Vivian Yee
NY Times, Mar. 5, 2025
“Another fundamental impasse centers on the issue of Palestinian statehood. The Arab countries’ calls for establishing a Palestinian state are almost certain to run headlong into Israeli objections.”
When President Trump said last month that he wanted to move all of Gaza’s roughly two million residents out of the strip to Egypt and Jordan and transform the territory into a beachfront “Riviera” for tourism, the pressure was on Arab leaders horrified by the idea to come up with their own grand plan.
At an emergency Arab summit in Cairo on Tuesday, they laid out their vision: Rebuild Gaza without forcing out the Palestinians who live there. Sideline Hamas, the armed group that currently controls Gaza, and appoint a committee of qualified bureaucrats to run the strip for six months before handing power to the internationally recognized Palestinian government in the West Bank. Then reunite the territory with the West Bank as one Palestinian state — a long-held dream of Palestinians and many Arabs across the Middle East.
For all the talk of statehood and nuts-and-bolts discussion of temporary housing units for Palestinians, however, Gaza’s postwar future appears no closer to a resolution.
While Arab countries presented a unified front against the idea of forcibly displacing Palestinians and a detailed $53 billion reconstruction blueprint, their plan leaves central questions still unanswered. And the Arabs have little influence they can use to push Israel or Hamas to break their deadlock on several key issues, especially as the Trump administration is openly siding with Israel.
“With all due respect, the plan was very technical, as if it came from an engineering consultancy,” said Ghassan Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “And we need a political plan.”…SOURCE