Gaza – the no state solution

The most harrowing book I read last year is “GENDERED VIOLENCE – Jewish woman in the Pogroms of 1917-1921.”

In this study, Irina Astashkevich describes rape as a strategic weapon in the genocidal anti-Jewish violence (pogroms) that erupted in Ukraine when at least 100,000 Jews died in this 4 year period with an untold number of Jewish women raped in the most violent barbaric manner.

The journalist and poet Bialik, witness to the Kishinev pogrom, wrote of this violence in his epic poem “In the City of Slaughter.” He described the utter uselessness of the Jewish shtetl to protect its people from marauding waves of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, anarchists etc entering the villages, thieving and committing the most atrocious acts, often forcing the men to watch gang rapes of their women in the village square, wives who’s breasts were sliced off, bowels opened and stuffed with feathers, left to die slow and painful deaths.

This is what happened when Jews were unable to protect themselves living as they were, strangers in other lands. Since 1948 Jews have lived more securely in the knowledge they had retaken their homeland from foreign invaders and could protect themselves going forward. That has been abundantly clear given the number of times Israel has been attacked since, but, always being victorious, has built a unique defense force of citizens, proud of who they are, living freely in their own homeland. Israelis know that every war is existential. Losing a war means certain death of all Israelis.

Several times over the years Israel has offered a settlement of peace with her neighbors, only to be rejected each time. This is the backdrop to the ludicrous appeal for a two state solution as a gift to those who invaded Israel on 7 October 2023, raping and murdering in the most grotesque pogrom reminiscent of the pogroms in Ukraine described by Astashkevich and Bialik.

The two state solution is dead. Everyone knows that, even as they call for it. The demonic events of 7 October 2023 crossed a line that will forever change the world. This change begins with Israel and Gaza. There is a call for the day after, that is the day after Israel reaches its goal of freeing all hostages and eliminates the Hamas terrorists and its ideology. History has shown there is no solution to this age old problem. However, a resolution to enable management can be explored. In existential times, every avenue must be explored if catastrophe is to avoided.

In seeking a plan that will maintain some sort of managed peace it is important to note a few facts:

Gaza will take a decade or more to clear after the war has ended with Hamas eradicated.
The Gazans must not be kept festering in tent cities in Southern Gaza as this will lead to a new Arab refugee problem.
The Palestinian Authority is not fit for purpose in Gaza, or anywhere else in fact.
Its impossible to have both a contiguous Israel with the north/south connected and a contiguous Palestinian state comprised of the PA territory west of the river Jordan and Gaza on the mediterranean coastline.
Generational refugee status is not sustainable.
UNWRA is corrupt and has no role in the Middles East.
Egypt has a vast stretch of underdeveloped land in Sinai.
Israel can build transportable homes quickly.
Israel can grow a desert.
Egypt grows cottn..
The US and international community has an interest in maintaining stability in the Middle East.

In 2016 at our “Two State Solution: dead or alive?” event in London, some 200 attendees voted dead. And yes there was a Palestinian Arab on the panel and there were Palestinian Arabs in the audience. Over the subsequent years this debate exited front page discussion until the 7 October 2023 pogrom in southern Israel when it returned as the only solution to discuss, as though this were some new fan-dangled idea on the drawing board.

No sooner had the defiled hostages and corpses been hijacked back to Gaza by depraved Hamas terrorists, than the greater world began calling for a ceasefire, resurrecting the two state solution (TSS) as the only option to stop this eternal Arab/Israel war even before Israel fired its first shot. Indeed, on a BBC Question Time program some three weeks after the invasion, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews called for a ceasefire and a negotiated TSS settlement. The idea of a ceasefire before a war had begun is odd. Odder still is the oversight that Hamas had broken a pre-existing ceasefire that was in place on 6 October 2023, that Gaza was a sovereign entity run by the political class the people had voted for.

PA administration

Demands for a post conflict solution are rife with some putting forward ideas for what they hope might become a permanent solution to this centuries old conflict between Arabs and Jews. Some are proposing that the PA under Mahmoud Abbas should administer Gaza, overlooking how Hamas had deposed this entity in 2006, implementing 16 years of tyranny over the inhabitants of Gaza with constant attacks on Israel. Also overlooked are the repeated failed attempts of the PA and Hamas to unite, which is how Hamas was able to take control in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that this enmity can ever be reconciled. The PA leadership is corrupt, as is Hamas, rendering its governance of Gaza a non starter.

