On February 4, President Donald Trump came up with one of his trademark tremendous ideas. Vacate the entire Gaza Strip and turn it into the Las Vegas Strip. Here was the agent of chaos, a.k.a. the president of the United States, blurting out a paradigm-breaking solution. Just vacate Gaza. It made sense from a real estate developer’s point of view: Gaza is uninhabitable, it lies in devastation, ruin, and rubble, with no future for its inhabitants. It was “a demolition site,” in Trump’s words, and he wasn’t wrong. In order to rebuild and turn it into a beautiful “Riviera,” as he proposed, Palestinians need to be relocated. In a few days, “relocated” turned into expulsion to Egypt and Jordan, both of which predictably rejected the idea. He later added to the chaos he’d created by saying Palestinians would not be allowed to return. By March 12, he flip-flopped and reversed course, if you can call it a “course.” No one, he said during a meeting in the White House with the visiting prime minister of Ireland, Micheál Martin, “… is expelling anyone from Gaza.” The Egyptian Foreign Ministry was so impressed with the moral clarity and courage that it came out with a special statement thanking Trump for his newfound insight.
The messianic, theo-nationalistic right wing in Israel celebrated Trump’s idea; he is to them the modern embodiment of Cyrus the Great, the Persian emperor who freed the Jews from the Babylonian exile, enabling them to return to the promised land. The Israeli right was jubilant about fulfilling a biblical fantasy. Here was Trump, proposing to expel 2.3 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and by extension, they believe, allowing Israel to annex Gaza and eventually the ancestral biblical West Bank. In Genesis 15, God made a real estate deal with Abraham, The Covenant of the Pieces, promising him the entire land of Israel. Trump respects real estate deals, so there you have it: a validation of the biblical narrative and a Cyrus the Great in one.
Trump’s idea would be great if the Middle East were a real estate project on the Upper Middle East Side of Manhattan. It isn’t. I don’t know how many books on the history of the Middle East Trump has read (though I have a guess), but this is a complex, labyrinthine region with deep animosities and hatreds that defy even the beautiful logic of real estate development. The Realtor in chief probably never meant for his idea to be interpreted as “ethnic cleansing,” but that’s how it was received in the Arab world. He did what he always does, blurting out his rendition of common sense, then doubling down on it the more anger it creates.
Benjamin Netanyahu quickly endorsed the “plan,” which enabled him to pretend that Israel actually has a postwar plan. It doesn’t. Two-plus months later, the status quo lingers with no end in sight. And 58 years since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, it remains Israel’s daunting and excruciating problem.
Israel in Denial
On the eve of October 7, 2023, few Israelis cared about Gaza or thought about “the Palestinian Problem.” In the 10 months preceding October 7, Israelis were busy demonstrating against a constitutional coup instigated by a prime minister, Netanyahu, on trial on three counts of corruption and bribery and coveting the dubious title of the first leader of a democracy who has waged war against his own country, its security organs, judiciary, checks and balances, and its democracy. Nothing in 2023 evoked any public discourse about, and the Israeli zeitgeist of the time devoted very little attention to, the future of the Palestinian issue. In fact, in the five (yes, five) election cycles that took place between 2019 and 2022, the Palestinians and the future of the West Bank and Gaza were not a campaign issue in any form.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not faraway, remote places. They are adjacent to Israel, and around 700,000 Israelis now live inside the West Bank, among 3.3 million Palestinians. In American terms, the Palestinians reside in suburbs and exurbs around an Israeli city, all clustered together in an area the size of New Jersey. There are 15 million people living between the Jordan River in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west, roughly evenly divided between Palestinian Arabs (3.3 million in the West Bank, 2.3 million in the Gaza Strip, and 2.1 million Arab citizens in Israel proper) and Israeli Jews (nearly 8 million). In political demographics, this is defined as an equilibrium, one that endangers Israel’s identity and future as a Jewish state and a democracy. To most Israelis, this equilibrium is a theoretical, academic term that means nothing and has no impact on their daily lives. They regard demographics as an abstract concept that is occasionally used to frighten and warn them about the future but has little impact on their current lives. It was no different from how Groucho Marx regarded posterity: “Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?”
