As desperate Palestinians in sealed-off Gaza try to find refuge under Israel’s relentless bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack, many ask why neighboring Egypt or other Arab countries don’t take them in.

The two countries, which flank Israel on opposite sides and share borders with Gaza and the occupied West Bank, respectively, have replied with a staunch refusal. Jordan already has a large Palestinian population.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi made his toughest remarks yet on Wednesday, saying the current war was not just aimed at fighting Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, “but also an attempt to push the civilian inhabitants to … migrate to Egypt.” He warned this could wreck peace in the region.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II gave a similar message a day earlier, saying, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”

Their refusal is rooted in fear that Israel wants to force a permanent expulsion of Palestinians into their countries and nullify Palestinian demands for statehood. El-Sissi also said a mass exodus would risk bringing militants into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, from where they might launch attacks on Israel, endangering the two countries’ 40-year-old peace treaty.

  • fiat_lux
    2•1 year ago

    Let’s not go down the path of quantifying the ‘value’ of people’s lives, it has historically led to bad things.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•1 year ago

      Quantifying people’s carbon footprint isn’t quantifying the value of their lives.

      And the value of people’s lives is quantified all the time. Any time money is spent to save people’s lives, the people who fund it are gonna want to know how much it costs and how many lives it’s expected to save. If the cost per life saved is too much, the money doesn’t get spent. Without doing that kind of calculation, you either spend no money saving lives, you do nothing but try to save lives, or you just throw a random amount of money at the problem and hope it does enough good to be worth it.

      • fiat_lux
        1•1 year ago

        Quantifying people’s carbon footprint isn’t quantifying the value of their lives.

        It’s also not even necessary in the context of comparing the impact of continuing war to advocating peace. Military equipment doesn’t have an inherent right to exist or uses once created, and the people we’re talking about already exist and deserve a peaceful happy life as much as anyone else. The choice we do have though is around where we spend existing carbon and the damage we cause in pumping into mutual self-destruction.

        And the value of people’s lives is quantified all the time.

        I am keenly and painfully personally aware, and I don’t enjoy participating in that either. I also consider many implementations to have led historically to bad things because it is near impossible to quantify without some truly horrible and ham-fisted reductionism.