Suffering Palestinians is the strategy against Israel.

This almost guarantees that Arab proposals for post-war Gaza will be duds in terms of any regional political advancement, even if they would rebuild the Strip.

The Palestinians’ plight, as media cliche writers dub it, is the Arabs’ main weapon. (photo: Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Arab unity is as real as a three-humped dromedary, but Arab leaders shouted out in outraged unison against U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for the U.S. to take over Gaza, relocate its people, and rebuild the Strip.

Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit thundered that Trump’s plan would have a “damaging effect on peace and stability” and was “unacceptable for the Arab world.”

Let me translate: “We loathe Jews and Israel’s existence and have never given up our sick Islamist fantasy of destroying the Jewish state.”

The so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a strategy for the Arab goal of annihilating Israel; it is not the war itself. The Palestinians’ plight, as media cliche writers dub it, is the Arabs’ main weapon, so two million Palestinians relocated from Gaza would be a huge reduction in the Arab arsenal and a major victory for Israel.

No wonder the Arabs oppose it.

The Arab world does not even attempt to resolve the contradiction that Gazans claim refugee status as well as insisting that Gaza is their homeland. If they are refugees, then they can — and should — be relocated. If they are from Gaza, they cannot be relocated, but they are also not a displaced people. That undermines the entire basis for Palestinians’ decades of terror against Israel and exposes the fictional Palestinian narrative for the lie that it is.

This is the big picture. It is also the simple part. The world is in flux. The Muslim world’s schisms — Sunni versus Shia, and reformers versus barbarians — are playing out. Interests are shifting and realigning.

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Today, Gaza is a population of jihadists who elected Hamas into government, turned it into an ISIS-Nazi terror state, and launched the genocidal October 7th pogrom against Israel. The mainstream media likes to portray Hamas as a group that is separate from ordinary Gazans, who are suffering under Hamas’ oppression.

While that is certainly the case for some, the Arab world knows that Hamas is a Palestinian movement that enjoys great support and, after 18 years in power, has radicalized Gazans.

Polling from the respected Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research from June 2024 (when Israeli attacks were fierce) shows that 57 percent of Gazans think believe Hamas was right to attack on Israel on October 7th. Fully 76 percent of Palestinians in Gaza said they were satisfied with Hamas’ performance during the Israel-Hamas war.

This is a terrifying poll. Hamas’ grotesque strategy in Gaza is to use civilians as human shields, something only jihadist crazies could support, yet 75 percent of Gazans claim to do so.

One can quibble with the poll numbers, but it is clear that many Palestinians in Gaza are Islamists. That is why Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that would be expected to take in Gazans under Trump’s plan, want nothing to do with them.

Hamas is an offshoot of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and banned as a terror group in 2013. Egypt knows that these jihadists want to build a Caliphate at the expense of nation-states, including Arab kingdoms and Muslim republics, so the Egyptians want to contain them.

The Muslim Brotherhood also has a 100-year plan to conquer the West. Its decades-long work of pushing Christian minorities out of Arab Muslim countries is salient. Christians make up five percent of Middle East populations, down from 13 percent at the turn of the century, and about 19 percent a century ago.

The last thing Cairo wants is to take in a huge population of Muslim Brotherhood-inspired extremists. It is why Egypt has built a huge security wall on its border with Gaza that extends 18 meters underground. Egypt will not even let Gazan women and children seek sanctuary until the Israel-Hamas War is over.

Gaza was never an “open-air prison” before the war like the malignant lying anti-Israel lobby claims, but to the extent that Gazans could not get out, Egypt shares as much blame as Israel (even if the one-eyed international media rarely reports this fact).

Jordan, likewise, has no desire to take in more Palestinians. The Palestine Liberation Organization tried to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite Kingdom in 1970, known as “Black September.” The Jordanian military fought a war to drive them out.

The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Jordan’s King Abdullah — the current monarch’s King Abdullah II’s grandfather — in 1951. Jordan is having a major battle with Iran-backed extremists and certainly does not want more.

The Palestinians do not win popularity contests elsewhere in the Arab world either. After being driven out of Jordan, their leadership moved to Lebanon, where they brought war and terror, and the Palestinians backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, after which the Kuwaitis expelled them bloodily and vengefully.

Given this history, Egypt and Jordan’s concerns have some merit. Those who know Gazans the best, like and trust them the least.