And so, most Israelis conveniently didn’t think about what is happening 40 miles south from Tel Aviv in Gaza or 15 miles to the east in the West Bank. In 2023, Israelis truly behaved as if denial is just a river in Egypt, 1967 is ancient history, and the Palestinians are a nonissue.
Then came October 7. The worst calamity in Israel’s history, a debacle of historical proportions and a day, to borrow FDR’s phrase, “which will live in infamy.” This, after years of a reckless, arrogant, and myopic policy by Netanyahu of deliberately neglecting a long-term solution while practically and effectively strengthening Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. In this way he could sanctimoniously declare “there’s no partner for peace,” no urgency to deal with the Palestinian issue, enshrining and perpetuating the state of denial.
Hamas launched a savage terror attack, murdering 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers. In the ensuing war, roughly 400 more soldiers were killed. Israel had every right to respond forcefully, but 45,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, were killed in what often seemed vengeance-driven and indiscriminate Israeli attacks. Yet in December 2023, and again in early 2024, when the Biden administration, recognizing Israel’s right to retaliate, implored Netanyahu to engage in discussion of a postwar political settlement, Israel summarily refused. When the United States cautioned that military goals must be aligned with and derivative of a broader political objective and strategy, Netanyahu evaded, ignored, and procrastinated; he then flatly derided the idea of a postwar settlement, saying only that “Hamas must be annihilated.”
That was a legitimate and justifiable war aim. But what comes next? Who would fill the power vacuum and govern Gaza? Netanyahu, on brand, repudiated every idea, particularly the U.S. proposal of an Arab interim force with the participation of the Palestinian Authority. Also on brand, he never came up with an alternative and coherent Israeli policy for Gaza. Meanwhile, the war escalated to include Hezbollah in Lebanon and a kinetic exchange of missiles and drones with Iran. Netanyahu now self-righteously argued that it was never about Gaza but rather was a multifront existential war. A year and half later, Gaza is effectively destroyed and dysfunctional, 2.3 million Palestinians live there in abject conditions, Israelis are anxious, and Israel still has no plan.
How We Got Here
For at least four decades, the default and broadly considered the most viable and desirable solution has been the “Two States” model, a demographic-geographic-political separation between Israel and the vast majority of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and a partition into two sovereign states. But in the decade before October 7, 2023, the two-state solution lost its appeal to a large extent. The last effort, in 2014 by Secretary of State John Kerry, was an exercise in futility. The combination of terrorism decreasing to significantly lower levels, Israel both strengthening Hamas in Gaza and building or expanding settlements in the West Bank, the inept and widely considered to be corrupt Palestinian Authority, an Israeli prime minister who was obsessed with Iran, and a general fatigue in the world with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led to a sharp decline in the viability of two states. Since October 7, it’s seemed to have lost any glimmer of relevance.
The stark contrast to the two-state solution is the “One Binational State.” This is an idea that assumes the best in human nature, as if we are talking about Sweden and Denmark or New York and Connecticut. The only ones who support it are either Palestinians who understand both the intractable political-economic-demographic reality or habitual users of psychedelic drugs who once took a course in history or political science. It is a sure recipe for eternal mayhem. Two hostile, totally distrustful ethno-national communities coexisting in the same political unit is the dictionary definition of catastrophe.
