Many people who oppose President Trump’s plan to renew Gaza lack a clear knowledge of what he meant by “owning”? Were the vendors involved in building roads, valves, apartments, and commercial properties instead of caves?
While numerous critics argue against the totally unimportant and ineffective subtitute idea of using the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Gaza, even though the historical original appears to have only had a passing impact upon closer inspection.  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,
Recall that at the end of World War II, when Berlin and Dresden were in remains, the Allies , stayed in command,  , executing Nazi officials and de-radicalizing Germany ( the way they did in Japan ), changing significantly the country’s organizations.
But, contrary to modern myths, the Marshall Plan’s influence in revitalizing Germany was trifling.
Never mind that Middle Eastern players and UN agencies then pounce on its perceived validity as a unit, with even the Jerusalem Post reporting as if money were the main issue with such a program.
They all omit some details, among people that the US and Allies “owned” Germany and Japan for a few years.
Between 1944 and 1948, Eastern and Central Europe had expelled approximately 12 million experienced Europeans whose families had resided there for a long time. The majority of those were resettled in West Germany.
In 1945-6, after the war ended, West Germany faced economic conflict, with prices raging at 19, 000 percent per month, dark industry thriving, and a tax rate at a confiscatory 95 % at relatively low wages.
Germany changed its fiscal and monetary policies considerably. Ludwig Erhard, West Germany’s new finance minister, in 1948 stabilized the coin and carried out extreme fiscal changes, considerably lowering tax rates and scrapping cost controls. According to The Deutsche Bundesbank, the changes” changed women’s lives from one day to the future.”
The Marshall Plan was simply put into effect in 1948.  , From 1948 to 1951, the US contributed$ 13.2 billion to German treatment. Of that,$ 3.2 billion went to the United Kingdom,$ 2.7 billion to France,$ 1.5 billion to Italy, and only$ 1.4 billion to the Western-occupied zones of Germany.
Additionally, decades of research have demonstrated that the Marshall Plan did not provide funding for the restoration of the city’s crumbling equipment. Instead, the reconstruction was quite little full before the strategy was executed.  ,  ,
Although no doubt the$ 1.4 billion offered some assistance ( and there is no point showing what percentage of the “gross national product” it reflected, since the latter was utterly mismeasured and underestimated ), what brought about the post-World War II West German miracle was Erhard’s policies combined with the , massive arrival of skilled people.
For “miracles” happened around the world when significant numbers of people arrived in specific locations. They were unrelated to any foreign support.
The mystery of 17th-century Europe was neither Spain nor Portugal – both of which fit the “finding gold” mildew– but below-sea-level Amsterdam and Holland, whose fortunes were created despite normal hurdles.
Immigrants, some of whom were or became merchants and bankers, were drawn to the new republic because of its unprecedented openness to all religions and its laws allowing the practice of finance ( Amsterdam had the world’s first stock market ). Immigrants and Huguenots, discriminated against somewhere in Europe, were popular among them.
Many of the money flowing into Amsterdam was both owned by foreigners or by Amsterdamers of foreign descent. They transformed Amsterdam into the monetary and trading hub of the 17th-century world.
Perhaps this is what Trump, the president of another nation whose development has benefited from such immigration, is trying to convey when he uses the term “ownership” despite the absence of any indications that qualified individuals from other countries may immigrate to Gaza or that any governing body that might be established that would do any shifting policies.
Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan’s histories are similar to those of Germany after World War II and of Amsterdam in the 17th century. The state provided an umbrella of law and order, imposed relatively low taxes, and gave people stakes in what the business society was doing, which was able to draw in immigrants and businesspeople from all over the world.
At the start of the 19th century, Sir Stamford Raffles built Singapore as a port and supported it with an open-to-allracial educational system.  , Trade and security brought prosperity to the penniless immigrants from Indonesia and, in particular, China.
Immigration opportunities were provided to immigrants in China’s densely populated Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which were initially dominated by warlords and a status-conscious bureaucracy and later by a communist bureaucracy.
Hong Kong benefited from the waves of Chinese immigrants, particularly the inflow of Shanghai merchants and financiers when Mao Zedong “liberated” China in 1949.
Of course, the example of Israel, which decentralized and opened its financial markets from the late 1980s ( turning into the” Start-up Nation” ) and benefited from waves of skilled immigrants, fits the historical patterns of previous centuries.  ,  ,  ,
None of these historical experiments have a chance of being compared to Gaza or, for that matter, the majority of the Middle East.
It is important to discard perhaps once and for all the” Marshall Plan” government-foreign-aid-aggrandizing mythology as a solution for failed societies.  , It is as important to use words with precision – such as just what “ownership” or” control” may mean and whether or not it is applicable to start with.
As of now Hamas, Hetzbollah and theocratic Iran are labeled as “terrorist” organizations or” axis of evil”, but with no Nuremberg trials on the horizon for their leaders.  ,  ,
Briefly: No matter which way one looks at Gaza, Marshall Plans,” controls” ( in the post-World War II sense ), “ownerships” and expectations of “miracles” are nonstarters.  , Nobody wants to move there although if Egypt, or Jordan with a majority-Palestinian population already, opened their borders, perhaps some Gazans would move there.
The article draws on Brenner’s books Force of Finance ( 2001 ) and Labyrinths of Prosperity ( 1994 ) and his articles” Venture Capital in Canada”, ( 2010 ), and” Venture Capital Secret Sauce” ( 2019 ).