An ironic revival.
Rafah, August 21 – A Third-Reich-era proposal to move all of Europe’s Jews to an underdeveloped island off the Indian Ocean coast of Africa got an ironic revival of late as international powers seek a compelling destination to which Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whose leaders made common cause with the Third Reich against the British and the Jews during World War Two, can move permanently to ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel and to regional stability.
In the late 1930’s, German officials began developing plans to move the Jews under its control out of Europe, and picked up on an idea raised in the 1880’s for relocating Jews en masse to Madagascar. The Nazis abandoned the plan – which Germany could not undertake in the first place, given the logistical constraints and enemy naval superiority – in 1941 in favor of outright genocide. The Madagascar Plan’s inevitable outcome would be similar, but required shipping and personnel capacity that Germany lacked.
Now, however, Palestinians – whose leaders, most prominently the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, allied himself with the Nazis and urged them to get on with the genocide in Europe so it could then be brought to Palestine – might wind up on Madagascar themselves, it turns out, now that global and regional players have had it with the violence, instability, extremism, and other ills that have always accompanied the Palestinian cause. As such, those powers have begun examining the feasibility of transferring most or all of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip to Madagascar.
The proposal, which enjoys support among top Trump administration officials, calls for marshalling global shipping capacity to conduct the transfer, and International Monetary Fund assistance to help Madagascar absorb the approximately two million new inhabitants. Such development investment was neither available nor intended under the Nazi plan for the Jews; the Nazis aimed to let the harsh environment and paltry resources of the island do the extermination work for them.
Organizations that work to assist populations to relocate and reestablish themselves in new countries after fleeing conflict changed their tune upon discovering the plan; they insist that Palestinians, uniquely, must stay in the conflict zone, lest their departure facilitate “ethnic cleansing,” a concern oddly lacking in those aid organizations’ approaches to every other conflict on Earth. In their zeal to prevent any such plan from coming to fruition, the NGOs provoked the ire of Madagascar’s government and citizenry, who took umbrage at the NGO’s racist assumption that Madagascar is incapable of handling, or unworthy of absorbing, such a model population as Palestinians.
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