The international community wants to perpetuate Gazan victimhood, not resolve it

Most everyone is not concerned whether Israel will win the Hamas war but, rather, what to do with Gaza after that happens.

Israel Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel has come up with an idea that she refers to as “thinking outside of the box.” She says, “Gaza has long been thought of as a problem without an answer. We have tried many different solutions – disengagement, enrichment, conflict management and building high walls in the hope of keeping the monsters of Hamas out of Israel. These have all failed.”

Yet, Gamliel, undiscouraged, says, “We must try something new, and we call on the international community to help make it a reality.” Her idea, as she puts it, is a win-win situation for both evacuated southern Israeli residents and Gazans, allowing them all to come back to their homes without fear of danger. In fact, she says her plan will put an end to the ongoing Hamas rocket attacks which always return, even after a ceasefire.  

What Gamliel is counting on is help from the same people who claim they support the Palestinians. It’s a sort of “put up or shut up” challenge which is based on assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the organization designated to handle refugee matters. Her idea is that they would oversee the resettlement issues, in Gaza, once this war is over.  

Ironically, though, the intelligence minister acknowledges the fact that this agency, which claims to be laser-focused on the Palestinian refugee population, and has been given an annual budget exceeding a billion dollars, has yet to do anything to alleviate their problem. And why would that be?

A betting person would put their money on the fact that no one wants to resolve the Palestinian issue because to do so would put an end to the perpetual grievance which is deliberately left for Israel to solve. Jordan doesn’t want them, Egypt has refused them entrance, and “Turkey stands with Egypt, using the convenient fallback position that they should not be removed from their homes or exiled into Egypt.”

Not one of the 22 Arab nations in the world has offered to house the 2 million Gazans, whose own terrorist government has put them in peril by inflicting a massacre upon innocent Israelis, causing them to be displaced from their homes while the IDF conducts a ground war to root out the brutal Hamas regime. 

Nor has the UN body come up with any kind of viable solution for these Gazans who are being used as pawns in a deadly game of chess. Indeed, the pawn is the smallest in size and the least in value in this match where humans have become a useful commodity as Israel’s thorn in the side which will not be removed – at least not by their fellow Arab countrymen.

But this is not a new dilemma. Gaza has a 5,000-year history of strife and turmoil, but after Israel became a state in 1948, “Egypt administered the newly formed Gaza Strip. It was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967. Between 1994 and 1999, Israel transferred security and civilian responsibility for much of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. In 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlers and soldiers and dismantled its military facilities there, and in early 2006 Hamas took control.”

Since the area has been under Hamas control, the situation has only deteriorated, as everyone expects Israel to provide an economic solution by allowing Gazan citizens to enter Israel in order to make a living, but, we’ve seen how that has ended up.  

One account relates: “We worked with them, ate with them, talked to them every day…It was very clear that the terrorists had a lot of intelligence. They seemed to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing.”

Jordan’s Queen Rania, herself a Palestinian, was given a brief history lesson, in an open letter to her, back in 2014, as she lamented about the horrible suffering of her people. 

The writer, a Brazilian doctor, Sergio Simon, reminded her that when Jordan took in Palestinian refugees in 1948, who were not permitted to be absorbed into Jordanian society, but, rather, kept under inhumane conditions, they attempted to assassinate her husband’s father, King Hussein in 1970 and start a civil war against the Jordanians. Jordanian Armed Forces ended up killing thousands of Palestinian refugees in what was called “Black September.”

The doctor wondered why it is that many Jews, also once refugees from Arab lands, were absorbed into Israeli society, facilitating the next generations to become doctors, lawyers, teachers and university professors in Israel while Palestinians have remained perennial victims since 1948?

He ends his letter to her with a plea for her husband to convince the Arab leaders to solve the Palestinian problem as soon as possible by absorbing them into their society and recognizing Israel as a state. Considering that the letter was penned some seven years ago, and no progress has been made, the only conclusion to be drawn is that no one is interested in helping these people to rise out of their victimhood status. 

In Gil Troy’s article entitled, “Palestinians can stop the war by overthrowing Hamas,” he also addresses the Palestinians directly, blaming them for remaining victims and saying, “If you wanted to build yourselves up rather than destroy us, you could have made Gaza the Mediterranean Riviera. You blew every chance – repeatedly.”

So, what’s clear is that not only does the international community want to perpetuate the victimhood status of Gazans, but the Gazans, themselves have done nothing to change their situation over the course of 75 years. Israel, the one source of hope for them, ended in unspeakable tragedy.  

The truth is that it has proven to be financially advantageous for the likes of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA and the UNHCR, just to name a few, who have been the recipients of vast amounts of money for many years – funds which have gone to enrich their leadership but that have not been spent to improve the lives or future of each generation that has been born ever since.

Sorry to burst your bubble, Gila Gamliel, but your “novel idea” will not succeed until Gazans themselves reject others using them as cheap pawns in their quest to be wealthy and powerful. Since that doesn’t seem to be a likely scenario anytime soon, Israel will have to figure out another way to deal with the poison in her own backyard, because she certainly won’t get any help from the international community!