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February 9, 2024

The U.S. thinks that a reformed PA could run a postwar Gaza Strip at peace with Israel, but that ignores several inconvenient facts:

  1. The latest poll of Palestinian public opinion shows that the PA is deeply unpopular.
  2. The same poll shows that 72% of respondents supported the massacre of October 7th.
  3. The PA has an abysmal record of corruption and was too weak to prevent a Hamas-led coup in Gaza, less than two years after Israel’s withdrawal.
  4. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world and the problem will only get worse, thanks to an estimated population growth rate of 4% (among the highest in the world).  A 2018 study by Mario Coccia found that “terrorism thrives… with high growth rates of population combined with collective identity factors and low socioeconomic development.”
  5. The plan to create a postwar Palestinian state in Gaza would establish an unthinkable precedent with far-reaching consequences for global security: terrorist movements can now rape and behead their way to statehood.
  6. There is no Arab or other power with the popularity, authority, and morality to educate for coexistence and to ensure that all reconstruction funds rebuild Gaza as Singapore instead of Somalia.

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Yet the international community still clings to the delusional idea that if they just pressure Israel into accepting a future Palestinian state in Gaza, that impoverished, overcrowded, and radicalized territory will suddenly flourish.

While Japan and Nazi Germany were successfully deradicalized, that was only after the kind of absolute defeat and extended occupation that global opinion would never allow for Gaza.

Given the facts, resettlement is the only solution that avoids perpetual war between Gaza and Israel.

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Refugee resettlement is what normally happens to belligerents who lose wars, as Bill Maher amusingly explains in a brief historical summary that notes the many millions who have been resettled after wars in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. And there are countless other examples, including from last September, when over 100,000 Armenians had to abandon their ancestral lands in a matter of days after Azerbaijan militarily outmaneuvered Armenia (and the world hardly cared). Why should Gazans be treated any differently after losing a war that they started? If 850,000 Jews were forced to resettle in tiny Israel after fleeing Muslim lands where they had lived for centuries, why can’t Gazan refugees settle in some or all of the exponentially larger Arab countries?

Instead, the international community insists that Gazans stay in the overcrowded and now largely destroyed Gaza Strip, despite their hateful determination to keep attacking Israel and even though leaving them in Gaza is a recipe for humanitarian disaster and endless extremism: a failed state with a fast-growing population, no economy, no infrastructure, and now huge numbers of homeless. How is insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza actually helping them?

And the longer the international community coddles Palestinians with massive humanitarian aid and diplomatic pressure that prevents Israel from conclusively winning the wars that Palestinians start, the longer they’ll think that “resistance” might someday pay off — maybe by the 34th war, in the year 2075.

Why are Palestinians the only people not allowed to lose a war? What makes Gazans worthy of such preferential treatment? The Tibetans never blew up a bus in Beijing or massacred their Chinese occupiers, and yet they must submit to China’s military superiority.  But somehow Gazans have a stronger moral claim to a state and are therefore exempt from the rules of war and history?

Adding to the absurdity of insisting that Gazans remain in Gaza, they aren’t even endemic to that land, which has been ruled and inhabited by countless peoples over the centuries. Most Gazans are the children or grandchildren of people who arrived as refugees. Indeed, one of the root causes of the Israel-Gaza conflict is the conviction among Gazans that they are refugees who will one day return to live in the territory of sovereign Israel. Their real desire is not to live forever in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Rafah, but rather to move to Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem (after removing the Jews “from the river to the sea”).

Putting aside the lack of historical connection to the Gaza Strip and the consequences that normally apply to those who lose wars, resettlement is also the most practical solution to the present humanitarian crisis. Even if the war magically ended today, clearing all the rubble and rebuilding Gaza will require far more time, effort, and money than permanently resettling Gaza’s refugees.