November 22, 2023
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Gaza and the Making of a New Middle East Order
As the fighting continues, Israel is formulating its vision for a postwar Gaza Strip.
By: Hilal Khashan
The ferocity of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas will reshape the Middle East. Its brutality is reminiscent of World War II's final battles, which transformed Germany and Japan from belligerent states into democratic countries championing worldwide peace. It is unlikely that democracy can prevail throughout the Middle East, but it is highly possible that the region’s regimes and populations will in the future eschew conflict and focus instead on internal economic issues.
The war in Gaza will reconfigure the Palestinian question and lay to rest the anti-Israel role of political Islamic movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. It will also usher in Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would work to transform the West Bank into an integral part of Israel and announced a committee to impose full Israeli sovereignty over it. Netanyahu did not hide his intention to keep Gaza when the war with Hamas ended. In response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s comments that Gaza should eventually be part of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, he said the Israeli army did not enter Gaza to hand it over to the PA. Meanwhile, the reactions of other regional governments to the war haven’t gone beyond demanding aid and humanitarian relief. These conditions indicate that Israel could try to revive a decades-old proposal to push the Palestinian population of Gaza into northern Sinai.
Gaza-Israel in the Middle East
(click to enlarge)
Reoccurring Plan
Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, the Gaza Strip had a population of 80,000 and an area of just 140 square miles. Following Israel’s founding, however, some 160,000 refugees fled into the strip. After signing the armistice agreement with Israel in 1949, Egypt administered Gaza, but its growing population – which today exceeds 2.2 million – and frequent intrusions into Israel by refugees trying to recover possessions from their villages created a security threat for the nascent Jewish state. The U.S. played a critical role in resettling Palestinian refugees through U.N. Resolution 194, adopted by the General Assembly in December 1948. The resolution gave the refugees a right to return to their homes, though the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency aimed at integrating them into the societies of the Arab countries bordering the Palestinian territories.
The idea of resettling Palestinians in Sinai has resurfaced repeatedly ever since. In 1950, Egypt’s King Farouk rejected a U.S. offer to buy the Sinai Peninsula to settle Palestinian refugees displaced from their homes after the 1948 war. President Gamal Abdel Nasser considered resettling about 60,000 Gazans in northern Sinai. His administration cooperated with the UNRWA from 1953 to 1955 to implement the project, but it was thwarted by Palestinians in Gaza in an uprising called the March Intifada. Nasser subsequently abandoned the plan after an Israeli raid on Gaza in which dozens of Egyptian soldiers were killed, forcing him to turn to the Soviet Union for weapons.
With its dense population, Gaza has been a constant source of concern for Israel since its occupation at the beginning of the Six-Day War in 1967. At the time, the British ambassador to Israel indicated that the Israelis believed that any permanent solution to the Gaza issue must include the transfer of part of the population outside the limits of the 1949 armistice agreements. He stressed that the new Israeli policy included settling Palestinians in northern Sinai and that the Israeli government was not concerned about international criticism its strategy would receive because its priority was finding a lasting solution to the problem. Thus, an influential plan developed by Israeli lawmaker Yigal Allon proposed relocating Palestinians to Sinai following its seizure by Israel after the 1967 war.
Israel’s security problems in Gaza continued into the 1970s, with repeated operations launched against its forces. The Israeli government decided to forcibly displace thousands of Palestinians to the city of el-Arish on the northern coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli Defense and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said it was time for the government to refocus its attention on the situation in Gaza rather than the West Bank. Its first step was to reduce by about a third the population of Gaza, which had reached 350,000 by 1967. In 2000, Israeli Gen. Giora Eiland, the head of the planning department in the Israeli army and director of the National Security Council, proposed to house Gazans in northern Sinai. The plan included construction of an airport, a port and a city that could accommodate 1 million people.
In 2010, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said he had rejected an offer by Netanyahu to cede part of Israeli territory in the Negev Desert in exchange for resettling Palestinians from Gaza in northern Sinai. In 2013, geography professor Joshua Ben-Arieh proposed a plan to expand the Gaza Strip to the outskirts of the Egyptian town of el-Arish into Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid. There are also indications that former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi reached an agreement with Hamas to allow Palestinians to move into northern Sinai. The Sinai Development Project would have allowed Arab nationals to own property in Egypt, but it collapsed after Morsi’s overthrow in 2013.