International administration

Others are proposing some form of international entity to administer Gaza that might include Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, America, some European states and even a hint of the UN. Such a plan by whatever combination might be agreed overlooks the failure of international forces in conflict zones across the world. Indeed just over a year after removal of the international peace keeping force in place on the islands of Tiran and Sanafir, the Iran backed Houthis, commenced a blockade of the Red Sea shipping route. There was also meant to be a buffer zone of some 50 kilometers in Southern Lebanon overseen by the UN, but that hasn’t deterred Hezbollah from operating out of that space. It remains questionable whether such a force might actually work in what many hope will be a reformed Gaza.

There will certainly be many more proposals thrown into the arena over the next months. In drawing up such proposals there are elements that must be considered:

The neighbourhood
1. Size and situation geographically
2. Population and demographic
3. Administration and governance
4. Economy – GDP etc
5. UNWRA

1. The Gaza strip is situated North of the Sinai desert, jutting into the south western corner of and sharing an eastern and northern border with Israel, a southern border with Egypt and a western coastline along the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza was part of Egypt from 1948 until 1967. It was not included in the territory that the British Mandate of Palestine, caretaker administration of the region, had allocated for the re-establishment of Israel, the nation state of the Jews. Israel had taken control of the Sinai desert in 1967 during the Six Day War, and returned the Sinai to Egypt in the 1982 Camp David peace deal, except for the Gaza strip that Egypt refused to repossess. Gaza therefore was unwillingly retained by Israel who withdrew in 2005 leaving the land to be self-governed by the local Arabs living there. This land was never Palestine before 1948 or after, even though its initial governance was handed to PLO’s Fatah.

2. The current population of Gaza is approximately two million. The demography is predominantly Muslim with about 3,500 Christians, most belonging to Roman Catholic, Baptist and Greek Orthodox denominations. There are no Jews in Gaza although there was once a sizeable Jewish community dating back 3000 years. Most Jews fled following the 1929 Arab pogrom against Jews and by 1945 there were just 80 Jews in Gaza City. Israel briefly controlled the Gaza strip from 1967-2005 when every last Jew was taken out of the region following a unilateral withdrawal. Gaza is often described as the most densely populated area on earth, but in fact Mumbai is much more densely populated. Its problem is not so much its population density, but its perpetual refugee status, passed down generations, keeping Gazans in perpetual poverty overseen by aid agencies that have become an end rather than the means. These aid agencies fail to adhere to the definition of a refugee that defines those born in a country are no longer refugees.

3. In a coup against Fatah that controlled Gaza following the Israeli unilateral withdrawal in 2005, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2006, led by Ishmail Haniyeh until 2017 when Yahya Sinwar took control. In a prisoner exchange for the return of hostage Gilad Shalit, Sinwar had been released from Israeli prison where he was serving a life sentence for murder of his compatriots that he claimed were disloyal. As head of Hamas in Gaza and with his brother’s help, he has built a 500 km network of tunnels packed with weapons and all mod cons to serve his terrorist organization in their aim to destroy Israel.

4. Gaza’s GDP in 2021 was estimated to be $27.779 billion made up of smuggling and some manufacturing. Hamas imposes a levy on these goods to the tune of $460 million per annum. Apart from this Hamas receives large amounts of charitable funds and aid via UNWRA, the UN and other NGOs.

5. UNRWA employs about 40,000 local Gazans and controls hospitals and schools plus what is termed refugee camps. Refugees are a growing portion of society as it is now decreed that refugee status is passed down the generations with no sign of settlement as with, for example, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands all of whom have been absorbed into Israeli society or settled in the West as full citizens in those countries. In the schools predominantly run either by Hamas or UNRWA, there is clear evidence of radicalization of children, creating generations of Jew hating terrorists, currently involved in the war on Israel, in what Israel has termed Operation Swords of Iron. As the war continues, evidence emerges of a rabbit warren of some 500 kilometers of tunnels running under Gaza with entrances in/adjacent to hospitals, schools, private homes and even under babies’ cots. Recently the Hamas headquarters were discovered in tunnels under the UNRWA headquarter complex. Many terrorists are transported above ground in Red Cross and UNRWA ambulances.

