I don’t find this description of Gaza as a prison of Israel’s making compelling. The Palestinian refugee crisis and the problem of statelessness is a regional issue for which there is so much blame to go around and yet the analysis I hear over and over never grapples with - heck, never teaches me anything about - the political choices of Jordan and Lebanon that have impacted the situation for the worse. You touched ever so briefly on Egypt here and then nothing. There are hundreds of thousands of stateless Palestinians (maybe half a million?) in Lebanon who are treated like crap, discriminated against, and also live in the conditions you decry (when they were in Gaza and blamed on Israel). And, by the way, what’s the excuse for the lack of human empathy expressed by Lebanon? Hamas doesn’t have “death to the Lebanese” in its charter, does it?

Honestly, the tragedy is Gaza is heartbreaking. Statelessness as a global phenomenon is a super important issue that I would love to know more about. In the Israel-Palestine context, won’t someone please shed light of the very underreported issue of how surrounding countries appear to prefer to stick it to Israel by obstructing the process by which these refugees of many generations can naturalize? And if it’s okay for them not to want to offer these people a path to full citizenship, please explain why?