In 2018, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas revealed that he had rejected an offer from Morsi to obtain a piece of Sinai to settle Palestinians there, with the knowledge and approval of Hamas. According to Israeli leaks, Egypt, Israel and Jordan held a secret summit, also attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in February 2016 in the Jordanian city of Aqaba. Israeli sources claimed that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi made an offer to settle Palestinians in Sinai between Rafah and el-Arish. Although Netanyahu denied that Egypt had made such a proposal, he acknowledged that the conference took place, while the Egyptians avoided discussing it altogether.
During the current war, the idea of resettling Gazans in northern Sinai has again resurfaced. After Netanyahu warned residents to leave the strip ahead of a heavy bombardment, the Palestinian ambassador to France asked where they should go. The chief spokesman for the Israeli army said the Rafah crossing was still open and advised anyone who could leave to do so. Israeli writer Eddie Cohen proposed settling Palestinians in Sinai in exchange for eliminating Egypt’s foreign debts. He believed Egypt would not reject the idea due to its serious economic challenges and the likelihood that the U.S. would give its tacit approval. Besides, he pointed out that even European countries were unable to stop thousands of Syrian refugees from crossing their borders, and the Egyptians will likely experience the same fate with Palestinian refugees.
Cairo has publicly rejected any proposals to resettle Gazans in Sinai – though pro-government media have claimed (falsely) that Egypt has always welcomed Palestinians as visitors. Egypt’s rejection of the idea raises the ceiling for negotiations to obtain greater financial returns from Western countries.
A number of factors could indicate whether Egypt will maintain this position in the future. Chief among them are the distinguished relationship and unprecedented cooperation between Israel and Egypt during the el-Sissi era and his pivotal role in the aftermath of the Hamas attack. Other key factors include Egypt’s fragile political situation, its escalating economic crisis, and the government’s dire need for U.S. and Western support on these and other issues.
Some political observers claim, based on two plans proposed by sources close to Netanyahu, that Israel intends to deport the residents of Gaza. The first plan originated in the Misgav Institute, led by Meir Ben-Shabbat, who worked as Netanyahu’s secretary and envoy on special missions. The second allegedly came up in the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence. While the first plan suggested transferring Gazans to Egyptian cities, the second preferred that they remain in Sinai, with the option of absorbing some into Western countries. However, both plans call for pushing residents initially to the southern sector of the strip until the terrible living conditions there force them to flee to northern Sinai. Egypt, then, could not avoid opening the Rafah crossing and accepting them into the country.
Regional Consensus
Prior to the Oct. 7 attack, Arab countries backed the international consensus on eliminating Hamas and creating a Palestinian state in Gaza and northern Sinai. However, Hamas’ attack facilitated the decision to wage all-out war against it. Western countries, Israel and most Arab states have reached the conclusion that fully normalizing diplomatic and commercial relations will be very difficult with the presence of movements that are supported by Iran and call themselves the "axis of resistance." However, even Iran is now dissociating itself from Hamas. In his recent meeting with Hamas Politburo head Ismail Haniyeh, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the Palestinians should stop demanding that Iran intervene in the war because it is not in Iran’s best interest to do so. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif came under attack by Revolutionary Guard-controlled media after he said the Iranian people reject the regime’s policies on the Palestinian issue. Some newspapers loyal to the government believed his honesty repudiated the image of the Islamic Republic as the defender of the axis of resistance.
Another Iranian official said that Tehran made the right decision to avoid participating in the war and that its decision was in the best interest of the Palestinians. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian also announced that his country had informed the United States of its unwillingness to expand the conflict. The Iranians hope that the war’s end will initiate a new drive to resolve the lingering dispute over its nuclear program. They also hope that, given their strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon and the weakness of Arab states, they will retain a significant role in the Middle East’s postwar order. They are not oblivious, however, to the fact that military escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, short of total war, would be necessary to transition to an era of non-belligerency with Israel.
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