Palestinian entity

The underlying problem with the Palestinian entity is the generational refugee issue, maintained and funded by a Western leadership overlooking that the reason for its creation by the KGB in 1964 was precisely to use a manufactured people as a weapon against the West. Russia embraced the Muslims of the Middle East in much the same way Hitler had done, creating a narrative that appealed to the innate antisemitism the journalist Mehdi Hassan wrote about in his 2013 Huffington Post article. See also Islam and Nazi Germany’s War by David Motadel.

Unless the issue of Islamic antisemitic anti-Westernism is taken into account, the post Gazan resolution will be kicked down the road only to explode in another dawn. Yahya Sinwar has already promised that, given the chance, he will do 7/10 all over again ad infinitum and there is nothing in place to ensure that another entity will not spring up once Hamas is annihilated, if that is at all possible. After all Hamas was not in existence in 1929 when the Hebron pogrom took place, nor in 1972 when the Israeli athletes were massacred at the Munich Olympics amongst many other attacks on Israel.

Repairing Gaza

This war has already seen humanitarian camps set up in southern Gaza. The destruction of the underground infrastructure will take almost a decade to repair. The fractured tunnel network will have to be stabilized before any rebuilding can commence. This is an enormous engineering project. If one considers how long it took to build a ring road around London, rebuilding Gaza can be seen in perspective. In the meantime, a tent city in southern Gaza will create a new limb for the eternal Arab refugee problem in the region. This must be avoided at all costs.

History

Little known is the ceding of the two Red Sea Islands of Tiran and Sanafir back to Egypt as part of the 1982 Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. These islands had been occupied by Israel together with Sinai and Gaza since the 1967 war.

Situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, entrance to Eilat harbor and Jordan’s Aqaba, these islands had been claimed by both Saudi Arabia and Egypt for most of the 20th century. The two islands have been a base for a multinational peace-keeping force with a small airport for the troops on the larger island, Tiran since 1979.

In 2016 Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi signed an order ceding these islands to Saudi Arabia following agreement of a multi-billion dollar Saudi investment in Egypt. The islands were due to be transferred in 2018, but, according to the Camp David agreement, transfer of the islands required Israel’s permission for any change of the international forces there.

In 2022, following President Biden’s announcement that the peace keeping forces would be withdrawn from the region, Israel gave the go ahead as an aspect of bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. This all seemed super positive until the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on 7/10. Some speculate that Iran instigated this attack to scupper the Saudi/Israel deal. Now the Iran backed Houthis of Yemen have blockaded the Bab al-Mandeb entrance into the Red Sea with access to Eilat and Aqaba interrupting international shipping. This doesn’t augur well for stability with a repeat of the Suez crisis in 1956 when Abdul Nasser of Egypt closed that canal to international shipping.

Egypt’s economy is fragile with a 50% drop in its revenue from shipping through the Suez Canal now blocked by the Houthis and is unable to build a sustainable economy. A collapsed Egypt represents probably the greatest danger to world peace having borders with Lybia and Ethiopia. Uncontrolled refugee entry into Egypt is unsustainable without international support and containment.

Resolution

An Israeli victory over Hamas is only one aspect for resolution if the Middle East is to achieve some sort of managed stability into the future. A stable Egypt is imperative and it is vitally important to ensure the Muslim Brotherhood does not win victory in the pending Egyptian election in 2024. It seems that with the right approach both a stable Egypt and settling the Gaza issue can be achieved simultaneously whilst Gaza is being territorially rehabilitated over what would probably be a ten year plus timespan.

The no state solution

The northern aspect of Sinai is a scantily occupied region since Camp David when every last Jew was painfully removed from their villages there. This proposal is to build homes for the Gazans in a portion of northern Sinai with agreed and contained boundaries. These homes can be very quickly erected as Israel had done in Southern Lebanon during the Lebanese war when prebuilt homes were transported on huge trucks from Israel into Lebanon.

