A year ago, President Trump proposed a Gaza migration plan: the relocation of Gaza’s population to other countries, or their reabsorption into the broader Arab world. The plan was greeted with moral outrage, diplomatic horror, and predictable denunciations. Yet it had one unfashionable virtue. It was an actual solution.

Gaza and Israel are not two neighbors locked in a solvable dispute. They are two trains on the same track, accelerating toward one another. Both have rapidly growing populations. Both occupy tiny, immovable slivers of land. Neither has meaningful internal room to expand. And unlike most conflicts, this one is not merely territorial or political. It is existential.

Palestinian identity, as it has been cultivated for generations, is not centered on state-building, prosperity, or coexistence. It is centered on grievance, resentment, and the religious conviction that Israel is temporary and will one day be destroyed. That belief is not incidental. It is foundational, taught, ritualized, and sanctified. There is no technocratic lever that alters it, because it is not an economic belief. It is a theological one.

Few are willing to say this plainly, but Hamas’s actions on October 7 were not aberrations. They were not distortions of Islam. They were modeled, consciously and explicitly, on early Islamic warfare as recorded in the sira and hadith literature. Muhammad personally led or authorized numerous military campaigns, which included beheadings, enslavement, mass killings, forced marriage, sexual slavery, and the eradication of entire tribes. Hamas does not see October 7 as a crime. It sees it as pious........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)