Since the status quo is unsustainable, a two-state solution is believed to be impossible, and a one-state reality is unworkable, there needs to be some form of a paradigm shift: a political triangulation that deconstructs and reconstructs this mess. It exists. It is called “trusteeship,” but in the absence of trust itself, it requires a leap of faith, and that requires leadership, courage, boldness, and innovative thinking—qualities conspicuously and sorely missing among both Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
In the Beginning
Gaza has been inhabited for over three millennia, the earliest reference made by Pharaoh Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BCE. It is mentioned later in the Bible several times. Genesis 10:19 notes that “… the border of the Canaanite was from Zidon, as thou goest toward Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, unto Lasha.” In the fifteenth chapter of Joshua, it is written that Gaza will be among Judah’s tribe’s territory, yet the Bible never mentions an Israelite presence in Gaza. Most famously, in Judges 16:1-3, we learn about a Nazirite judge, Samson. He was a practitioner of abstinence from wine. But he did go and see a prostitute in Gaza: “Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in unto her.” Samson fell in love with another woman, Delilah, who turned him over to the ruling Philistines, who plotted to execute their mighty enemy. Samson, through his immense strength, goes on to destroy the temple of Dagon, the god of vegetation and fertility. Later, Zephaniah, famed for his gloom and doom prophesies during the days of the Judaean King Josiah, warned, “… Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation.” (Zephaniah 2:4)
In antiquity, Gaza changed hands several times between the Israelite King David, the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, and even the Persians. While Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) conquered the town and sold all its inhabitants into slavery, under Hellenistic and Roman rule, due to its location, Gaza again became a thriving commercial center. In 635 C.E., Arab tribes took over Gaza and turned it into a regional center of their nascent monotheistic religion, Islam. In 1516, the most powerful regional empire, the Ottomans, defeated the Mamluks and conquered Palestine, including Gaza. Four hundred years later, the Ottoman Empire, on the verge of collapse during World War I, lost Palestine to British Gen. Edmund Allenby in November 1917, five days after the November 2 “Balfour Declaration,” supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was issued in London. This ushered in the modern era in the Middle East, which brings us to 1947–1948 and contemporary history.
With the end of World War II, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the impending dismantling of the British Empire, a solution to the “Jewish Problem” was sought. The 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the “Morrison-Grady Plan” produced a Provincial Autonomy Plan that proposed the creation of a unitary federal trusteeship in Mandatory Palestine with multiple semiautonomous states where the British Mandate ruled previously. A Palestinian state, including Gaza, would make up roughly 40 percent of that area. The convoluted plan soon became a nonstarter, and the United States and Britain referred the issue to the newly established United Nations. In late 1947, the U.N. passed Resolution 181, the “Partition Plan.” It essentially divided British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state (including Gaza). While the Jewish political leadership agreed, the Palestinians, backed by Arab countries experiencing postcolonial nationalistic surges, flatly declined.
On May 15, 1948, the state of Israel was declared and established, immediately followed by a general war with six Arab countries. The fighting in late 1948 resulted in the Egyptian army retrenching around Gaza City from the edge of the Sinai desert to just south of the Israeli town of Ashkelon. It was 25 miles long and between 3.5 and 7.5 miles wide. For the first time, the area became known as the Gaza Strip. It was under Egyptian control, but rather than annex Gaza and its more than 200,000 inhabitants, Egypt ruled through a military governor and allowed attacks on Israel from within the strip. The refugee population in Gaza, people who either fled or were expelled by Israel in 1948–1949, grew quickly.
In 1956, as part of the Suez War, Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip, but President Dwight Eisenhower demanded an immediate withdrawal, which Israel heeded. The watershed year, of course, was 1967. Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and conquered the entire Sinai Peninsula, including the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria), respectively, in six days. In the justifiable euphoria that engulfed Israel, Gaza was seen as a prize, as if Israel just got hold of Tuscany or the Loire Valley. The Israel Defense Forces Southern Command’s musical ensemble (there were such things back then) came out with a song in 1968 called “Go to Gaza.” The intro’s first two lines are:
Go to Gaza, go to Gaza
What do you mean go, I’m already here!
We still are. For 58 years, Israel has remained in the seventh day of the Six-Day War. This era is called “protracted temporariness”: Israel convinced itself that it is holding the territories as a safety deposit until there are “serious partners for peace” in the Arab world. That era never came to an end. Thousands of Gazans got work permits in Israel in construction and services industries, and the reality of occupation became a permanent feature in Israeli life.
The 1970s brought the Yom Kippur War, the historic 1977 visit to Jerusalem by Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt mediated by President Jimmy Carter. During the negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin insisted that Gaza remain in Israeli control. When Sadat acquiesced, Begin was convinced that he’d outmaneuvered the Egyptian president. It seems more safe to assume that Sadat couldn’t believe his good fortune.
