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The very first step in President Donald Trump’s 20-step comprehensive, good-faith effort to bring peace to the Middle East states that “Gaza will be a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.”
That’s going to be a heavy lift. Because “deradicalizing” Gaza entails the Palestinian people abandoning their identity and transforming their culture, which has been defined by a mythical origin story and a self-destructive bloodlust against their neighbor. And yet step one is the only step that really matters.
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Journalists and politicians love to lament the ancient nature of the confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis or Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. It’s always been lazy, ahistorical thinking. For one thing, Israel is at peace with most of the Arab world. There is no conflict with the Egyptians, Jordanians, or Gulf states. Israel is at war with Islamist Iranian proxies. One of the big, underlying motivations by Palestinians and Iranians for the Oct. 7 attack was to prevent the Saudis from joining the Abraham Accords.
For another, the Palestinian conflict is a relatively modern one. One side simply refuses to accept the reality of history. Palestinians have no right to a state. Palestinian identity, a 20th-century ethnic concoction, ends and begins with “Nakba,” the day the entire Islamic world rejected a new Arab state, began a war, attempted to massacre the Jewish population in Israel, and began ejecting about 750,000 Jews from their ancestral homes across the Middle East.
The claim that Israel is the ancestral home of most Palestinian “refugees” is a myth. From 1948 until 1967, when Israel reclaimed disputed areas, Gaza was in the hands of Egypt. Not one world leader referred to Gaza as “occupied” during that time. There was no rebellion against their Egyptian occupiers or terrorist strikes in the heart of Cairo. No, Gaza was used as a launch site by Fedayeen terrorists against Israeli civilians.
Indeed, the only reason Palestinians have been showered with perpetual aid and legitimacy in the first place is that they have chosen the right enemy: the Jewish people. If you don’t believe the attention Palestinians garner is unique, ask yourself why groups with far stronger historical cases for self-determination, such as the Druze, Yazidi, or scores of other ancient minorities, have no such support. The starving Rohingya people are the largest stateless minority in the world, and most Americans have probably never even heard of them.
Perhaps if they started stabbing Jews in synagogues on Yom Kippur, countries like France and Britain would start “recognizing” their claim.
The propensity to engage in malevolent violence against civilians does bolster the historic argument for statehood. Yet, the West feeds Palestinian radicalism by rewarding it. Days after Oct. 7, Democrats were already talking about a Palestinian state. One of the driving misconceptions of the elite Middle East policy blob in the United States is that peace in the Middle East is contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state. The opposite is true.
The demand for an Arab “Palestine,” a creation of the Soviets and Arab states post-1967, has convinced Gazans and West Bankers that they should engage in endless war and self-inflicted deprivation. It is exceptionally unlikely that there ever will be a Palestinian state. But peace is contingent on Palestinians accepting that the existence of Israel is permanent and that there is no “right of return.” The Trump plan doesn’t promise them a state. The plan states that only after completing many reforms over numerous years in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority will there be any credible “pathway” for a new state.
That’s the rub.
Any rational person would jump at Trump’s postwar reconstruction plan. The world promises to help rebuild Gaza, to attract investments and experts from around the world to modernize and enrich the Palestinians’ home, guaranteeing them security and a future. Not that anyone threatens a peaceful Gaza. The idea that Israel has any desire to occupy that strip is a fantasy. The country has been trying to rid itself of it for decades.
But Trump’s promise isn’t new. Palestinians could have dropped their bellicosity scores of times during the past century and chosen a far brighter future. The world offered Palestinians a state too many times to detail here. They are possibly the only people in the world who are permitted to keep rewinding history after every war they lose.
Now, of course, there are numerous other complexities to the deal.
Even if Hamas accepts the plan, which not only requires it to disarm and “deradicalize” but leave political and administrative positions for good, the group’s promises mean nothing. Hamas has never kept an agreement. Every break in fighting is simply an opportunity to retrench. The Oct. 7 massacre was launched in the middle of a ceasefire.
Even if Hamas accepts the deal, foreigners will need to run the place for the foreseeable future. Palestinians have never shown the ability to govern themselves in a manner required of the 20th century. Israelis handed Palestinians a proto-state in Gaza in 2005. American Jews bought the people advanced farming technology to feed themselves. Everyone knows what happened next — they destroyed the technology, put Hamas in charge, and engaged in 20 years of war.
Forget Gaza for a moment. Take the Palestinian Authority, the more moderate and responsible faction in Judea and Samaria. Though it has been showered with billions in aid from around the world, the corrupt ruling clan, which is unable to administer an election because extremists would win, can’t even control its own internal security. Without Israeli assistance, the entire place would have fallen to Hamas a long time ago, just as Gaza fell.
The best solution to this mess would be for Egypt and Jordan to annex Gaza and parts of the West Bank and take responsibility for the people and borders. But neither of those nations wants Palestinians, who have been a destabilizing force in the region for a long time. Years ago, Jordan ejected the Palestine Liberation Organization. As did Lebanon. Egypt has closed its border with Gaza to keep out Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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The plan is still worth pursuing. At worst, it imbues Israel with far more legitimacy in its efforts to destroy Hamas. The entire world, including most Arab nations and many otherwise antagonistic Muslim countries, has agreed that the terrorist army must disarm and Palestinians must deradicalize before any plan can move forward. If the Palestinians fail to comply, what excuse does the world have in opposing Israel’s advance?
If Palestinians, however, accept reality, they could live in peace starting tomorrow. Of course, it has always been up to them.