Over the last eight months, in the midst of a war in Israel and the largest expressions of Jew hatred seen worldwide since the Holocaust, a constant question keeps being asked: is it even possible for there to be peace between Israel and its neighbors?
To deny the possibility of a long-lasting peace is to deny the existence of God; and as a Rabbi, that is inconceivable for me, for Judaism teaches that “all things are in the hand of God except being in awe of God”. I believe peace is possible, but it requires creative thinking and hard work.
Golda Meir famously said, “We will have peace when Arab mothers love their children more than they hate us”. This is an impossibility with all Hamas supporters, as Articles 7, 11, and 13 of the 1988 Hamas Charter are clear that Hamas is dedicated to the “obliteration” of the Jewish people. It is impossible to have peace with people who are dedicated to your death. So, the first thing that must happen to create a long lasting peace is to destroy Hamas. Not defeat it but destroy it… and replace it with leadership and a workable plan for a successful Gaza. A Gaza where mothers are seeing their children have better lives and prefer those better lives to an existence devoted to hating Jews.
Israel is currently well on the way to eliminating Hamas, having destroyed the Rafah brigade and most of the Hamas infrastructure. It is only because of Israel’s commitment to redeeming hostages that it has not fully destroyed Hamas already. But with the destruction of Hamas, is there a plan that could work?
I believe that as a general rule, most people would rather experience a qualitatively better life for their children in peace than suffering through war. Yes, there are the fanatical extremists, but most people prefer hope and success to war and misery. If we accept that as a major premise (recognizing that it may be naïve and the Jew hatred may just be too great), then there is a potential for a permanent peace. And there is a precedent historically.
Upon the destruction of Hamas, the next step is to be honest: there is and has never been a nation of “Palestine”. There has never been a unique Palestinian government, currency, language, stamp, culture, or any symptoms of an independent country. The first time the word “Palestine” is used is by the Romans (over 1000 years after the Jewish Kingdom of Israel), who called the entire Middle East region (including what is now Israel, Egypt, Jordan, et al) Philistena, similar to calling the states of Kansas, Missouri, etc. “the Midwest”. Not a nation, but a region. That regional name was passed on through multiple empires who occupied the area to the Ottoman Empire and then to the British after WWI. The concept of an individual nation of Palestine only came about in 1964, when public relations expert George Anderson developed the idea at the behest of the Arab League to create a “victim” that could be used to manipulate public opinion against Israel, and created the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which later transformed into the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat. The great-grandparents of the people living in Gaza today called themselves “Egyptians” and the ancestors of those Arabs in the West Bank called themselves “Jordanian” (all living in the regional mandate of “Palestine” with “Mandate of Palestine” passports from the British government).
This is the difficult task: to return to the honesty that there is no “Palestine”, but just Arabs living in different countries. Not to discount the people who live in Gaza, but to counteract the propaganda of the last sixty years and replace it with historical accuracy.
The next step after the destruction of the extremists of Hamas is to separate Gaza and the West Bank back into distinct territories that are not one fictional nation.
This will be a difficult shift because of world media propaganda. But it is even more difficult given that to do this would remove a tremendous amount of power and influence by the P.A.; and so, they would be extremely opposed to this concept. But it is an absolute necessity if we are to ever have peace.
So long as there is a fictional nation of “Palestine” that is non-contiguous and is on both the western and eastern borders of Israel, the P.A. and its supporters will always call for the destruction of Israel… claiming that the whole area in between the West Bank and Gaza is actually “Palestine” and Israel is a “colonizer” who has no right to exist. It is as if New York and California seceded from the U.S., and decades later claimed that all of the states in between were actually part of “New California”. In order to achieve peace, we must go back to the pre-1964 honesty that Gaza is distinct from the West Bank and eliminate the propaganda of the last sixty years.
That is the monumental task: the world must insist that these unrelated Arabs are not part of a single demographic. But it is necessary and possible, especially with American pressure.
If (and this is a big “if”) we can separate Gaza and the West Bank into two entities, there becomes a clear path towards peace modeled after amateur athletics.
In 1964, athletes from Gaza competed under their own Gaza Amateur Athletic Federation. It was not until 1983 that Arafat was able to pressure them into joining the Palestinian Amateur Athletic Federation. For 19 years, the athletes from Gaza were distinct, and this is the model that can be used politically to create peace.
With Gaza separated from the West Bank, a three-state solution becomes possible rather than the unworkable two-state solution that so many politicians keep fighting for.
With Hamas eliminated and a separation of Gaza from the West Bank, the entire dynamic of the region changes. Gaza, which has some of the prime beach property in the world and is close to Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv could become the Singapore of the Middle East: a place of commerce and tourism. Upon creating an independent state of Gaza, an international administration that includes both Israel and the United States could oversee the rebuilding of Gaza over a 3- or 4-year period. International business partners such as Hilton and Hyatt could be convinced to build resort properties on the beach. Assurance of rejecting terrorism could be garnished by copying the model of resorts of US Indian reservations and each resort participating in giving a portion of income to native Gazans; and Gazans would have employment opportunities as well in the new businesses. The Gazans would then have a vested interest in rejecting the extremists as their families would be prospering and their children would have significantly better lives. Peace and prosperity would replace war and misery. Hope would multiply upon itself, and Gazans (not Hamas sympathizers) would be able to create a thriving society for themselves and their children.
The West Bank, or third state, would need to be a separate negotiation; but without a problematic imperative of tying the West Bank and Gaza together, there are numerous possibilities. Annexed to Jordan or as an independent state of its own, the West Bank issue would be exponentially easier to resolve.
There are obvious challenges inherent in this three-state solution. The splitting of Gaza and the West Bank; the elimination of extremists such as Hamas in Gaza; and the convincing of the international business community to invest in Gaza are all challenges. This plan requires the United States to exert pressure on the P.A. to allow Gaza to thrive as an independent nation. Iran, the P.A., and all Arab extremist groups would be opposed to this plan as they would lose power in the region. But the rest of the world would ultimately embrace this solution as it allows the innocents in Gaza to rebuild peaceful and successful lives, would create another modern society in the Middle East, and would be a start to peace in the entire region. Although difficult to enact, this is the one solution that has the possibility of establishing a long-lasting peace.
Theodor Herzl once said, “If you will it, it is no dream. And if not, a dream it is and a dream it will remain”. The whole world dreams of peace, and perhaps this is a way to achieve it.
Dreams only become reality with hard work combined with faith. But if there has ever been a dream worth working towards, a peaceful and prosperous independent Gaza as a neighbor of a safe Israel is certainly worth the effort.
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