The Arab Plan For Gaza

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Hussain Abdul-Hussain of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has published what he thinks the Arab Plan for Gaza will likely look like. It will be revealed at the summit to be held in Cairo on March 4, but already the plan’s broad outlines have been leaked. More on the “Arab plan for Gaza” can be found here: “The likely Arab plan for Gaza: No Hamas, no PA, no deportation,” Elder of Ziyon, February 23, 2025:

Plan not out yet, will likely be unveiled at Cairo Arab League Emergency Summit on March 4. Plan expected to promise enormous amount of Gulf money (up to $20 billion) to Gaza (Egypt will certainly get a cut and PA’s Mahmoud Abbas will also get a bribe to buy him out of the plan).

Considering that the estimated cost of rebuilding Gaza is now upwards of $55 billion, the pledge of $20 billion will not be nearly enough. And $55 billion would hardly be missed by the treasuries of the rich Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. Perhaps the Arabs are hoping to entice the U.S. and the Europeans to contribute more billions of their own. That notion should be promptly rejected. The non-Muslim countries have over the past half-century provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to the Muslim Arab countries, especially to Egypt and Jordan. It is time to call a complete halt to this misguided transfer of wealth, and to hew to the rule that “Muslims must help Muslims.”

What do the Arab states intend to do about the $14 billion that just four leaders of Hamas have stolen over the years from the aid money meant to support all the people in Gaza? Those leaders are Khaled Meshaal ($4 billion), Mousa Abu Marzouk ($3 billion), the late Ismail Haniyeh ($4 billion), and the late Yahya Sinwar ($3 billion)? The Trump administration would do well to remind the world of these vast sums which, if located and seized, would mean that the Arab states could reduce their own contributions to the reconstruction of Gaza.

The crux of the plan is this: In return for the enormous money to rebuild Gaza, both Hamas and Abbas will be out of Gaza. In their stead, a Palestinian governing body (the plan calls them technocrats), will be installed by the Arab League and put in charge of rebuilding Gaza, physically and politically. This body will oversee reconstruction and make sure to keep out two things: PA’s corruption and Hamas’s wars. Funders, after all, want to make sure that all the billions they will invest will not be stolen or not be destroyed in yet another round of war with Israel.

Will Hamas simply go quietly? Will its leaders have to be bribed to leave? Will the upper echelon of Hamas be offered permanent refuge in rich Arab countries? Or will those Arab countries be allowed by Israel to send into Gaza a pan-Arab military force to crush what remains of Hamas, in order to then impose a government of technocrats, consisting of Palestinians who have been serving in the Gulf as senior aides to the local rulers?

And what if Mahmoud Abbas or others in the Palestinian Authority try to replace Hamas in Gaza, and insist that they are the “only true representatives of the Palestinian people” and not our “brothers in the Arab Gulf to whom, of course, we are grateful for their generous aid”? Will those Arab states be able to impose their will on Gaza? Why would Gazans prefer the famously corrupt Abbas — who with his sons Tarek and Yasser has acquired a fortune of $400 million — to the government of technocrats who, under the Arab Plan, would take control? Perhaps Abbas or his successors (he is now 89) in the PA would be able to appeal to a nascent Palestinian nationalist sentiment to oppose a plan the other Arabs want to impose “on us, the Palestinian people.” Or would the Gulf Arabs be able to buy off Abbas or other PA leaders who might succeed him, so that in return for dropping their objections to the plan for a Gazan government of technocrats, they would receive enormous bribes, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars?

Elder of Ziyon thinks that Trump’s plan for Gaza was presented as a way to prod the Arab states to produce an alternative plan for the Strip, and especially, to get them to pledge a large contribution to finance Gaza’s reconstruction. And it worked. The reason the Arab states want to reconstruct Gaza, Elder of Ziyon says, is not out of any great sympathy for the Palestinians, who are treated with contumely throughout the Arab world, but rather, in order to keep the Gazan Arabs in the Strip, rather than have them attempt to move to their own countries. The Gazans would have to endure living in what Trump calls a “demolition site,” but one where technocrats would rule, rather than the corrupt PA or the murderous Hamas. And these technocrats might be able, through instituting a series of short-term population moves within well-defined areas of Gaza, keep its people constantly moving away from the sites whose turn has come to be razed and rebuilt. Thus Gaza, sector by sector, will, be reconstructed, and after each sector has been rebuilt, people will move back in. And the credit for this solution should then go to Donald Trump, its only begetter. But it won’t.