The success of President Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza will depend almost entirely on the extent to which the more than 2 million Gazans see actual improvement in their living conditions. For Gazans, the first issue will be a roof above their heads. This winter has been harsh all around the country, and in Gaza it has been disastrous.
During our torrential rains and very strong winds, as I sat in the comfort of my Jerusalem home, I couldn’t even imagine what the 1.5 million homeless people in Gaza were going through. I know people there living in tents and in bombed-out buildings. Whole families, elderly people, children, infants, men, and women already living in inhuman conditions, forced to confront the elements of weather, their tents blowing away in the wind, their ground flooded, miserable, sick, cold, and hungry.
The first step for this to change is the disarming of Hamas and the decommissioning of its weapons. Hamas is well aware that no reconstruction and no money for reconstruction will enter Gaza if they remain in control and continue to be a threat to Israel and to the people of Gaza itself.
The Americans will soon present their plan for the demilitarization of Gaza. The Americans have been continuing their engagement with Hamas on this issue through the mediators who are supporters of this process – including Qatar and Turkey.
An unpublished draft resolution of Trump’s Board of Peace states: “Only those persons who support and act consistently to create a deradicalized terror-free Gaza that poses no threat to its neighbors will be eligible to participate in governance, reconstruction, economic development, or humanitarian assistance activities in Gaza.”
What I hear from many Gazans is their faith in God and hope. Gaza is resilient and some semblance of life is slowly returning. Children are attending schools in makeshift classrooms. Many of those teaching are volunteers. Local community organizations have been put together to gather the children who have not attended normal schooling in two years.
Everyone is living in trauma and there is no mental health structure to deal with all of those who cannot sleep through the night or cope with their new reality. Politics is barely spoken about – people are in survival mode and have no bandwidth to think about political solutions. They are dealing with a roof above their heads and the next meal for their families.
I know that many Israelis reading this feel no compassion for their Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Too many of our leaders and public personalities have stated repeatedly that there are no innocents in Gaza. Perhaps the contempt felt by many Israelis toward Palestinians in Gaza is understandable.
To them I say: Most of the Gazans were held hostage by Hamas for 18 years. Perhaps more important than that, the people of Gaza will remain our neighbors, and even if many of them would like to find another place where they can live, there are no other places that are willing to take them. The Gazans are here to remain and we need to understand that.
How can Gaza turn around?
The question that we Israelis must face is how to ensure that Gaza turns around – that Gaza becomes a place of peace in which the people of Gaza want to live in peace next to Israel. The first thing that must be done is to ensure that people have a place to live in, even if it is temporary while Gaza is being rebuilt.
If Trump, his team, and the Board of Peace are successful in raising the tens of billions of dollars for the reconstruction, Gaza will be rebuilt with a much higher standard of living, with good-quality housing, good infrastructure, roads, public transportation, open spaces, parks, and new public buildings such as schools.
Dr. Ali Shaath, the head of the Gaza national committee, said that Gaza needs 200,000 caravans for temporary housing right now. Israel has not allowed them into Gaza. There are thousands waiting to get in, but Israel has refused to allow them to enter. This already points to the main problem the Trump plan will face.
The single largest obstacle to success right now is the government of Israel. Israel intends to hold its control over Gaza for as long as possible and with as many restrictions as possible. This could become the cause of deep conflict between the government of Israel and Trump and his people. We have already been witnessing the Israeli refusal to open the Rafah crossing that will now happen, and with the full entry into phase two of the Trump plan. If there is an argument of this type between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump, without any doubt, Trump wins.
It must also be understood that Gaza is not a project of gentrification. For the poor Gazans, housing that they cannot afford to live in should not be built. Gaza has to be built for the Gazans by the Gazans. This requires a lot of attention being placed on recreating Gaza’s economy.
There are a lot of talented, smart, educated, and highly motivated young people in Gaza. Before the war, there were seven working universities in Gaza and tens of colleges teaching everything from engineering, computers, math, science, languages, and more. At the same time, youth unemployment reached almost 70%. If Gaza is closed to the world, it becomes a bastion for increased radicalism. It is not enough to change the curricula and the textbooks; the daily reality for Gazans has to also change.
Clearing the rubble first is urgent. There are an estimated 60 million tons of rubble that must be cleared from the destruction done by the Israeli army. This will take years, and no one has come up with a tangible solution of what to do with it. Concrete and masonry rubble can be crushed into stone aggregates – some used for road paving and filling material for foundations. Concrete aggregates can be mixed with fresh cement. Crushed rubble can replace a portion of gravel or stone in construction.
According to some reports, Israel is going to be held partially responsible for the costs of removing and recycling rubble. Space has to be cleared quickly for the cities of caravans of temporary housing. Infrastructure for water, sanitation, and electricity have to be constructed immediately. The upside of all that must be done is that refugee camps will not be rebuilt.
Gazans have not had electricity 24/7 for many years. Now they might be able to have a refrigerator at home, an electric oven, heating, hot water, a laptop computer, a place to charge their cell phones, and maybe even air conditioning – things we take for granted.
When the Rafah crossing opens, in two directions, Israel will insist, as it has done, that it is only for people and not for goods. Reconstruction of Gaza cannot be left in the full control of Israel. There must be robust security measures for any and all goods entering Gaza, but there are systems of ways of doing this that do not require Israeli control.
Part of the measures of success for Gaza, objectively but also subjectively by the people of Gaza, will be the extent that Israel does not continue to control what happens in Gaza. There seems to be a joint Israeli-American understanding that most of the international nongovernmental organizations wishing to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza will be replaced by private sector elements. This is already happening since the official end of the war in October.
There are positive and negative elements to this. It is good to rebuild the Gaza private sector, but this opens the door to a lot of corruption, which is already being reported in the media. The corruption is on the supply side – meaning Israelis, some of them from within the military – according to the current reports. This is intolerable and threatens the very foundations of trying to rebuild Gaza. There must be zero corruption by all of those involved.
Perhaps on par with the physical reconstruction of Gaza is the construction of a mindset that will eventually enable us all to imagine peace between Israel and Gaza, which essentially means peace between Israel and Palestine (because there is a need to immediately address the West Bank as well). It is not only the physical reality of Gaza that has been deeply damaged over the two years of the war and the many years prior to the war, it is also the hearts and minds of Israelis and Palestinians.
I will try to address this in upcoming columns – looking at education and Trump’s point 18 in his 20-point plan: An interfaith dialogue process will be established based on the values of tolerance and peaceful co-existence to try and change mindsets and narratives of Palestinians and Israelis by emphasizing the benefits that can be derived from peace.