President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff have reportedly pitched “Operation Sunrise,” a plan to transform the Gaza Strip into a high-tech city and hub. It is impressive and ambitious. Team Trump always deserves credit for thinking outside the box rather than repeating the tired, old proposals of the past. In this case, however, one basic mistake will condemn the project to disaster: It fails to account for the self-destructive ideology that consumes Palestinian society.
Highlighting what could be in Gaza is welcome. What became Israel was a malarial patch of land, a discarded backwater until Zionist settlers drained swamps and transformed it into rich agricultural land. For all the talk by Palestinian advocates of Zionists as outsiders to the land, the Palestinians themselves were. The Arab influx into the land originated from today’s Syria and coincided with Zionist eradication of malaria. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed that, “the Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period,” with migrants coming from both Syria and Egypt. As Palestine filled, real estate prices soared—a basic calculation of supply and demand. In 1937, the British-sponsored Peel Commission reported that a “shortfall of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.” If Israel and later Singapore could take a resource-free wasteland and thrive upon it, there should be no reason why Palestinians could not.
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They will not, however. Among the worst sins of foreign policy strategists is assuming others share the same values or think the same way as Americans do. Kushner and Witkoff are businessmen and developers. They arose in a milieu in which everyone wanted to get rich and, if the deal was negotiated right, everyone could. As a developer, Witkoff and Trump believed that if they built it, people would flock to it.
The problem with Gaza, however, has never been poverty. After all, there are many poor countries—Malawi and Senegal, for example—that are democratic and do not tolerate terrorism. Palestinian proponents can argue that lack of independence explains their embrace of terror, but this too is false. Somaliland enjoys no international recognition, no appreciable resources, is almost completely Muslim, and yet has developed good governance, a stable democracy, and a no-nonsense attitude rejecting terrorism. Indeed, if terrorists seek to recruit a young Somalilander, his own parents likely will turn him into authorities to keep the peace and prevent the stain to family honor. Such stability, democracy, and success are the major reasons why Somaliland deserves the investment and recognition more than the Palestinians of Gaza.
Famously, when Israel turned over Gaza, they transferred its economic infrastructure to the Palestinian authorities. I visited at the time and saw the greenhouses and industrial sites upon which Gaza could have staked its economy and provided jobs; instead, they chose to loot and destroy.
Nothing has changed. The problem has never been poverty, but rather ideology. Too many Gazans would rather remain poor and kill Jews than get rich and live in peace. They root their logic in a twisted religious exegesis that money will not reverse.
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Dumping money—and committing the United States to 20% of its multi-billion expense over a decade—will not buy peace; it will only create an entitlement that for too long has convinced Palestinians their own choices do not matter. It will therefore incentivize terrorism rather than convince Gazans to embrace peace.
The best path forward is not to build Gaza, but to cut off aid entirely and make the Palestinians build and develop their economy from scratch based on whatever customs revenue they can raise over the Egyptian border. It is the Somaliland model, and it works, because as the economy develops, so too does the capacity to manage it. Trump’s magic wand approach might enrich developers, but it will neither bring peace nor help Palestinians.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
