Assessing the future of Gaza and the White House proposal for its reconstruction, Elliott Abrams turns to another one of the so-called minor prophets (known in Jewish tradition as “the Twelve”): Zephaniah, who prophesied that “Gaza shall be forsaken.” Abrams begins by looking at the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal from the Strip in 2005:

Hamas bided its time for about eighteen months and then took a week to overpower Palestinian Authority forces and take control. Egypt said and did precisely nothing. Neither did the other Arab states. For all of them, Gaza was an embodied argument: Israel is illegitimate, all Gazans are displaced refugees who have the “right of return” to the orange groves they left behind. They had no more interest in actual living Gazans than the authorities in Cairo.

While Arab states have taken in refugees from Syria, they still refuse to accept refugees from Gaza, who, Abrams writes, “do not merit this compassion. For if they leave, they are abandoning the great struggle against the Jewish state.” As for the president’s plan to remove the population of Gaza and rebuild it with American investment:

I do not believe that this will happen. But Trump has wonderfully challenged the Arab view of Gaza as central to the “steadfastness” needed against the Zionist enemy, and he has rightly called it inhuman. In fact, he has jettisoned the view that the most important thing about Gaza is its role in the “two-state solution” that will produce a new sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel.

Trump is treating Gaza as a physical place and its people as suffering humans, which is more than has ever been done by any Arab League resolution condemning Israel and calling it a war crime to allow Gazans to move away.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.