TIME Magazine Facilitates the Transfer of Gaza to Egypt

It's report here:

...if it [the opening of the Rafah Crossing] was a cause of celebration for Gazans...the reaction in official Israeli circles surely includes "quiet satisfaction." For in Jerusalem the feeling is: If the Egyptians want to take responsibility for 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, more power to them. Cairo after all had control of the coastal enclave from 1948 to 1967...
...observed Giora Eiland, a retired major general, in an interview almost a year go. "No one knows what to do with Gaza."...Not even Gaza's vegetables are welcome in Israel. "No, no, no," Eiland said. "We don't need any kind of economic relationship with Gaza whatsoever."..."It is not in Israel's interest to see Gaza and the West Bank as one entity," Eiland observed.

...That's a view...endorsed by Israel's settlers, as determined and implacable a group as you can find in the modern world. They want to hold onto the West Bank, an area rich in Biblical sites and significance to the observant Jews who are the most "hard core" of Jews living on West Bank hilltops, notes Naftali Bennett, director general of the Yesha Council, which represents settlers. Gaza has nothing of consequence to religious Jews, which is one reason to be rid of it [???].

Another reason: Without the Strip, Israel can make a better case for annexing the West Bank. As Bennett explained the other day to a room of foreign journalists, the case against annexation has always been the assumption that Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews, making Israel a defacto apartheid state, with the minority governing the majority. Few Israelis want to be in that position. But, Bennett maintains, "the myth that demography is against us is wrong. Demography is not against us."

His math is instructive in more ways than one....

Within its borders, Israel has some six million Jewish residents and 1.1 million Arabs...Bennet thinks 1.8 million [Palestinians who reside on the West Bank] is about right. Combine them, and you have a nation of six million Jews and about three million Palestinians, a comfortable Jewish majority, Bennett says, given the declining birth rate among Israeli Arabs.

And Gaza? What about the 1.5 million Palestinians there?  "Gaza we don't count," Bennett says. "Because that's gradually becoming Egypt's problem."

Who once said 'Go drink the water of Gaza'?

Arafat:

the curse beloved by Arafat: "Go and drink from the sea of Gaza!"

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