ISRAEL — After three months of fighting Hamas in Gaza, the IDF is on the verge of eliminating the terrorist entity. This raises the question of governance in Gaza after the smoke settles.
Despite being classified as a terrorist organization by seven nations including Israel and the United States, Hamas is the elected government in Gaza. Eliminating Hamas, deemed as necessary by Israel, will leave Gaza without a government. Founded in 1988 during the First Intifada as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas set three long-term goals, articulated in its charter: first, the end to the Jewish state, and second, the creation of an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The third goal, stated explicitly multiple times in the charter, is the genocidal annihilation of the Jews.
This is expressed succinctly in the charter by the phrase “Hamas rejects any alternative to the complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
Such an entity ruling the region on Israel’s southern border would represent a grave existential threat.
The Biden administration has pressured Israel to allow the Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza as a prelude to a “two-state solution.” Indeed, when Israel evacuated the Jews in 2005, it was done with the intention of having the PA take power. But Hamas won the elections, leading to a bloody civil war in which Hamas eliminated any opposition.
If elections were held today, it is likely that Hamas would be voted back into power. A recent poll carried out by The Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research reported that the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis has only increased the popularity of Hamas. Fifty-two percent of Gazans and 85% of West Bank respondents – or 72% of Palestinian respondents overall – voiced satisfaction with the role of Hamas in the war. Only 11% of Palestinians voiced satisfaction with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
The PA is no better than Hamas and has not condemned the Oct. 7 attack. The PA has pledged to pay nearly $3 million to the families of the 1,500 Hamas terrorists whose bodies were found inside Israel after they slaughtered Israelis on Oct. 7 as part of the long-standing Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund.
Videos of the attacks showed terrorists wearing the yellow headbands of the PA’s Fatah taking part in the massacre.
The Palestinian Authority will be rewarding the Hamas terrorists and their families with $2,807,000 – already this month. The PA has not only expressed support for the Hamas terror attacks, but under PA law it will be rewarding the terrorists.
Read more:https://t.co/btGbEkoXVv— Pal Media Watch (@palwatch) October 15, 2023
A third option has been suggested: allowing the Gazans to leave. On Jan. 2, Minister of Intelligence Gila Gamliel outlined the main points of her plan for the voluntary resettlement of residents of the Gaza Strip, which she is presenting to the Israeli government.
“The mobilization of the international community is required to create a pool of countries that will take in refugees while receiving an aid package for them,” Gamliel said. “With proper diplomatic work, the international system can be harnessed for this. The implementation of an outline of voluntary humanitarian resettlement will allow Gaza refugees who wish to have the opportunity to rebuild their lives, without the tyranny and oppression of Hamas-ISIS, to be able to do so.”
The transfer of Jews from contested areas has always been a leftwing agenda as part of the disastrous “land for peace” Oslo Process. Any calls for the transfer of Arab populations to facilitate peace between Jews and Arabs has always been treated as a radical agenda and its proponents have been demonized and even targeted by the Israeli security forces as “extremists.”
So, it is shocking that Likud MKs have presented this as a possible solution for Gaza.
Danny Danon, a Likud politician and Israel’s former representative to the United Nations, and Ram Ben-Barak from the leftwing Yesh Atid party published an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, calling for “countries around the world to accept limited numbers of Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate.”
We simply need a handful of the world’s nations to share the responsibility of hosting Gazan residents. Even if countries took in as few as 10,000 people each, it would help alleviate the crisis,” they proposed.
While fleeing a combat zone is a basic and universal human right, many foreign leaders have come out strongly against this. The U.S. State Department responded by condemning this suggestion. “This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement. “We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.”
“We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land,” Miller said. “That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.”
It is noteworthy that a study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published in September – before the war began – reported on a mass emigration of young men from Gaza.
“Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, between about 250,000 and 350,000 young adults have left and gone abroad,” the study claimed. “Their initial destination is Turkey, from where their intention is to continue to other countries, primarily European countries and Canada.” The study noted that while Hamas obscures the data, it is clear that this exodus is increasing as requests for visas pour in.
War has only increased the desire of Gazans to emigrate. An article in the Guardian reported that Palestinians are paying bribes to brokers of up to $10,000 to help them exit via Egypt, which has worked to prevent Gazans from leaving.
