The Palestinians for 75 years have refused to make peace with Israel because they do not feel the cost of their recalcitrance.
We spent a chunk of our life in 2002 in the Hadassah Hospital Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Our son had a piece of shrapnel in his brain after a suicide bombing and spent several weeks in this unit prior to his movement to a rehab hospital and surgery to remove the head of a Phillips screw.
PICU dealt with all children in need, and I can testify that Jewish and Arab children received equal and fair treatment by all staff members. In the bed next to that of our son was a several month old boy by the name of Osama. Counting the months with my fingers, I realized that he was named after the other Osama who orchestrated the murder of 3,000 American citizens. Little Osama was very ill. Being a yenta (Yiddish: busybody), I asked the nursing staff what was up with him. They said that he had multiple bacterial infections and was not expected to live for very long. We promised his mother to pray for her son and she promised to pray for ours. After a few weeks of our being at the hospital, baby Osama died. My wife heard a friend of the mother say, “Don’t worry. Allah will give you another one in his place.”
In Jewish and Christian societies, we see every individual as precious. We mourn their loss, and even if the mother produces another fifteen children, the loss of that one child will always be felt. Unlike the Palestinians, Jews and Christians also do not celebrate death. When family members of Hamas fuhrer Yismael Haniyeh were killed by Israel in Gaza, the Qatar-based leader celebrated their supposed martyrdom. Shame he couldn’t join them.
Japan and Germany were rebuilt and later became economic powerhouses because they unconditionally surrendered. If one makes a working assumption that lives do not have great value in Palestinian society and that their death worship is real, then what have the Palestinians lost over the decades? They lost land in 1948 and 1967, but Israel has been foolish enough to give back large tracts of that land both through the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2006 retreat from Gaza. The Palestinians have suffered in the current conflict. Those in Gaza have been told to move multiple times—even if it is for their safety, they have to move, they have to fight with Hamas for food, and many of them have lost their homes. But they see all of it as transient. And that’s why there is no hope of making peace with the Palestinians if Gaza is rebuilt.
Let’s imagine a fully rebuilt Gaza in 10 years time. The houses and commercial buildings are far better than the ones Israel destroyed. Infrastructure is brand new and life in the Strip has never been better. So at that time a decade hence, let’s make a scorecard. Hamas succeeded in killing 1,200 Israelis, taking 256 captive, causing the deaths of hundreds of additional Israeli soldiers, and caused Hezbollah, Houthis, and others to attack Israel. Their losses? Those who were killed. But again, according to their world view, this is not such a big loss, especially if they are treated as “shahedim”--martyrs. The terrorists in Israeli jail would probably have already been released by our ten-year snapshot. So for the Palestinians the short-term suffering in Gaza would in the long-run lead to a far better and more beautiful place. Their killing of Jews and their continued hatred of Jews and Israel had no great downside for them. And that is the reason that unlike with the German and Japanese fascists, there will be no change in the mentality of the Gazans. Their dead are martyrs, the Jews whom they murdered are still dead, and now they have much better homes and stores than they ever had in the past. Why should they make peace with Israel when everything is going their way?
If you want to make the Palestinians change their worldview, you need to punish them for their actions. Just as a child is punished for doing something bad—and hopefully learning to separate himself from this behavior—so too the Palestinians need to pay a price for their Jew-killing and intransigence. Gaza should be left in ruins. Let them live in tents. Give them food and medicines so as not to die. But condition a rebuilt Gaza on a signed peace agreement between somebody and Israel. Let them each morning realize that killing Jewish youth at a rave means living in a building with no doors or windows and eating the same food that the UN handed out yesterday and the day before that. Unless the Palestinians feel that their actions have consequences, they will continue on the same path. Other than those killed, what did the Palestinians lose from the second intifada? They returned no land granted by the Oslo Accords and foreign aid kept flowing into Ramallah. And thus there was no change in hatred between 2006—the end of the intifada—and October 7th of last year.
The do-gooders from the UN, US, and Europe are hankering to let more and more aid into Gaza. They dream of an end to hostilities so that they can just go in there and rebuild the place to the most modern Western specifications. Keir Starmer made sure after his UK victory to call Binyamin Netanyahu and nudge him to finish the fighting in Gaza. What these Western geniuses do not understand is that blindly rebuilding Gaza after the war will simply perpetuate the 75% local support for Hamas or its next-generation incarnation. Unless Gazans feel a price for their support for killing Jews and their refusal to recognize and make peace with Israel, nothing will change in the gleaming new Gaza of 2034.
The success of a war depends on the quality of the peace that follows. There were huge blunders made by the Allies throughout World War 2 (like leaving the eastern seaboard lit up so as to allow German submarines to sink hundreds of American ships). But in the end, the Allies won and made a peace that we are enjoying 80 years later. The sacrifice of Israeli soldiers and the state of Israel in the present war will have meaning if a better future results from it. If there is a beautiful new Gaza with the same old hatred, then the war will not have achieved its true objectives.
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