In 1987, the first intifada erupted in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, putting an end to what Israel deluded itself into believing was a benevolent occupation. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, taking advantage of the angry, defiant, and violent mood in Gaza, set up an armed Palestinian branch of the brotherhood, called Hamas, an Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya—the Islamic resistance movement—as a counterforce to the secular Fatah, the main member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
What can be called “recent history” essentially begins with the 1993 Oslo peace process, establishing a Palestinian Authority governed the PLO and committing to a Palestinian state in five years. The issue of the settlements was postponed to later stages of negotiations. Hamas objected vehemently to the Oslo Accords and launched a wave of terror attacks in 1995–1996. With the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, the fate of the “Oslo process” was sealed, and an intractable status quo emerged.
Finally, in 2005, the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza set the stage for the current havoc. “I am cognizant of the costs, the demographic futility, and the negative political cost-benefit of holding on to Gaza,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told me in 2004, a year before he initiated the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the dismantling of all 21 Israeli settlements there. Unilateralism seemed like a good idea in the absence of a partner and after four years of a bloody second intifada. In 2006, Gazans held an election, encouraged by President George W. Bush. Hamas won in what became arguably the most Pyrrhic victory in the Palestinians’ storied history of self-inflicted political calamities.
The Rise and Fall of the Two-State Solution
Zionist Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have developed irreconcilable historical and political narratives in the last century, aggravated exponentially since 1948, the year of Israel’s independence, but a year indelibly perceived by Palestinians as their “nakba,” Arabic for “the catastrophe.” These narratives evolved into an intolerance characterized by what can be called zero-sum justice, where each believes that any admission or recognition of the other’s just claims and plight automatically diminishes their own. Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, argues that it was always willing to compromise and partition the land, seeking only to remedy and correct a historical record of persecution, pogroms, and extermination during 2,000 years of statelessness. The Palestinian liberation movement, forged and consolidated to a large extent as a response to Zionism, claims that Zionism was complicit with colonial powers and actively sought the eviction and expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. Zionism says it agreed to the 1937 Peel Commission as well as to U.N. Resolution 181, the “Partition Plan” from November 1947, while Palestinians claim they were offered only 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine and are being made to pay for injustices Jews suffered in faraway Europe.
The best summation of the traditional two-state model remains the Clinton Parameters. Following the Camp David Summit of July 2000, President Bill Clinton presented his vision in a closed meeting that December with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. The next month, he outlined parameters he had put forward to the two sides as “a guide toward a comprehensive agreement.” These parameters were accepted, albeit with reservations, by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as the basis for further peace effort.
These were the five basic parameters:
1. The establishment of a “sovereign, viable Palestinian state that would accommodate Israel’s security requirements and the demographic realities.” It would include the Gaza Strip and “the vast majority of the West Bank,” while settlement blocks would be incorporated into Israel “with the goal of maximizing the number of settlers in Israel while minimizing the land annex, for Palestine to be viable must be a geographically contiguous state”; some territorial swaps would be needed to make the agreement “durable.”
2. A solution for the Palestinian refugees that would allow them to return to a Palestinian state (those who so wished), or find new homes in their current locations or in third countries, including Israel, “consistent with those countries’ sovereign decisions.” All refugees should receive compensation from the international community (led by the United States) for their losses and assistance in building their new lives.
3. An “international presence in Palestine to provide border security along the Jordan Valley and to monitor implementation of the final agreement,” as well as “a non-militarized Palestine, a phased Israeli withdrawal, to address Israeli security needs in the Jordan Valley, and other essential arrangements to ensure Israel’s ability to defend itself.”
4. Four “fair and logical propositions” regarding Jerusalem: (a) It should be an open and undivided city, with assured freedom of access and worship for all, encompassing the internationally recognized capitals of two states, Israel and Palestine; (b) “what is Arab should be Palestinian” and (c) “what is Jewish should be Israeli,” while (d) “what is holy to both requires a special care to meet the needs of all.”
5. “Any agreement will have to mark the decision to end the conflict, for neither side can afford to make these painful compromises, only to be subjected to further demands.”
After the 2000 Camp David meeting, Israel’s chief negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami, was dejected and disillusioned.* “Left to their own devices, Israelis and Palestinians could never reach an agreement,” he told me (I was his chief of staff at the time). Later, he developed the idea of internationalizing the solution by establishing a “protectorate” that would govern the territories. That led to the notion of “trusteeship.”
