While Trump Envisions a Prosperous Gaza, Israelis Fear an ‘October 6 Mindset’

A member of President Trump’s team overseeing Gaza reconstruction, his son in law Jared Kushner, displayed a PowerPoint-accompanied plan at Davos on Thursday. The Strip, he said, could become a world “destination.” Israelis are yet to be convinced, though, that the promise of prosperity would dissuade Gazans from attempting to end the Jewish state. While Mr. Trump introduced Board of Peace members, including the leaders of Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, and others, one Mideast leader who signed on as a member, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, was absent. He skipped Davos fearing he would be detained according to an International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant. While President Isaac Herzog was at Davos, he was not on Mr. Trump’s dais either. Mr. Kushner, in his presentation, urged Israelis to give the peace plan a chance for at least 30 days, and remove their objections to Hamas-supporting Turkey and Qatar having access to Gaza. Yet he also said that Hamas remaining armed would hold back “the people of Gaza from achieving their aspirations.” As yet, the process of disarming Hamas is far from clear. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt introduced a video address, accompanied by music, in which the head of a Palestinian group of “technocrats” that would run the Strip’s day-to-day affairs, Ali Shaath, announced that “the Rafah crossing will open next week in both directions for Palestinians in Gaza.”Israelis note that allowing residents to go in and out through Gaza’s border with Egypt should have proceeded only after the return of the last hostage, Ran Gvili, whose body remains inside the Strip. Looming even larger in Israel is an unease over the idea that what Gazans yearn for the most is the good life. Calling for foreign investments in Gaza, Mr. Kushner said, “our goal here is peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. Everyone wants to live peacefully. Everyone wants to live with dignity.”Do they, though? “Gaza’s economic situation prior to October 7 was the best it had been in years, and yet October 7 happened,” the co-author of “The War of Return,” Adi Schwartz, writes on X. Yet “the massacre enjoyed broad support within Palestinian society.”Mr. Schwartz’s co-author, Einat Wilf, a former Knesset member of a leftist faction and who is currently running as head of the new Oz party, remembers addressing foreign diplomats long before October 7, 2023. Her listeners, she told the Sun, would argue that like everyone else, Gazans aspire to a nice home, a college education, decent income, and a better future. “Of course they want a better future,” Ms. Wilf would tell them. “It’s a future in which there’s no state for the Jews. And for that future they’re willing to work and sacrifice and suffer and fight.”Drawing on America’s Japan policies after World War II, she now says that a future education system in Gaza must acknowledge the Jewish people’s historical connection to the land of Israel. Before investing one penny in Gaza, Ms. Wilf adds, residents must renounce any claim of “return” to Israel and give up their “refugee” status.For decades, such ideas were marginal in Israeli discourse. Now they are mainstream. An “October 6 mindset” is a popular Israeli term that sums up the folly of pacifying Gazans with promises of prosperity. It describes policies that were widely accepted before the country experienced the trauma of 2023. Up until October 7, Mr. Netanyahu and others for years addressed each rocket salvo from Gaza by facilitating the arrival of a Qatari official at Gaza City with suitcases filled with $100 bills. Pretending to be satisfied, Hamas would temporarily halt the rocket launching. All the while, though, its chief, Yehyeh Sinwar, was plotting his invasion and massacre. In the early days of Zionism the father of Mr. Netanyahu’s political ideology, Vladimir Jabotinsky, warned against bribing Palestinian Arabs for peace. “Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off, but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 in his famed essay “The Iron Wall.”Gaza “could be a destination, have a lot of industry, and really be a place that the people there can thrive, have great employment once this starts going,” Mr. Kushner said Thursday. Jabotinsky, in contrast, would side with Israelis who warn of an October 6 mindset.

While Trump Envisions a Prosperous Gaza, Israelis Fear an ‘October 6 Mindset’

While Trump Envisions a Prosperous Gaza, Israelis Fear an ‘October 6 Mindset’

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