what goes in and out of Gaza (to try to limit the weapons Hamas has). But Israel had no control over what the Hamas Gaza government did in Gaza, how they spent their budget, what they built, what they taught in schools, what their military was planning.
A common pattern for state autonomous zones seems to be devolved local governance, but no foreign policy or inter-state security, which seems to describe Gaza pretty well.
The national / federal government is able to send agents and enforce its will on states / provinces. Israel was not able to send anyone into Gaza.
It would be a "breakaway province" situation, except that:
a. Israel intentionally got all its citizens out of that place and
b. Israel had no intention of taking control and forcing Gaza to join back into Israel.
Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.
Gaza was mostly an independent country at war with Israel and not even a little bit an autonomous province of Israel. The war could not be resolved and so it was stuck in a state where Israel thought it prevented Hamas from bringing in heavy weapons but did not want to commit to conquering a city.
I think some people thought that after Israel pulled out in 2005, and Gaza became autonomous, it would become a normal independent country, and people still treat Gaza of 2023 as if it's the Gaza of 2005.
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Speaking as someone very familiar with the situation in Xianjiang (my best friend is a world authority on it), there are countless differences. The most obvious difference is that Xianjiang became a part of China in 1949, whereas Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Gaza has also been a part of Egypt. Moreover, China's control is focused on assimilation, a crackdown on religious practices, and re-education, whereas Israel is concerned with none of those things. I could go on forever.
I wrote downthread about how persuasive this argument isn't.