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Trump Has Challenged the Arab View of Gaza as Central to "Steadfastness" Against the Zionist Enemy

(Commentary) Elliott Abrams - In our era, the Kingdom of Egypt took over when the British abandoned the Palestine Mandate and ruled Gaza from 1948 to 1967. But the Egyptians never annexed the area and never wanted to. They never viewed it as part of Egypt; Gazans could not become Egyptian citizens or move there. Israel conquered Gaza in the 1967 War, but when it withdrew from Sinai as part of the Camp David accords, it offered to give Gaza back to Egypt. No deal. Gaza was forsaken initially even by the Palestinians. In the original PLO charter of 1964, Article 24 clearly states that "this Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] on the Gaza Strip." The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah always gave Gaza and Gazans low priority. Same with Hamas. As Haviv Rettig Gur has written: "What did Hamas build there?...The GDP per capita in Gaza was higher than Morocco's before October 7. Its potential was always enormous....[The] tunnel system is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, and Hamas built nothing else in Gaza in all their years of ruling it." I was serving in the George W. Bush administration in 2003 when Ariel Sharon announced his decision to get out of Gaza. Sharon did not think Israelis had a future in Gaza. The demography was hopeless. In 2005 the withdrawal was completed, and Gaza was left to the Palestinian Authority to govern. The Israelis had built a network of 3,000 greenhouses, which provided 15% of all Israeli agricultural exports. A group of Jewish philanthropists put up the money and bought them. The Gazans would be given a head start on economic development, with the greenhouses as models. When the Israelis left, crowds looted and destroyed the greenhouses within one week. In all the wars of the past two centuries, there has never been a case in which civilians were absolutely forbidden to flee the battlefields. Until Gaza. Trump has wonderfully challenged the Arab view of Gaza as central to the "steadfastness" needed against the Zionist enemy, and he has rightly called it inhuman. In fact, he has jettisoned the view that the most important thing about Gaza is its role in the "two-state solution." But no one is offering visas; apparently refugees from Iraq or Syria are one thing, and Palestinians are another. Unless that changes, Trump's plan will not get off the ground. Trump's plan accepts that development will not happen in the current Gaza situation, where society is permeated by corruption, brutality, hatred, and terror. This is a simple fact about life and is not a reflection of prejudice against Palestinians. Trump recognizes that pouring more money into Gaza from Qatar or UNRWA (or the U.S.) will only reproduce what is there now: more terrorism, more death and destruction, and more misery. Trump is treating Gaza as a physical place and its people as suffering humans, which is more than has ever been done by any Arab League resolution condemning Israel. The writer is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2025-02-20 00:00:00
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