The displaced Gazans can be rapidly provided with a small home per family on a patch of land in quickly assembled sites with schools where Gazan children, radicalized in UNWRA schools, can be placed in de-radicalization programs to ensure they grow into a positive future free from the grips of all those involved in perpetuating the generational condition of refugee status, a blight on the progress of the Gaza Arabs. In time, factories can be established as people are trained in skills and professions useful to a budding positive society that can take its place in a civilized world. For example, Egypt grows cotton so there is no reason why the West cannot buy its t-shirts from Egypt that is far closer geographically than China, removing the age-old Yemeni piracy raiding of ships that pass through the shipping corridor to the Suez Canal.

It is said that Egypt is not keen to take Gazans into their midst. This plan obviates that stance, as America together with the oil rich Abraham accord countries and Saudi Arabia can present Egypt with an offer that cannot be refused in return for a small section of Northern Sinai, rehabilitation of which can only add to the Egyptian economy in the long run.

Funding

The UN contributes a large aspect of funding for the Gaza strip. Other funding is derived from NGOs and international fundraising as well as large contributions to Hamas from Qatar. It has long been evident that the UN focuses on Israel in excess to any other domain on the entire world. There are more resolutions passed against Israel than any other country including those like Syria, Iraq, Iran where thousands more have been killed in civil wars.

UNRWA

UNRWA is part of the United Nations family. In addition to a limited subsidy from the regular budget, the Agency benefits from a diverse range of partnerships with sister UN agencies. Inter-agency collaboration, including the sharing of skills and expertise, contributes millions of US dollars to UNRWA operations on an annual basis while increasing the coherence and effectiveness of UN systems, structures and processes.

UNRWA is engaged within the United Nations Development Assistance Frameworks (UNDAFs) that define how UN Country Teams will contribute to the achievement of national development results, humanitarian coordination mechanisms such as the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, and rapid-response tools, such as the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination system.

UNRWA partners with an inordinate number of United Nations agencies to implement humanitarian and development interventions. However, evidence from this current war reveals that UNRWA is completely intertwined with Hamas and several countries have withdrawn its funding.

Right now UNRWA has no need of its billion dollar budget as there are currently no schools or hospitals for it to run in Gaza. This means that 40,000 people are unemployed adding to the woes of living in tent cities in Southern Gaza. The UNWRA budget can be allocated to the rehousing of the displaced Gazans in Sinai. Coupled with this, it is in the West’s interest to maintain stability in the region so foreign aid currently contributed to “pay for slay” budgets of the PA and Hamas can be redirected to this plan. Further, billions can be requisitioned from the three Hamas leaders living in luxury in Qatar who are reportedly worth $12 billion. Israel can perhaps agree not to hunt them down if they pass that cash back to the people of Gaza and convince Egypt to agree to this plan. Then, of course, there is the international property portfolio held by Hamas and the PA. Finally, the Arafat fortune can be reclaimed from his inheritors.

Final status of Gaza

One final aspect of this plan is the ultimate status of Gaza. Gaza has been a site of conflict dating back to the Canaanites. It has never had a peaceful disposition or been a happy place for very long. It is claimed to be overpopulated and is a very small strip of of land with a rich natural habitat.

This plan proposes that once cleared of the tunnels for safety, the Gaza strip is established as a nature reserve and world heritage site where nobody will reside. It must be remembered that until 1967 the people of Gaza were Egyptian and have every right to reclaim their Egyptian citizenship.

Hotels can be built along the coast of northern Sinai for visitors to tour the rich archeological sites of Gaza. The Mediterranean coastline can be enjoyed as is that of France, Italy, Greece and Israel. After deradicalization, the rehoused Gazans in Sinai could be trained to service this site with a train service perhaps using the tunnels as an underground metro for transport. The opportunities are enormous if there is a will to achieve manageable security.

This site could be contracted to an international organization to run, overseen by an international body especially created for this purpose that might include the USA, UK, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

The UN, given its involvement with Hamas and its anti-Israel stance must not be a party to the administration and oversight of Gaza. They’ve blown it.

This plan will serve to avoid a new 2023 Arab refugee problem, resolve the eternal battle over who rules Gaza and cure the Gazans of succumbing to perpetual tyranny of their terrorist masters.

It is hoped that this plan will be seriously considered, that a team of economists and consultants is rapidly assembled to start building homes in Sinai for the displaced peoples as a matter of urgency.