Gaza is a knife aimed at Israel. Just look at the map. It’s not an accident.

The Gaza Strip was created by Arab states who attacked and lost to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48. It became a narrow festering laboratory where humans were turned into monsters, encouraged and trained to commit atrocities.  

Gaza became the anti-Israel terror base, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Gaza’s people have got no flag, no citizenship. Their symbol became the UN refugee card known in Arabic as al-Hawiyya.

Egypt kept the refugees penned up in Gaza in poverty and 70% unemployment, refusing them citizenship, denying them statehood and independence.

Lebanon and Syria also kept their Palestinians in camps. They saw the political potential of the refugees, exploited their suffering to harden them as a knife aimed at Israel. Enmity to Israel was the heart of Qawmiyya -- Pan-Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Hafez Assad built their careers around it.

Whenever Arab leaders failed their people -- low literacy, poor health care, general poverty -- they distracted attention, wrapping themselves in the flag of Palestinian resistance and pan-Arab nationalism.

Fighting terror from Gaza consumed Israel in its first 20 years. After winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Sinai as part of diplomatic settlements, hoping terror would end. Under the 1993 Israel-PLO accords, Israel handed military control in Gaza to Arafat’s PLO. Terror increased. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel, also evicted its civilians from Gaza in 2005.  Arab terror rose even more.

Hamas beat the PLO in the 2006 elections after its participation was encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yes, it was a bad idea. Hamas then violently evicted the PLO. Gaza again became the main terror base against Israel. Its main domestic product was not locally grown flowers and citrus fruit pioneered by Israeli farmers, but rocket-based terror. Hamas called it muqawwama sarwakhiyya -- “rocket-propelled resistance.”

Hamas used its state educational and social networks to mold thousands of hate-filled killers.  From first grade to summer camps, Hamas gave children rifles and taught them to hate Jews, as detailed in the 36-paragraph Hamas Covenant.

The bloodcurdling October 7 attack, in which 1,500 were murdered and hundreds kidnapped, was not a by-product of the Gaza Arab state, but its prime directive. Hundreds of Gaza residents accompanied the Hamas terror units that crossed the Gaza fence on October 7, joining gleefully in the atrocities. No one forced them. They are not innocent.

This is but one sign that the Gaza population is more of a Hamas partner than a Hamas victim. Opinion polls show more than 80% support for Hamas in Gaza. In other words, the people of Gaza, who voted for Hamas in 2006, continue to support Hamas. They collaborated in the Nazi-like war crimes, and they, not just Hamas, must bear the price.

Hamas was even more “successful” on October 7, 2023 than Al-Qaeda had been on September 11, 2001. Hamas had dreamed of grabbing several Israelis as hostages. What Hamas achieved was far beyond its greatest dreams:  240 hostages and 1,500 deaths.

The October 7th attack devastated Israel, traumatized its collective psyche, and shocked the Mid-East more than the 1973 October War, probably more than 9/11 traumatized America. Remember, 1,500 murdered in Israel is like 50,000 murdered Americans.

Hamas cut up, burnt, and scattered the bodies for maximum shock value. Israel is still couring the fields, trying to find its dead. Meanwhile, rockets still threaten Israeli cities. Restoring Israel’s psyche and its deterrence means destroying Hamas the way the Allies destroyed the Nazi Party and its members in 1945.

Israel’s physical and territorial security -- on the southern and northern border -- can never be placed in perennial jeopardy to failed mini-states like Gaza or Lebanon run by terror groups. Hamas and Hezb’allah must be destroyed, physically, permanently, like the Nazis, al-Qaeda and ISIS. Iran’s role as the orchestrator of Hamas and Hezb’allah demands a final reckoning.

Gaza’s radical population must be reduced. Many should be resettled outside of Gaza. This solution should have been applied in 1949. Keeping millions of radicalized Arabs in Gaza is like massaging cancer, leaving it to fester again. There is plenty of territory in Arab states culturally and religiously compatible with Gaza’s Palestinian Arabs -- Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims. Egypt and Saudi Arabia and/or Iraq and Sudan are such large countries.

There is plenty of Arab money to make this kind of Gaza “Marshall Plan” realizable. Qatar itself, which is awash in petrodollars, has helped Hamas stay in power. Now it can make amends.

Plans by Biden-Blinken-Obama to build another failed state in Gaza should be scrapped. We do not need another doomed-to-fail Palestinian state that would become a forward base for Iran.

We must look at the Palestinians and Gaza honestly, without wishful thinking, which is the worst enemy of intelligence and strategic planning.

We saw the failed PLO state in Jordan in 1969-70,  the failed PLO state in Lebanon in the 1970s, suffered the PLO-Palestinian Authority state in the West Bank since 1993. Three failures -- three strikes for the team of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

Now we have witnessed the unprecedented failure of the abominable Hamas-Palestinian Jihad state in Gaza since 2006.

The Arabs who identify as Palestinians have failed at state-building, but they have excelled at terror, hijacking, and suicide bombing while blaming everyone else for their failures.

Palestinian “refugees” are the only post-World War II refugee group that is 75 years old, that still identifies as refugees in the world today. They have received much aid and have been catered to by a special and especially corrupt UN agency known as UNRWA which cooperated with Hamas.  Like Hamas, UNWRA must cease to exist.

The Palestinians have a unique record of hatred, working hardest to undermine the two countries that offered them citizenship -- Israel and Jordan. From Arafat to Abbas and Hamas, they have been partners or proxies with the Soviet Union and Iran, working against the U.S.

We must protect Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, not “free Palestine.’ 

Dr. Michael Widlanski is an expert in political communication, a former reporter and college professor who was the author of Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat (Threshold-Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Can Israel Survive A Palestinian State? (1990). He was strategic affairs advisor in Israel ’s Ministry of Public Security, editing captured PLO documents. Earlier he advised Israeli negotiation teams at the Madrid and Washington talks in 1991-92.  Dr. Widlanski was a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007-8 and at the University of California, Irvine in 2014, taught   political communication for two decades at The Hebrew University and Bar Ilan University.  Earlier he was a reporter at the New York Times and Cox Newspapers, war correspondent for  Israeli Army Radio and Diplomatic Correspondent for  Israel Television in English (IBA).