OPINION:
Perhaps the best thing about President Trump’s “out-of-the-box” idea for the future of the Gaza Strip is this: It is not the obviously and abjectly tried and failed policy of the past 75 years. Whatever comes next in Gaza, it will have to ensure that the horrific massacre that Israel was subjected to on Oct. 7, 2023, can never be repeated.
Optimally, moderate Arab countries, primarily U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, should play an active role, including providing peace-keeping troops, in rebuilding Gaza as a territory that will not threaten Israel and will provide a prosperous future for Palestinians willing to live in peace with the Jewish state next door.
It is galling and obscene to demand, especially when Hamas terrorists are still holding innocent hostages, that Israel returns to the situation that existed on Oct. 6, 2023, when, presumably, there was a ceasefire. Doing so is tantamount to consigning Israel to more terrorism. Hamas admits freely that its goal remains the violent destruction of Israel. It also means condemning more children in Gaza to the suffering they will endure by living under a terrorist regime that hides among them after committing atrocities.
The genocidal attack by Hamas against innocent Israeli civilians was by no means the beginning of the problem with Gaza. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Gaza has been a focal point and source of terrorism and killing against Israel and misery for the Palestinians who live there (misery caused by their own “leaders.”)
To begin with, the Palestinians who fled the newborn state of Israel and ended up in Gaza did so because the Arab states invaded the new state, intending to annihilate it in its infancy and slaughter its inhabitants. The resulting war, Israel’s War of Independence, would never have happened had the Arab states and the Arab inhabitants of Israel not violently rejected the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created an Arab state alongside Israel. The Arabs who fled and ended up in Gaza were thus victims of their own greed and aggression.
The refugees in Gaza were purposely confined to camps where their hatred against Israel festered. Arab propaganda at home and abroad targeted Israel as a bogeyman that was the cause of all the region’s problems. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt, then Israel’s No. 1 enemy, used Gaza as a launching pad for terrorist attacks on Israel. The cross-border raids by “fedayeen” fighters recruited from among disgruntled and embittered refugees in Gaza forced Israel to retaliate and kept the conflict at a high temperature. The conscious goal was to preserve Gaza as a cauldron of hate and resentment against Israel and as a continuing fertile ground for terrorism.
In 1956, a young Israeli soldier by the name of Ro’i Rothberg was killed by a fedayeen infiltrator at Kibbutz Nahal Oz (much later, one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023). At his funeral, Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s army chief of staff, eulogized him and prophetically lamented the danger emanating from Gaza. Israel, he said, was “carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness so that they can tear us apart.” He warned against “the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy who call upon us to put down our arms.” He concluded that “this is the choice of our lives — to be ready and armed and strong and tough, for if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”
Thus, in 1956, when the state of Israel was not yet 10 years old, Dayan, one of Israel’s greatest warriors and statesmen, realized that his country was fated to be ever-vigilant and that Gaza had been turned into an existential threat.
In 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel withdrew from Gaza completely. The Palestinians had a mini-state and could have done anything they pleased. It could have been a beautiful and successful Palestinian state — a Middle Eastern Singapore. Instead, the people of Gaza elected Hamas. Instead of investing in the future of their people, Hamas built terrorist tunnels and plotted Oct. 7.
The crocodile tears shed by ignorant protesters around the world should leave us cold. Not one child in Gaza would have been killed had not Hamas, sadly with the backing and participation of so many in Gaza, brutally attacked Israel. As Marco Rubio, now secretary of state, said so accurately about the death toll in Gaza, “Hamas is 100% to blame.”
If the status quo is untenable, which it certainly is, then now is the time to start thinking about alternatives that will ensure the safety of Israel and a decent future for Palestinians.
Suppose Arab leaders are serious about wanting to help the Palestinians. In that case, they will engage in an honest dialogue about Gaza’s future and not demand a return to the failed prescriptions of the past.
• Dan Burton is a Republican former member of Congress from Indiana and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee. Gil Kapen is executive director of the American Jewish International Relations Institute-B’nai B’rith International and a former Republican staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
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