Trump’s Gaza plan better than resumption of war

US President Donald Trump set out his plan to redevelop war-torn Gaza during a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Artwork: Frank Ling

In what can only be described as a Pavlovian reaction, Donald Trump’s proposed reconstruction of Gaza has elicited howls of outrage, from Hamas’s terrorists at one end of the spectrum to European leaders at the other.

With “experts” interviewed by The New York Times denouncing the proposals as “a violation of international law, a war crime and a crime against humanity”, one might be forgiven for thinking the President had advocated the slaughter of Gaza’s widows and orphans.

But back in what we pre-postmodern types call reality, the evacuation of devastated areas is hardly unusual. Recovery from natural disasters is an obvious case in point. From the clearing of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755, which opened the way to the city’s brilliant reconstruction, through to the response to Hurricane Katrina, which displaced 1.2 million people, recovery has almost always required evacuating the inhabitants of the affected areas.

That is even more clearly true in dealing with the damage wreaked by wars, which so often leave a legacy of unexploded ordinance, tottering buildings and contaminated water supplies.

Already in rebuilding those parts of France laid to waste in World War I, the broad rule was that where more than a third of structures had been severely affected the area should be cleared of inhabitants, preventing injuries and allowing systematic redevelopment.

The lessons of that experience helped shape the reconstruction of Europe and Japan at the end of World War II. With strikes against heavily populated cities taking place on an unprecedented scale, aerial bombardment and savage land battles had shattered urban areas. It was apparent to post-war planners that rebuilding devastated cities would require temporary, and in the worst-affected cases permanent, population movements.

Nor were those movements necessarily, or even normally, voluntary. In the occupied areas, they were typically mandated and enforced by the occupying authorities. But the British experience is telling of what was done even in longstanding democracies.

Thus, addressing the House of Commons in January 1941, Winston Churchill stressed that the goal of rebuilding was not to “to make a new world, comprising a new Heaven, a new Earth, and no doubt a new hell (as I am sure that would be necessary in any balanced system)”; rather, the policy framework had to enable “a number of large practical steps which it is indispensable to take”.

The result was the Town and Country Planning Act 1944, which was commonly referred to as the “Blight and Blitz” Act, since it encompassed both repairing war damage and clearing cities of slums.

That legislation allowed areas to be declared for demolition with little or no compensation for those losing their homes. Tenants, who accounted for 75 per cent of the affected population, were not even entitled to be informed that demolition orders were being considered, much less granted meaningful rights of appeal.

Palestinians walk amid the devastation in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

And while new housing was to be built, there was no requirement to rehouse the hundreds of thousands of families evicted. Indeed, it was not until the Land Compensation Act 1973 – which was passed once post-war reconstruction had been safely completed – that tenants evicted by area clearance orders received a statutory right to be offered an alternative.

It requires considerable ignorance to believe the UK example, which was not particularly draconian by continental standards, only pertains to a grim, long buried past. The reconstruction that followed the conflicts in what had been Yugoslavia shows the opposite is true.

“Although we have previously been unwilling to countenance population transfers,” Madeleine Albright (the US representative to the United Nations) declared as a resolution of those conflicts was being designed, mandatory population movements are, if they facilitate a durable recovery, “politically and morally defensible”.

Reflecting those convictions, the 1994 Washington Agreement, which set the basis for rebuilding war-ravaged Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, granted a European Union-nominated Administrator virtually unchecked powers over the reconstruction process.

The Administrator was required to consult local representatives, but had no obligation to take their advice, including on the designation of areas for clearing, demolition and redevelopment. Nor were the Administrator’s decisions subject to appeal, thus preventing local demagogues from sabotaging the recovery process, as they would otherwise have surely done.

The result was timely reconstruction. However, looking back, John Yarwood, who led the rebuilding effort, concluded that instead of eventually returning the city’s inhabitants to their former homes, it would have been better to permanently transfer a much greater share of the population out of areas plagued by ancient enmities and controlled by the stirrers of hatred.

“Surely it is preferable to have a safe house in a new area now than to have your old house in an unsafe area some time in the future,” he argued in a careful review of his broad-ranging experience with post-conflict reconstruction. Additionally, and even more importantly, “Making normal, everyday, people feel safe will allow authentic, unforced co-operation to begin and flourish, isolating extremists and allowing moderates gradually to take over”.

The remains of the Prefectural Industry Promotion Building after the bombing of Hiroshima.

That won’t, of course, cut any ice with Hamas, whose interests lie in perpetuating the misery that inflames the people of Gaza and ensures the flow of aid that finances its terrorist activities.

Nor will it calm the Arab states and their allies, who posture as staunch defenders of the Palestinian cause. They didn’t have a critical word to say in 1991 when Kuwait, in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s endorsement of Iraq’s attempted annexation, brutally expelled 300,000 Palestinians, driving many into the desert, where they were left to fend for themselves; but a proposal that would require those states to take some responsibility for giving Gazans a worthwhile future leaves them foaming at the mouth.

And it will scarcely satisfy the many governments, including our own, who insist that Hamas should play no part in Gaza’s governance yet have no strategy whatsoever for transforming that aspiration into reality.

Yes, Trump’s proposal, which is just a concept sketch, is nowhere near perfect. That innumerable details require fleshing out is undeniable.

But it is equally undeniable that even temporarily clearing Gaza’s cities would allow ordinance to be defused and Hamas’s massive terror infrastructure to be dismantled. As populations were transferred, weapons could be identified and removed, reducing the terrorists’ access to the means of coercion.

And a new administration, with powers similar to those deployed under the Yugoslav agreements, could be put in place and charged with rebuilding Gaza.

None of that will be easy. However, as things stand, there is only one likely alternative: a resumption, sooner or later, of war. By ensuring that comes to pass, the Pavlovian dismissal of Trump’s proposals is worse than foolish – it is a crime against humanity.