“It’s not a high bar,” said Professor Amichai Cohen, of the Israel Democracy Institute, when asked to comment on the assertion that Israel has the most moral army. Cohen is a recognized expert in the International Law of Armed Conflict, National Security Law, and Civil-Military Relations. In a future post, I hope to reprise some insights from yesterday’s interview with him posted on the online Times of Israel. At this point it seems to me the only army that has been able to follow the Geneva Conventions perfectly are those Swiss… who don’t fight. All this got me thinking about high bars, low bars, and rebar — the steel that reinforces concrete in the building trades. “When Gaza is rebuilt,” as its last Jewish governor was heard recently to opine, as if it’s a sure thing, and praising, by the way, the wonderful warmness of the Gazan people, I wonder how can it be rebuilt in such a way to prevent it from becoming a terrorist bunker once again, as Gaza City was revealed to be basically one large bunker overlaid with minimal infrastructure for human shields. All the schools and hospitals and houses that could have been built with all that concrete instead went down down down into terror tunnels. So how to reconstruct Gaza without concrete? Perhaps engineers or other creative individuals on this site could opine, shed some Chanukah light on this matter. Urban planning has been shown to have a crucial effect on the happiness and even the crime levels of people living there. The Pruitt-Igoe housing project towers in Saint Louis were famously a disaster for all concerned. Einstein thought no building should be above two stories high for ideal human habitation
What about bricks? Brick factories were once popular in the USA. Big earners too. Most people love a brick house. Mighty mighty and all that. “Fired bricks are one of strongest and the longest-lasting building materials. They are sometimes referred to as ‘artificial stone,’ and have been used since circa 4000 BC. Air-dried bricks, also known as mud bricks, have a history older than fired bricks, and have an additional ingredient of a mechanical binder such as straw.”Wikipedia
Wood is not an option. Wood is very expensive, and hardly exists in the Mideast. Certainly old hardwood is rarer there than it is becoming here.
So what to do? Jewish people lived early days in Gaza in tents and tin shacks for twenty odd years at the beginning of the last century. Reportedly, Jews have been praying once again in the archaeological site of an ancient synagogue built circa 500 AD or Common Era. That was probably built of limestone, or marble. I hope a new nonApartheid Gaza will allow this synagogue to be rebuilt and used again. Perhaps Gaza could become a refuge state for all the boat peoples escaping from points along North Africa on rafts into the Mediterranean. Closer than the UK, or Rwanda (where some in UK want to ship the boat people). Together a new multicultural nation could rebuild itself there, like it was in days of yore. But how to do it without concrete? Or how to monitor the building-to-concrete ratios to be sure none of it is going to tunnels …?