I will admit that I am not totally aware of the value of the land of the West Bank vs Gaza. But from what I’ve been reading and watching these few months on the history of the conflict, it seems that at some point the PLO stopped being violent after the second Infatada and Hamas took over Gaza and pushed them out to the West Bank. And ever since then the West Bank has been slowly carved up more and more by Jewish settlements, effectively making the Palestinian land in the WB never able to be contiguous, and thus making it impossible for there to be a Palestinian state to be formed there.

So if the WB land is valuable to the Israelis, I cannot see how Gaza wouldn’t be even more valuable. As Gaza has access to the sea, and there’s all the recently found offshore gas fields that would fall into Gaza’s EEZ if it ever were to be recognized as the Palestinian state.

So I don’t get why they’d disengage and leave Gaza alone when it’s valuable land, but they will also for obvious reasons never stop the blockade of Gaza. As an outsider that leans to the left, it seems like Gaza is purposefully put into the state that it’s in, to keep a threat around, so the conservatives running Israel can stay in power.

Is that because Gaza is proving harder to annex and pacify than the WB?

My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.

You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it’s all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.

If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.