Clifford D. Mayis the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), as well as a columnist for “The Washington Times.”
(JNS) More than 6 million Syrians fled their homeland during that country’s almost 14-year-long civil war. Other nations took them in. It was the humanitarian thing to do, and it fulfilled their obligation under international law.
Since Hamas initiated a full-blown war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, almost no Gazans have managed to flee because no countries—not even Egypt, whose Sinai Peninsula borders Gaza—were willing to take them in.
Was that because the value of Gaza’s civilians as Hamas’ “human shields”—sacrificial pawns in the jihad against Israel—overrode humanitarian and legal concerns? Or because they want them to be allowed to plan their next attack? I report, you decide.
Prior to the current conflict it could be credibly argued that “the Palestinian Arab cause” could be achieved with the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.
It’s now become obvious that, for Hamas and its supporters, the Palestinian Arab cause is and always has been the extermination of Israel, the resurrected Jewish homeland, a tiny island amid an ocean of Arab and Muslim states.
“Two-state solutions” were offered to Palestinian Arab leaders in 1937, 1947, 1967, 1978, 2000, 2001 and 2008. Palestinian Arab leaders declined them all and proposed no alternatives.
However, if you think about it, a kind of two-state solution was in effect the day before Hamas terrorists breached Israel’s border and staged the worst orgy of murder and other atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust.
Gaza has been ruled by Palestinian Arabs since 2005, when Israel totally withdrew from the territory without preconditions in the hope of securing peace. Initially, that meant Palestinian Authority, dominated by the Fatah movement, governed. Two years later, Hamas ousted Fatah and established its unfree one-party rule with no further elections.
Gazans have been among the largest recipients of aid from the “international donor community” on a per capita basis.
Food, medicine and construction materials were routinely transported from Israel each day into Gaza. Israel supplied Gazans with electricity. Thousands of Gazans were permitted to enter Israel to take jobs.
Hamas delegated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other U.N. agencies the provision of most social services. Hamas gave the U.N. orders, and the U.N. agreed without complaint— even when munitions were stored in schools and command-and-control centers set up in hospitals.
Had Hamas been willing to peacefully coexist with Israel, Gaza could have become a successful nation-state confederated in some way with the Palestinian Arab entity on the 'West Bank'.
Instead, Hamas built an army and spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a subterranean fortress in which its troops would hide during the war it planned to launch.
Early in the conflict, as innocent hostages were being held and tortured by Hamas, the Biden administration demanded that Israel not just deliver aid—food and fuel that Hamas would of course steal—but also formulate a plan for “the day after.”
How odd those demands seem in any historical context. Can you imagine Roosevelt and Churchill providing aid to Germany and formulating the Marshall Plan before the Nazis surrendered?
It’s against this backdrop that President Trump has now raised an audacious idea for post-war Gaza. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it,” Trump announced last week.
He said the almost 2 million Gazans—who self-identify as “refugees from Palestine” even though they live in a Palestinian Arab territory (they cannot be termed refugees if they are on Palestinian Arab territory and on the other hand, most are there only since 1948 when they left Israel hoping to come back after the Arab armies destroyed the fledgling Jewish state, so talk of Gaza being their land for millenia is a bald lie, ed.) —should relocate to other countries. At the same time, the United States would dismantle “all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons” in the Strip. He added that, at present, Gaza is “a demolition site,” with “nothing to move back into.”
The feasibility of this proposal notwithstanding, I strongly suspect it was a way of saying to Arab rulers, particularly Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordanian King Abdullah II: “You don’t get to just watch and kibitz. If you don’t like my idea, come up with a better one!”
Remember that following the 1948 British withdrawal from Mandatory Palestine, Egypt ruled Gaza. That rule ended in 1967 after Egypt launched and lost a war against Israel. Note: Egypt never attempted to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza.
As for Jordan, it was carved from the British Mandate for Palestine in 1921. In that new polity, then named Transjordan, the British installed an emir—a Hashemite, a member of a noble clan resettled from Arabia.
The territory remained a British protectorate until 1946, when it was granted independence as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Two years later Jordan conquered Judea and Samaria, expelled all the Jews, renamed those territories the 'West Bank', and annexed them. Jordan lost them when it attacked Israel despite being warned to stay out of the fray in the 1967 war.
Most Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. Among them is Queen Rania, wife of the current king of Jordan, Abdullah II. If their son, Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah, succeeds to the throne, he will be the first Palestinian Arab king in history.
The Egyptian and Jordanian responses to President Trump’s proposal have so far been unhelpful. They have reiterated their opposition to taking in Palestinian Arabs, even temporarily. They insist that Palestinian Arabs lead Gaza’s reconstruction, neglecting to specify which Palestinian Arabs would be up to the task. Hamas, maybe?
Though Trump is famously unpredictable, I wouldn’t be astonished – based on remarks he’s made over recent days—if he were to tell Sissi and King Abdullah something along these lines:
“You receive huge amounts of American aid along with vital security assistance. These are not entitlements.
“I’m trying to put an end to endless wars in the Middle East. That requires that Gazans not be ruled by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the mullahs in Tehran.
“So, are you with me or against me? Are you an ally? Because I expect America’s allies to contribute to the collective security and give at least as much as they take. Is that you or not?
They should think hard before answering.
