A smart, well-educated, friend of mine, about my age, so in grammar school during 1967’s Six Day War, did not know or had not remembered that Gaza is actually Egyptian territory. He had forgotten that it had been used by Egypt as a base when Egypt in June of that year mobilized 100,000 soldiers and hundreds of tanks on the southern and eastern borders of Israel poised to invade. Or that at the same time Jordanian, Saudi, Iraqi, and Syrian forces were similarly poised to attack from on the West Bank and the Golan heights.

In the event Israel struck first and took not only Gaza but all of Sinai. Nor did my friend know that the only reason Gaza remains in its current bizarre quasi-independent but stateless limbo is that the Egyptians refused to take it back even after signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Nor did he know that Egypt has ever since refused to accept Gaza back it back for fear the Palestinians terrorists would become Egypt’s problem. Nor did he know that Egypt cooperates with Israel in enforcing the embargo of Gaza.

If my friend did not remember this, how many Americans born in this century know it? Do they teach it at Harvard?

[They don’t teach much at Harvard except the cult of radical Leftism, as we have seen this week especially. That’s true of Academia generally. Most people don’t know that the West Bank was Jordanian in 1948, which the Jordanians and Palestinians eventually forfeited after making war on Israel multiple times in the following nineteen years. That’s why the West Bank is occupied, and why Gaza was contained in a mutually beneficial partnership between Israel and Egypt, until now. — Ed]