Western countries such as Canada, Australia, and the UK — all under confused leftist governments that have offered thousands of visas to refugees from Gaza — should take note. Statistically, some of these refugees must be extremists, and a significant number must hold some extremist views.

Bringing in thousands of people from one of the world’s most radicalized places is as stupid as a mule that has bumped its head. It is also a callous thing for Western governments to do to do their Jewish communities at a time of surging antisemitism.

Especially fanciful is the idea that jihadists will change once presented with the opportunities that moving to the West will bring them. To think this is to demonstrate no understanding of Islamism whatsoever. You should block your ears when such people speak.

If Trump cannot get the region to accept his plan and Gaza is rebuilt with its population still there, then the questions remain of what to do about Hamas and who will govern Gaza.

There is no point in rebuilding Gaza only for Hamas to take it over again and launch more attacks against Israel in a few years. That has been the disastrous policy of recent decades. It is also Hamas’ preferred outcome. I am no military strategist, but doing what your enemy wants does not strike me as an idea from the pages of Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.

It may not end up being an all-or-nothing situation. Maybe only some people will leave Gaza, and it will end up with a smaller population.

The Israeli Right has long wanted to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, without forcing them to do so, and even want to offer Gazans incentives to leave. It is hard to argue that Palestinians who want to leave should not be allowed to do so. That would indeed make Gaza a prison.

Fewer people would make rebuilding Gaza easier, which means it could be done more quickly. It would also make flushing out the jihadists easier.

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Trump’s boldness and unpredictability has put the Arab world into a spin. They will also take no comfort from Trump’s sidelining of Europe in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Russia-Ukraine War. It shows that this U.S. administration has a different worldview, is doing things its own way, and does not care whether it upsets allies or foes.

It is not business as usual.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has had a pretty low profile so far with his boss hogging the limelight, has asked Arab states to do more than whine.

“All these countries say how much they care about the Palestinians, but none of them want to take any Palestinians. None of them have a history of doing anything for Gaza,” said Rubio. “Right now, the only plan — they don’t like it — but the only plan is the Trump plan. So if they’ve got a better plan, now’s the time to present it.”

This is correct. It also calls the Arab bluff. The pressure is now on them to produce serious proposals. If they do not, it will essentially be confessing that they do not want a resolution because suffering Palestinians is the strategy against Israel.

It is amazing what a little motivation can do. Arab states are now working frantically on alternative rebuilding plans for Gaza. An Egyptian proposal is said to be the frontrunner. It would reportedly involve establishing a national Palestinian committee to govern Gaza with no Hamas involvement, international participation in reconstruction without relocating Gazans, and financing from Arab and European states.

Apparently, they are even considering creating a Trump Fund for Reconstruction, which reveals how they view Trump. They believe that playing to his ego is the way to win him over. That may well be true.

This plan, however, does not credibly keep Hamas out of power. Even if Hamas were to surrender power in some sort of agreement, as they have indicated they might, there is nothing to stop them from being re-elected or seizing power again in the future. It is worth listening to the Israeli Right on this. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, they predicted Hamas would take over within a year. It took only six months.

This almost guarantees that alternative Arab proposals will be duds in terms of any regional political advancement, even if they would rebuild Gaza.

I am also curious as to how long these proposals estimate rebuilding Gaza will take. The UN said it would take 350 years to restore Gaza’s economy to pre-war levels. This was utterly moronic thing to claim. Empires rise and fall in a fraction of that time. The Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian (Achaemenid) empires each lasted about half that time.

Predictably and disappointingly, a path towards a two-state solution is reportedly part of the Arab proposal. The two-state solution died on October 7th everywhere except in fantasists’ minds. Reversion to it shows a lack of creativity and a detachment from reality.

Arab leaders do not yet seem to have fully absorbed the fact that their thinking about the conflict is moribund. Trump thinks many assumptions about the Middle East are wrong.

The Abraham Accords — in which the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan normalized relations with Israel and which were brokered during Trump’s first presidency — dispelled the myth that a resolution between Israel and the Palestinians was required before the region could progress.

The Trump Administration is now slaughtering another sacred cow: the notion that a two-state solution is the only way to resolve the conflict.

There is always more than one option for those brave enough to look for them. The idea that the only possible solution is the one that has failed for eight decades is obvious nonsense.

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