Engineering a new Gaza
While few Palestinians currently live in Gaza’s Israeli-controlled zone, US hopes are understood to rest on the idea that development, security and presumably access to medical care and welfare would be enough to draw people from other areas of Gaza.
But complicating US ambitions is that access to the “green zone” is heavily restricted for Palestinians, a situation that is likely to continue going forward.
According to The New York Times, Israeli security services are likely to conduct background checks on Palestinians seeking shelter in the new compounds, giving Israel a veto over who will be allowed in.
The outlet added that European diplomats have expressed concern that the eventual criteria could exclude large numbers of Palestinians, including civil servants, such as police and medical staff, who have worked under Hamas’s 18-year administration of the enclave as well as their family members.
And aid agencies said the idea of providing aid only to people in certain areas to the exclusion of others goes against humanitarian principles.
“We deliver aid where people are,” said Tamara Alrifai, the director of external relations for the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. “We don’t provide services where we’d like people to be. That goes against the entire philosophy of aid and development.”
“This is about delivering the services people need to where the people are, not creating an artificial village and imposing what services you think people need onto them,” she said.
US planners are said to hope that access to food, security and aid will draw people into the Israeli-controlled ‘green zone’
Division, partition and shrunken space
Arab and European officials as well as agencies such as Refugees International have expressed concern that the division of Gaza into red and green zones may pave the way to permanent partition. The idea has also drawn comparisons to the occupations of Baghdad and Kabul, where green zones became effective Western enclaves.
However, the suggestion of dividing Gaza is not entirely new. Speaking in April, Netanyahu spoke of plans to “divide up” Gaza by building a new Israel-controlled security corridor between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting Israel was preparing to separate the two cities.
As recently as September, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich characterised Gaza as a “real estate bonanza”, telling an audience that he was already in negotiations with the Americans on how to divide up the enclave after the war.
Smotrich and other Israeli settler leaders have consistently called for Israel to create illegal settlements for Jewish Israelis in Gaza and essentially force the Palestinian population out in what would amount to ethnic cleansing.
“How can you divide it?” Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House asked rhetorically. “You can’t squeeze 2 million people into a space even smaller than that which they’re already in.”
“Imposing an Israeli or American solution onto Gaza just isn’t going to work. If you’re going to even try to achieve something lasting, you need to begin with an understanding of Gaza’s history, culture and trauma,” Mekelberg added. “Palestinians need to be part of any settlement, or it’s never going to be stable.”
In Gaza, news of US and Israeli plans for the future of Palestinians is doing little to reassure a population battered and displaced after two years of Israeli assaults. “No one has talked to us. No one has thought about what people here need,” Hussein said. “What about people’s homes and land? Do they just give them up to go and live in a container?”