In the aftermath of October 7, two mutually exclusive propositions emerged regarding the future of the conflict. The first was that the two-state solution is a fantasy. No Israeli in their right mind would ever consider a model that establishes a Palestinian state with a long border with Israel. That would inevitably ensure more October 7s. The second proposition, though, was based on the opposite conclusion. The status quo is unsustainable, continued occupation is a moral, political, and security calamity. The demographic equilibrium inexorably leads to a disastrous single binational state reality. Therefore, new and creative ways must be found. The two conclusions may seem irreconcilable, but both are based on a truism that October 7 didn’t change: The maximum that Israel can offer does not meet the minimum the Palestinians can accept. Which is why a different paradigm is required.
Trusteeship
Israel reasonably insists, as a sine qua non, that a precondition to any form of political settlement is a totally demilitarized Gaza Strip and West Bank. That’s fine. But what is that final status settlement? Who fills the power vacuum? Who governs a destitute 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip? How is the new reality linked to the West Bank? Clearly, if Israel ends up occupying Gaza for an indefinite period of time, it becomes the de facto sovereign. It owns Gaza. That is not something a majority of Israelis want. If it carves out just security buffer zones, the power vacuum inside Gaza spreads, and anarchy reigns supreme. So what can be done, other than building a Riviera and a casino, as Trump proposed? An international trusteeship.
The U.N. Trusteeship Council is a formal agency of the United Nations. In the beginning, it featured the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union/Russia, and China. It was established in 1945 against the backdrop of decolonialization. Its mission statement was to supervise governments in “trust territories” and to lead them to self-government or full independence following the colonial power’s retreat. Historically, there were 11 “trust” territories, all in Africa or the South Pacific. The most recent and relevant models are those of Kosovo and East Timor (or Timor-Leste), an island east of Indonesia, both in 1999. The U.N. in East Timor and Americans and NATO in Kosovo set up what is called a “neotrusteeship”: a combined model of international and domestic governance through which foreign powers or international agencies temporarily assumed responsibility for the domestic political authority, government, bureaucracy, and economy.
This is a political BOT model: build, operate, and transfer political power and governance capabilities. It retains the idea of two states, but under different modalities and sequencing. It hypothetically satisfies both Palestinian claims for self-determination and Israeli security demands and addresses the ominous demographic equilibrium. Trusteeship can work only when both sides are willing to engage the idea in good faith and there are intermediaries such as the United States, the European Union, the U.N., and Arab countries willing to facilitate it. It begins with a coherent plan, along the lines of the Clinton Parameters, presented by one or all of the above intermediaries.
An obvious precondition is that Israel and the Palestinians agree to the plan in principle. Once there is mutual consent, a launching conference must be convened where work groups are formed. There needs to be a binding timetable, say a year, to complete the full plan and set benchmarks. Countries will be ascribed responsibilities—law and order, infrastructure, economic development, etc.—to coach the Palestinian Authority during the five years of trusteeship. During that period of time, Israel will withdraw gradually from quadrants in the West Bank, with an international police and military presence taking over. Settlements will be clustered—as per the Clinton Parameters—into three main blocks that make up 10 to 12 percent of the territories and where 80 percent of the settlers live. The rest will be evacuated or given the choice to live under eventual Palestinian sovereignty.
There was never a shortage of solutions and creative ideas for Gaza and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The two-state solution; one binational state; a Palestinian state in Jordan and some areas in the West Bank; continued occupation with municipal sovereignty in Palestinian cities; a trilateral confederation between Israel, Jordan, and a Palestinian state; autonomous and scattered Palestinian Bantustans. None is viable.
But there was almost always, with the rare exception of Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000, a severe shortage of leadership, will, imagination, and vision on both sides, complemented by an abundance of self-righteousness sanctimony. This needs to end; otherwise history will be endlessly repeated.
In order to make this happen, there has to be change in leadership in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This can emerge either organically or once such a proposal is made. And ironically, a “trusteeship” is a concept that Trump can relate to and initiate himself, instead of thinking he can turn the Gaza Strip into the Las Vegas Strip.
* This article previously misstated Shlomo Ben-Ami’s title.
