Resettling Gaza

After President Trump proposed resettling the Arab Muslim settlers currently living in Gaza, there was an outbreak of furious objections from politicians, activists and media outlets.

The objections could be roughly divided into the moral and the practical. The ‘moral’ objection was that it was ‘wrong’ to resettle the population currently occupying Gaza, and the ‘practical’ objection was that it would be impossible to accomplish. Both objections do not hold up.

The Jewish population of Gaza was resettled twice, once after the Egyptian invasion and the conquest of Gaza during the War of Independence, and the second time after the 2005 ‘disengagement’ forcibly eliminated 21 Jewish communities and expelled families living there.

Not only did politicians and the media not object to the forcible removal of the Jewish communities of Gaza, but they celebrated it as a step forward for peace in the region.

Many, if not most ‘peace plans’, propose the further resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Judea and Samaria to make way for a ‘Palestinian’ state. Even as they object to  resettling Gazan Muslims in Arab countries, they refer to Jews living in the ‘West Bank’ as settlers, to their communities as ‘settlements’ and propose that they be resettled elsewhere.

UN Resolution 242 has been interpreted by many politicians and the media to mean that Israel must withdraw from territory, including parts of Jerusalem, where 450,000 Jews live. The same people who insist that it’s morally wrong and impractical to resettle 2 million Muslims out of Gaza also argue that it’s morally right and practical to resettle nearly half a million Jews in Israel.

Opponents of Trump’s proposal don’t believe it’s wrong to resettle a population, they would just rather expel and resettle Jews than expel and resettle the Arab Muslim colonial population.

They don’t oppose resettlement, they support terrorism.

With the moral question out of the way, what about the practical one: is it even possible?

Some say that the Gaza Arab Muslim population could not be moved without ‘door-to-door fighting’. But Israel’s recent experience in the war after Oct 7 shows that’s clearly not true.

Despite the false claims of genocide, the Israelis kept civilian casualties to a minimum by evacuating as much as the ‘civilian’ population as possible from one part of Gaza to another.

Despite being told it was impossible, Israelis evacuated hundreds of thousands of Gazans to make way for military operations. During the beginning of the  war, around 1 million Gazans left the north for the south and the UN would later claim that as many as 1.5 million Muslim settlers in Gaza had been displaced. Most of those in Gaza followed orders and got out of the way.

Looking to examples beyond Israel, the Black September war between Jordan and the PLO resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 terrorists, as many as 25,000 civilians, according to Yasser Arafat, and some 20,000 ‘Palestinians’ were resettled in ‘refugee camps’ in Lebanon

After the Gulf War, Kuwait punished the ‘Palestinians’ who had collaborated with Saddam Hussein, by expelling some 280,000 of them in a mass purge that was later joined by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf allies for a total estimated by ‘Palestinian’ advocates at 400,000.

Kuwait shelled ‘Palestinian’ neighborhoods and sent in death squads to massacre them. Tanks and troops were deployed, checkpoints were set up and most of the ‘Palestinians’ were driven from their country and their neighborhoods were eliminated. Parts of Hawally, where the ‘Palestinians’ used to live, were bulldozed and turned into an amusement park.

This was done with the support of the first Bush administration.

“I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature,” President George H.W. Bush told reporters at a press conference.

Saudi Arabia deported over 50,000 ‘Palestinians’, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar, which has since become a state sponsor of Hamas, also began firing, expelling and deporting ‘Palestinians’

None of these events occasioned much protest or commentary, they occurred with the support of western governments who, like President Bush, compared it to the reactions of the French against collaborators after the Nazi occupation, and life soon went on as it had before.

The resettlement of large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ has happened before in the Middle East. While the resettlement of Gaza would take place on a larger scale, it would not be that much larger than the resettlements during the war or in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Such a resettlement is both practical and morally defensible since there are no other options.

The underlying problem in the conflict is that Israel resettled some 800,000 Jewish refugees from the Muslim world, while the Arab Muslim nations who attacked it failed to do likewise. Along with the UN, they insisted on maintaining them under the fake identity of ‘Palestinians’ as a perpetual army of occupation: forming into terrorist groups for an endless war with Israel.

“You have to learn from history. You can’t keep doing the same mistake over and over again,”  President Trump pointed out.

Every possible effort has been made to create a ‘Palestinian’ state for over 30 years. After multiple peace proposals, land concessions, endless rounds of negotiations and taxpayer funding (over $2 billion through USAID to the ‘Palestinians’ since Oct 7 alone) nothing worked.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, leaving behind greenhouses and plans for new industries, along with sizable international funding, Hamas turned it into a war zone.

Two-state solutionists continue to argue that if Israel were to offer even more land, expel and resettle more Jews, the Muslim terrorists would finally agree to a permanent peace.

But there has never been a single shred of evidence that would work. None of the Israeli proposals or concessions undertaken since the late 1980s have led to any kind of peace. The PLO and Hamas used terrorism at every turn to press for more Israeli concessions while giving nothing in return. Their leaders have said again and again that they intend to destroy Israel.

After Oct 7, everyone is finally taking them at their word.

Diplomats insisted that peace could not come without the expulsion and resettlement of Jews from Judea and Samaria. President Trump flipped the table by suggesting that it can’t come without the resettlement of Arab Muslims from Gaza. Which makes more sense?

Debate is still going on about President Trump’s proposal for an American role in Gaza. Many Americans and Israelis see the move as unnecessary. They would prefer to have Israel take care of business alone with the political support of the United States. Just as Bush provided political support for the Kuwaitis to expel the ‘Palestinian’ population from their country.

President Trump is a visionary and his idea reframed the entire view of the conflict, and while it may only be an opening for a negotiating position, like his talk of annexing Canada or Greenland, there is no doubt that it has shaken up all the conventional wisdom in the Middle East. His basic  premise, that Gaza is a lovely place that will be a source of conflict as long as it is populated by Islamic terrorists and their supporters, is fundamentally sound.

The objections to it, both moral and practical, are groundless. Resettlement is feasible and moral. If the Kuwaitis and the Jordanians could resettle the ‘Palestinians’ out of their countries on far less grounds than the atrocities of Oct 7, the Israelis certainly have the right to do it.

The politicians, diplomats and reporters who advocated for the mass resettlement of nearly half a million Jews have no moral grounds for opposing the resettlement of Gaza Muslims.

And after trying everything else, including decades of failed efforts to make peace with the terrorists or trying to coexist with them in the absence of peace, it’s time to do what makes the most sense for everyone, and the only thing that has any hope of bringing peace to the region.