ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf

@einatwilf · Twitter · 2025-02-05 04:31 UTC

Some thoughts on the US President's proposal for Gaza: 1) Look here at the attached image of one of the hostage release productions. What the President correctly sees is that Gaza has no objective geographic problem. It is not some windswept landlocked area facing droughts. It is located on a beautiful part of the Mediterranean with soft sands from the Egyptian Delta. It sits at the cross roads of two ancient trade routes. Connected by train through Israel to the Red Sea, it could provide competition to the Suez Canal (is this also part of the thinking?). It has energy reserves. It has everything it needs to be a major trading and tourism hub (and a US military base?). The only problem Gaza has is politics - its people are committed to an ideology of destruction (sustained in that by organizations like UNRWA) - meaning destroy what the Jews have built next door rather than build for themselves. What the President seems to notice is that Gaza's inhabitants could have built for themselves something remarkable on this strip of land, and instead they chose - and it is an ideological choice - to turn it into an integrated weaponized landscape for the singular purpose of destroying Israel. So the President sees what Palestinians, Egyptians, even Jordanians, should have long ago seen - Gaza is an extremely valuable piece of land - if, and that's a big if - the politics can somehow be moved from ones of destruction to construction, figuratively and literally. 2) However, the Arab world is no stranger to grand US building project ideas intended to help settle Arab refugees and move on from war. What the Arab countries have done in the past with such grand US ideas, beginning in the 1950's is take the money, hijack the agency though which it was to be done (UNRWA), build nothing, and keep the Arab refugees generation after generation turning them into a people - the Palestinians - tragically organized around the idea of no Jewish state. This means that any grand project depends on taking advanced actions that will not allow it to be hijacked. As the US defunds UNRWA it must avoid repeating a situation where western money flows, but the politics of destruction remain. Perhaps, this is why the President speaks of the US taking over the territory immediately. 3) How can the politics of destruction be changed? The key is to end the lie and the scam of perpetual Palestinian refugeehood and the violent vision of "return" which underpinned the October 7th attacks and massacres, and which for generations have sent Gazans the message that Gaza is not their home, but a launchpad from which to "liberate Palestine from the River to the Sea". How? transmute any notion of refugeehood and "right of return" into property rights in Gaza. Gaza's inhabitants, regardless if they are given temporary or permanent refuge in other Arab countries, and even if they just remain in Gaza, must be struck from UNRWA's records as refugees and must each individually recognize that they possess no such thing as a "right of return" into Israel. In return for that, and only after this is done, each Gaza resident receives a unit of property rights (such as an apartment) to be realized when Gaza is rebuilt. That right can then be realized or sold, but it is a simple property right in Gaza, where Gaza is home, not a destructive vision of "return" to somewhere else. 4) Finally, if I were Jordan, I would finally recognize how valuable Gaza is and I will make a play for it - offer to provide temporary or permanent refuge to Gazans - and in return take over Gaza as a Jordanian foot in the Mediterranean. I would then offer Israel to give back the Arabs of the West Bank the Jordanian citizenship that was stripped of them in exchange of Israel allowing two train routes from Jordan into Gaza through the West Bank and from the Red Sea, creating competition to the Suez Canal. (and if I'm Egypt, I would try to prevent Jordan from doing this, and offer to take over Gaza myself). Bottom line: what the President's proposal served to highlight is this: Gaza is an incredibly valuable piece of territory. Whoever can figure out how to change its politics from the current ones of obsessive destruction to forward-looking construction, will benefit greatly themselves and will benefit the region more broadly.