By Yaakov Peri, Amir Avivi, and Benjamin Anthony
The result of Israel’s election is final. Benjamin Netanyahu is now in the process of forming his governing coalition for what will be his fifth term as prime minister.
Also hard at work are Jared Kushner, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, the three-man U.S. negotiating team charged with the task of finding a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. They are expected to unveil their plan for how to strike what President Trump calls the “deal of the century” soon after Netanyahu announces his coalition partners.
While Israel’s leader may be wise to cling to traditional overtures for his own political success, traditional thinking would be anathema to any American effort to resolve the Israel Palestinian conflict. Without claiming to know the contents of the U.S. plan, we believe that a traditional approach would almost certainly end in failure.
Since the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 1993, those who have espoused the two-state solution have consistently ignored several unspoken but stubborn realities. Those include the fact that the Palestinian people are now divided across two geographical areas, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Situated between those two areas is the State of Israel, a geographical reality that renders it impossible to make a Palestinian state contiguous without bifurcating northern Israel from southern Israel.
Additionally, the Palestinian people now have two separate polities, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That division means that Israel does not have a negotiating partner that can legitimately claim to speak for all Palestinians.
Realities such as these have stymied the peace process for decades, during which time, Israeli Jewish communities in the West Bank have grown in both size and population.
Any plan calling for the traditional two-state solution would require Israel to forcefully evacuate up to quarter of a million Jews from their homes in order to make way for a Palestinian state in the area vacated. And as a result of the geographical impossibility of a contiguous state, forced to choose between one geographical area or the other, the international community has focused its attention on the West Bank as the natural anchor for the Palestinian state, turning a blind eye to Gaza as a result.
By doing so, they have allowed the Gaza strip to deteriorate into an ever more dire situation, with growing challenges that have been consistently swept under the rug.
Now, after successive, failed efforts, even the most dogged of optimists have resigned themselves to the notion that absent a two-state solution, the only viable outcome is paralysis.
Neither Israelis or Palestinians should accept that as their fate. An out-of-the-box approach could help bring about an end to the conflict. In fact, it is precisely because of the foreclosure of the traditional paradigm that an opportunity exists to shake up the kaleidoscope of Middle East peacemaking entirely, turning focus away from the West Bank, and instead looking toward the Gaza Strip for a pathway to a better future for all.
The idea
We call our approach The New State Solution. The plan calls for the establishment of a free, independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, where half of all Palestinians live, that would be expanded southwards, to incorporate approximately 10% of the northern, coastal area of the Sinai Peninsula.
The New State Solution
Gaza, that very same strip of land that is deemed hopeless and doomed, is actually the place that offers a realistic opportunity to create a change to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a change that genuinely serves the interests of both sides. That should be the site of the state for all Palestinians. It can happen in the near-term, leaving future negotiations over the West Bank, including sure-to-be-difficult ones over the status of Jerusalem, to another day.
Gaza is a de facto state already, with its own borders, a government (that is also a terror organization), and a militia. It is also overcrowded and in desperate need of extra territory in order to properly develop.
The Sinai peninsula, contiguous and largely uninhabited, is 10 times the size of Gaza and the West Bank combined. It is a massive, undeveloped piece of real estate crying out for development. There the Palestinian people could establish a state with significant potential for economic prosperity, without having to give any territory in return. The establishment of the new state could mark the end of the conflict, or at least begin to give both sides something constructive to pour their energies into.
Palestinians living under the rule of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would receive citizenship of the new state, instantly transforming them from being a stateless people to a people with their own government. No one in the West Bank — Israelis or Palestinians — would be forced from their homes.
The New State Solution would usher in a wider, regional approach to rapidly improving the situation in Gaza. Israel, which would make its due and just contribution to the development of the state by way of granting security assistance, technological know-how, and water and irrigation expertise, could recruit the active support of moderate Sunni Arab states, gradually normalizing relations with them as they work together to resolve the Palestinian issue.
Such a vision is viable in today’s reality due to major changes that have swept the region. States that once had an interest in perpetuating the Israel-Palestinian conflict now have a markedly higher interest in seeing it resolved, eager as they are to join the U.S. and Israel to form an official coalition against Iran and its radical proxies, who are today busy trying to destabilize the Middle East.
The importance of oil is decreasing, and Arab states are increasingly dependent on cooperation with Israel and the U.S. to face their new challenges.
All of this has created new interests and opportunities that a decade ago seemed impossible. Arab leaders recognize that old ideas have become obsolete. As a result, the time for a new solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has arrived.
A phased plan
Phase one of the New State Solution would involve building a major economic hub in northern Sinai that would act as a growth engine for Gaza. High-tech zones could be seeded and invested in. The beautiful Sinai shoreline, a tremendous economic asset for the Palestinian people, could be developed into focal point for tourism, trade and industry.
The workforce would be the currently unemployed Gazan people themselves, who would initially cross into the Sinai via the Rafah border crossing in order to build up a state in their own image, constructing homes and communities, all while laying the infrastructure for a state that would be theirs. This would match a ready works program with a ready work force.
In time, as the concept is proven, those workers would begin settling in the northern Sinai section of the new state, as the Gazan state expands south, marking the beginning of the next stage.
From an economic zone to a state
In northern Sinai, international consortiums would invest in the new state in a manner that avoids paying for Hamas’ terrorism or supporting the personal bank accounts of Hamas leaders.
We understand that as an independent state, the Palestinian people will have the freedom to choose their own leaders.
But the New State Solution would present Gaza’s current leadership, Hamas, with a difficult choice: focus on the future of the Palestinians or remain obsessed with perpetuating a war against Israel, fixated on fundamentalism and conflict.
There are obviously no assurances they will make the right choice, but a new paradigm would at least force them into reexamining their terror-war footing. That’s an opportunity the world and the Palestinian people should all embrace. Such an opportunity should not rise or fall on the whims of a terrorist organization.
Egypt as kingmaker
As the donor state that would provide Palestinians the land for their new state, Egypt, which has its own serious problems to deal with, would benefit in three key areas: economy, security and status within the Arab world.
As the kingmaker in the new Middle East, Egypt would receive massive, economic assistance from the international community to resuscitate its struggling economy. President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi is a product of a restive, young, underemployed population. Economic assistance is something he realizes he needs for his future and for the future of his country.
Egypt currently faces significant security challenges in the Sinai peninsula, with terror organizations who view Egypt as a relatively soft target establishing a presence there. Israel and the international community could further help Egypt to battle back against ISIS in the Sinai, and help to secure its Libyan and Sudanese borders against the influx of terrorists and weapons.
This would become the focal point of an international, political project, regaining its central status among the Arab world as it does so.
The New State Solution is a forward-thinking, new approach that truly serves the regional interests of Palestinians, Israelis and Egyptians. It is not guaranteed to succeed but, it seems certain to us, a “solution” that hews to old ideas is destined to fail.
For almost a century, efforts to solve the Israeli — Palestinian conflict have tried to harvest new results from old ways of thinking.
Instead of letting Gaza fester and neglecting one half of the Palestinian people in the process, we have the opportunity to transform Gaza from an intractable problem into an integral part of the solution.
The Sinai peninsula is no more of a desert than was Israel at the turn of the 20th century. We have made our desert bloom. Israel and the international community can do the very same for our Palestinian neighbors.