Gaza is often described rather loosely as an 'open air prison', notably by David Cameron.
What is far more resembles however is one of the great Jesuit missions set up during the early seventeenth centuries within the amorphous border zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Rather than being taught the violin, agriculture and how to sing in a choir, UNRWA, the modern equivalent of the Society of Jesus, appear to mainly want to pass on a form of cosmic grievance and hatred, but the effect is the same for the Gazans as it was for the Guaraní: total dependency.
They are forced to live within an artificial, anomalous legal bubble in which they are utterly infantilised, and thereby absolved of all responsibility for their own actions, and attitudes.
And UNRWA, just like the Jesuit order, defends the permanency of this state of tutelage for largely self-serving reasons.
Their ‘protected’ community needs more external aid than any other human population on Earth because, how else could they even exist?
They have to be comforted that theirs is not the ordinary lot of citizens, the task of building a prosperous secular society. UNRWA feeds them, not just with actual victuals paid for by outsiders, but also with an existential fantasy, a vision of a promised land, a world without the evil of Israel, without Jews and other infidels, a return to how things were before all the sins were committed, and these will of course all be forgiven.
One interesting difference however. The Jesuit missions resulted in a form of genocide. The Guaraní were incapable of adapting to their physical and spiritual cage, and thus died off rather rapidly.
Meanwhile in Gaza, in spite of a reported 40,000+ casualties of this recent war, the population has increased by a further 2% October to October.
It may be relevant that the Jesuits chose to immerse a ferocious people (Guaraní means war) in a permanent condition of peace, whereas UNRWA...
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