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A Bold Exit: Clearing Gaza, Holding the West Bank, and Offering Palestinians a New Choice

By Steven Franco - Times of Israel April 20, 2025

A Stalemate of Slogans.

For over 75 years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lived on a loop: failed frameworks, temporary ceasefires, and a peace process that functions more like performance art. Each new initiative collapses on the same fault lines—Palestinian rejectionism, Arab duplicity, and Western idealism untethered from Middle Eastern reality.

What’s needed isn’t another two-state variation. It’s a new framework altogether—one that prioritizes stability, moral clarity, and real opportunity over wishful thinking. This vision begins with three uncompromising steps:  

1. The total evacuation of Gaza, 

2. Status quo on the West Bank under continued Israeli security control, and

3. The creation of a voluntary Palestinian satellite state in a willing Arab nation, launched and tested over the course of 30 years.

This is not about punishment or exile. It’s about giving Palestinians a future that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have repeatedly failed to deliver—and inviting Arab nations to finally match their rhetoric with responsibility.

Gaza: No Way Forward Without Emptying the Ground

The moral and logistical insanity of conducting military operations in Gaza with a civilian population trapped inside is undeniable. Israel is now expected to wage war in a neighborhood, not a battlefield. If a sustainable postwar vision is to emerge, Gaza must first be fully evacuated—of civilians, weapons, and terror infrastructure.

Gaza’s residents, many of whom openly express their desire to leave, deserve the choice to start over elsewhere. That path should be opened—not as forced displacement, but as an offer of voluntary relocation, with dignity, safety, and international backing. Only then can Gaza be reimagined from the ground up, as something other than a launching pad for terrorism.

Arab Nations: Time to Share the Burden

It is long past time to ask why no Arab country has offered to receive even a fraction of Gaza’s population. Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon keep their Palestinian populations segregated and stateless. Gulf nations send speeches, not solutions.

If the Arab world truly believes in Palestinian dignity, then now is the moment to act. A coalition—perhaps led by the UAE, Bahrain, or Egypt, Saudi Arabia—should identify and develop territory for a new Palestinian satellite state, constructed with Gulf wealth and governed under international trusteeship. Education, industry, and civil infrastructure would be built from scratch—not under Israeli occupation, not under corrupt Palestinian leadership, and not in the shadow of Hamas.

This is no more radical than previous resettlement proposals throughout history—including the 1903 Uganda proposal for Jews. What matters isn’t where a nation is founded, but what it is founded on.

The West Bank: Status Quo, Secure the Ground

Unlike Gaza, the West Bank—Judea and Samaria—remains relatively functional under a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian control. Despite deep flaws, the current arrangement has prevented full-scale war. Until real reforms emerge among Palestinian leadership, the status quo must hold.

Security cooperation must continue and even intensify, especially after the disloyalty many Arab Israelis and West Bank residents showed after October 7. At the same time, Israel can pursue economic integration and responsible development—not to “buy” peace, but to strengthen stability.

The Palestinian People Deserve a Choice

This proposal offers Palestinians a civilizational choice:  

– Remain in the West Bank, under imperfect governance and the long road to reform, or  

– Pursue a new path in a clean, purpose-built Palestinian state elsewhere—free of corruption, terrorism, and inherited victimhood.

This is not forced relocation. It is voluntary self-determination. For 30 years, let both paths operate in parallel. Let people choose not with slogans or stones, but with their feet. Where would they rather raise their children? Where do they see a real life?

Education: The Real Long War

True peace will never come from ceasefires or summits alone. It comes from the way children are raised and the heroes they are taught to honor. As Shimon Peres said nearly 25 years ago, “The war is not only over land, but over education.” Had that process begun when he said it, we’d be living in a different world today.

The new Palestinian satellite state must be founded on reformed education—focused on coexistence, entrepreneurship, and global integration. Let that be the future, and let those who wish to cling to the past do so without dragging others into the abyss.

A Hard Reset, Not a Soft Landing

This vision is not utopian. It is hard. It challenges taboos, shatters slogans, and demands real courage—from Israel, from the Palestinians, and most of all, from the Arab world. But the current model is broken. A different outcome requires a different structure.

Let the world stop demanding the impossible from Israel while expecting nothing of the Arab states. Let us reframe the Palestinian issue—not as a perpetual grievance, but as a test of vision, values, and voluntary choice.

Let us offer a future that begins not with more negotiations—but with a blank slate, a cleared land, and a new chance to build.