Bibi blew up a city of 2 million people to rid itself of Hamas. They have not rid themselves of Hamas. They have produced a new generation of people who want to get even with Israel. Dumb tactics.
Why is this our problem? Wherever the Palestinians are better off...we are better off keeping our nose of out this. Did I miss something?
We should focus our attention on beating the crap out of Iran and threatening to level their singular oil shipping point if they continue to fund and promote terrorism. Aside from that, Bibi can clean up his own mess.
Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza
The purpose of the strip is to keep them as perpetual refugees waging a forever war on Israel.
By Elliot Kaufman, WSJ
Feb. 5, 2025 4:56 pm ET
Trump and Netanyahu at the White House Tuesday. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Zuma Press
President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries, but not because the idea is cruel. Few critics dispute his point that it would benefit the displaced to escape the “demolition site” of Gaza and live in peace rather than as cannon fodder. The real disturbance, after decades to the contrary, is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do.
On Oct. 19, 2023, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal suggested that to achieve the dream of Israel’s destruction, and with it an Arab Palestine from the river to the sea, millions of Palestinians might have to die. The prospect doesn’t trouble him. Years earlier the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas turned down Israeli offers of statehood—unprecedented for a national liberation movement—and the Palestinian leader from the 1920s through the ’40s, Hitler ally Amin al Husseini, did much the same before and at Israel’s founding.
Reimagining the failed Arab drive to wipe out the Jews, only a few years after the Holocaust, as a story of Palestinian victimization and valiant resistance to Zionist aggression is the essence of the lost cause. Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland.
This is the worst kind of nationalism, an eliminationist one that brings its people only misery. But Arab states have long indulged it. It relieved them of the burdens first of resettling Palestinians and then of starting and losing wars to annihilate Israel. Let Palestinians fight and die instead, Arab statesmen reasoned.
The world plays along. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was founded in 1949. It was supposed to resettle the displaced from the defeated Arab invasion and then disband. Instead, the Arab and Soviet blocs made Unrwa into a permanent international commitment to the lost cause. Mr. Trump’s Gaza idea flows naturally from his move Tuesday to end U.S. funding to Unrwa. He proposes to do the job Unrwa never would.
Unlike the U.N. agency that handles all the world’s other refugees, Unrwa doesn’t resettle the Palestinians it serves. Its job is to keep them in forever-refugee status down into the third, fourth and soon fifth generation. This way, they stay poor and crowded in Gaza’s permanent refugee camps, whipped up for a final return to overwhelm the Jews.
To this end, Palestinians are radicalized in Unrwa schools and kept on the international dole in the reserve army of the unemployed rather than encouraged to build institutions of their own. That’s the purpose of the Gaza Strip, from long before Hamas destroyed it by massacring Israelis and then fighting from every home, school and hospital. It’s a tiny piece of land, carved out by Egypt in 1949 to keep the Palestinians packed together at arm’s length—as Israel’s problem. With Unrwa providing all services and blocking its clients from building for the future, Gaza exists to trap Palestinians into war. It fits Hamas like a glove.
The scandal isn’t that displaced Palestinians now could be “transferred” voluntarily out of Gaza; it’s that they have been forced to stay there—as Hamas’s shields during the war and among the ruins in its aftermath. Their incarceration by Unrwa and Egypt is the brutal status quo, strangely unchallenged until now. As the Journal’s editorial board noted in March, “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”
Even as Arab states claimed Israel was slaughtering Palestinians indiscriminately, they insisted Gaza’s borders stay shut. When Palestinians tried to flee the war, as is their human right, Egypt forcibly closed the border—with the support of the international community. I wrote on these pages in May that backing Egypt in this decision was Joe Biden’s worst mistake of the war, making it longer, bloodier and less decisive than it ought to have been.
When Mr. Trump says he would like to “resettle people permanently in nice homes and where they can be happy and not be shot, not be killed,” he is accused of inhumanity. The humane solution, by liberal lights, is to sacrifice another generation of Palestinians to permanent refugee status and a forever war on Israel. That’s what life in Gaza holds for them.
Most Israelis, for their part, can hardly believe their good fortune. Leading political commentator Amit Segal quotes Psalms: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like dreamers.” Nadav Eyal, his liberal counterpart, suggests Mr. Trump’s idea could be effective leverage for a Saudi deal. Let Riyadh take credit for saving Gaza by making peace with Israel. Others see the threat of U.S. control as a way to prod Arab states to take responsibility for Gaza. A new range of possibilities has opened up. Conservative publisher Rotem Sella writes, “Tonight, ‘total victory’ has turned from an abstract idea into a clear and near reality.”
All know that a President Kamala Harris would sooner have suggested the evacuation of Israel than of Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled by resisting Mr. Biden’s conventional ideas for the “day after” the war, most of them likelier to hasten the next war than to bring peace. Now, in dealing with Mr. Trump, Israel can reap the reward.
That’s what many find so intolerable about Mr. Trump’s idea. Not that it would hurt Palestinians—it would help them—but that it would set back the lost cause, which, profligate as ever with Palestinian lives, had seemed to prosper so wonderfully from the war in Gaza and the death squads’ work on Oct. 7, 2023.
Mr. Kaufman is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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