‘What should happen when our soldiers win this war and we eventually pull out of Gaza? Has every Palestinian been educated to hate and kill Jews? Can we ever trust the Palestinian people and their leaders to work with us?”
These are some of the big questions that Israelis are asking themselves following the most vicious and unprovoked attack on any Western civilization in 75 years.
Of course, there are different groups in Israeli society with different ideas. One group says that the war must be so decisive and punitive that it will act as a deterrent against any future terror attack in Israel. Another group says that we must import 200,000 Indian workers and never allow any Palestinians to work in Israel again. Another camp is hoping that Canada, Scotland, and other pro-Palestinian nations will admit Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank as refugees.
But where do these various paths lead?
Prior to October 7, the primary source of income for the two million Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria derived from working in, or exporting to, Israel. Many other foreign workers employed in agriculture and construction left Israel after the massacre, leaving these industries moribund, with work in Israel’s crucial housing and building industries suspended.
If we never let the Palestinian workers back in, in five years time we will have terror in our backyard that will make Hamas look like a local mafia gang. If we can never trust individual Palestinians to work alongside us again, how can we expect to create an enduring peace on our borders?
Add to this the fact that importing thousands of foreign workers would create an immigration nightmare. Firstly, these workers would need to be trained in local building techniques. Secondly, they would need to be housed – in a country that is struggling to find accommodation for its own people. Finally, many of them could apply for citizenship and marry into the Jewish population, creating difficult issues for the Jewish State down the road.
A peace plan can't be hasty or desperate
MANY HISTORICAL “peace plans” in Israel have been hastily implemented after sustained periods of terror. The Oslo Accords of 1993 came about following the First Intifada. After six years of fighting and fear, Israelis became war-weary and ended up accepting a less-than-ideal solution for the sake of “peace.” That was effectively a win for our enemies.
If we make the same mistakes as we have in the past, a desperate “peace plan” would not only reward Hamas for its massacre but also set up another 30 years of pain. Many would feel that the sacrifices made by hundreds of brave Israeli soldiers would be in vain if we have future attacks emanating from either Gaza or Judea and Samaria in the future. We know that Palestinians have been brainwashed for generations to hate and kill Jews, and their natural resentment of Israel’s victory and their suffering will further fuel their anger. There must be a better solution.
While UNRWA exists, keeping the Palestinians as refugees and fueling their desire to “return” to Israel, keeps them in a permanent state of suffering. Many people now recognize the need to dismantle UNRWA and devise a solution for Palestinian coexistence that does not incite hatred of Israel in future generations of Palestinian children.
Enter what I call the “Stick and the Carrot” Approach: Psychology 101, Parenting 101, Peacemaking 101. It’s a simple idea, but, oddly, it has never been tried in Israel. What do I mean?
The Palestinians in Gaza have been operating for 30 years without any positive incentive to live peacefully with Israel (what I call a “carrot”) and without any deterrents against building terror capacity (let’s call that a “stick”). In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has been motivated by the carrot of economic prosperity, but no stick to deter terrorism against Israelis. Neither society had both the carrot and the stick.
Since Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, Hamas in Gaza has had operational freedom to build terror tunnels (using millions of tons of cement provided by Israeli cement companies), to arm itself to the teeth, and to train its children in the latest terror techniques. The Palestinians in Gaza also had no carrot; the 18,000 workers who came into Israel to work were a paltry 1% of the population, and we now know that they were motivated to spy for Hamas rather than to work for this enhanced income.
The PA has also operated without a “stick,” without an Israeli deterrent – training its children to carry out terror attacks, paying $350 million a year to terrorists’ families, and operating the “Fatah” terror army in its war of attrition against Israel, killing 28 civilians in cold blood in 2023 (before October 7) including my wife and two daughters. Israel equipped and trained the PA police force, and many of these weapons have been used against Israeli citizens.
The carrot of permits has worked in the West Bank
LET’S LOOK at the carrot that Israel uses in Judea and Samaria. Until October 7, there were 200,000 Palestinian workers entering Israel each day as breadwinners for their families, generating income to support an estimated one million Palestinians – half the population of the West Bank. The salaries that they received were over twice the money earned by employees of the PA, and 90% of their exports also went to Israel, meaning that around 80% of Palestinian income in Judea and Samaria derived from Israel.
If you had asked any Israeli before October 7 where they would perceive the greatest threat of a major terror attack, their answer would have been unanimously “from Judea and Samaria,” given the proximity of Palestinians to Israeli settlements. But no, the attack was from Hamas in Gaza – the regime with no carrot and no stick.
So, what if Israel could engineer a “Day After Plan” for the Palestinians that introduces both a carrot and a stick? How would this look? Almost every Israeli would agree that the stick must be a political settlement that will never allow the Palestinians to wage war on Israel again. A process of deNazification that results in no terror tunnels, no terror leaders, no anti-Israel brainwashing in schools, no terror training, and no weapons.
A structure that enables the IDF to have complete military control over both territories. But this must come with a carrot; for the Palestinians to agree to these conditions or at least to live with them, there must be an incentive. The carrot of work permits for Palestinians, perhaps granted town by town, depending on their speed of adopting our conditions of “non-terror,” would help each Palestinian community to build a free and prosperous society.
In the past, we have given the Palestinians a carrot without a stick, and we’ve tried the “no stick and no carrot” approach as well. Now is the time to implement the full plan, involving both incentives and deterrents and using the logic of enlightened self-interest to create a peace plan with a realistic chance of sustainable success.
The writer is an educator who lives in Efrat. His book Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity has been republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.