A report in the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom cited a memo submitted to Israel’s political leadership by legal experts claiming Israel has no legal obligation to allow displaced Gaza residents to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip. The memo, signed by Dr. Raphael (Rafi) Bitton from Sapir College, Prof. Eugene Kontorovich from George Mason University and Prof. Avi Bell from the law schools of Bar Ilan University and the University of San Diego, analyzed the state of war from a legal perspective.
The legal experts explored whether there is an obligation to allow residents to return northwards if it would thwart a key military objective in war. In this case, allowing the Gazan civilians to return would deter finding and returning Israeli hostages. The experts based their opinion on reports that the Israeli captives were transferred to the southern Gaza Strip under the cover of humanitarian corridors created by Israel while being forced to disguise themselves as locals. Allowing Gazans to return to northern Gaza would further exacerbate the IDF’s search for hostages.
The three jurists emphasized that returning the population to the north is out of the question so long as the fighting continues. It was also emphasized that Israelis were not able to return to their communities adjacent to the Gaza border because of ongoing rocket attacks from Hamas.
“The IDF has no legal obligation to enable the return of the population to the northern Gaza Strip, and such a duty is unlikely to emerge in the coming months,” the legal experts concluded. “The IDF has a vital military need justifying non-return of the population as long as fighting continues and as long as the goal of freeing the captives remains.”
A call for the Gazans to be permitted to flee a war zone should not be confused with a call to resettle the region with Jews. Eugene Kontorovich, the head of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Gaza Can’t Be Peaceful Without Jews.” In it, Kontorovich stated that among the demands being made by the Biden administration is an implicit prohibition against Jews being allowed to live in Gaza.
The Biden Administration’s implicit “Fifth No” for post-war Gaza is – “no Jews.” But Jews living in Gaza is the best test of deradicalization . My oped in tomorrow’s @WSJ https://t.co/qQWOWmml06
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) January 3, 2024
“The existence of safe Jewish communities in Gaza could eventually make Israel confident enough to withdraw,” Konbtorovich wrote. “By contrast, as we’ve seen in recent months, if Jews aren’t safe in Gaza, they won’t be safe in Israel either.”
Rebuilding a Jew-free Gaza is an integral part of the Oslo Process and the two-state solution being advocated by the Biden administration. All of the Jews living in Gaza were forcibly removed in 2005, and no Jew has set foot in the area since the evacuation. The areas of Judea and Samaria under the control of the Palestinian Authority are likewise forbidden to Jews who may not even enter without being attacked. Similarly, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the 20th century.
Kontorovich noted that a significant Jewish community existed in Gaza as far back as the 1500s. In the late 19th century, while the region was under Ottoman rule, a new wave of Jews moved in and established a flourishing trade community. Most left after the Arab riots in 1929. When Israel recaptured Gaza from Egypt in 1967, thousands of Jews moved there, establishing the communities known as Gush Katif.
All of the Jews were forcibly removed from Gush Katif on Aug. 15, 2005, the day after the Ninth of Av, commemorating the destruction of both Jewish Temples in Jerusalem.
Approximately 9,000 Jews, mostly from the Religious Zionist movement, were torn from homes they had built. Thriving agri-businesses were abandoned and all of the 21 communities were leveled.
The action left a deep scar on Israeli society. Carried out by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a heavy-handed political maneuver that required the former general to create a new party while still in office, massive protests around the country were suppressed, some violently, and many protesters jailed. Calls for a referendum vote, certainly justified for such a move, were ignored.
Indeed, the action was explicitly racist, turning Gaza into Judenrein (“cleansed of Jews”).
Sharon said his plan was designed to improve Israel’s security and international status, claiming that in the absence of negotiations with the Palestinians, the demographic threat of an Arab majority required a unilateral move toward peace.
“The parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews, to minimize the number of Palestinians, not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem,” Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s deputy leader, said in a 2003 interview.
Coming in place of negotiations, the withdrawal from Gush Katif was intended by Sharon to obviate uprooting Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. When proposing the measure, Sharon also suggested annexing Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the major settlements like Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel.
The Palestinians have failed to recreate the paradise on the Mediterranean that was Gush Katif. Many of the Gazans had been employed in the greenhouses, at least half of which were left intact. Palestinian looters destroyed them as the Jews left, effectively wiping out an industry that earned $450,000 a day.
Gaza has received billions of dollars in foreign aid, but Hamas has usurped most of it, using it for terrorism against Israel rather than benefiting Gazans.
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