Everyone Has a Plan for Gaza

Governments have plans. Donors have plans. Security officials have conditions. Technocrats have committees. International agencies have damage assessments. Consultants have reconstruction schemes. Activists have slogans. Diplomats have frameworks. Commentators have moral certainties.

The people of Gaza are still waiting for something more basic: authorship.

This is the problem almost nobody wants to name. Gaza is not only being destroyed, counted, mourned, defended, condemned, securitized, and promised reconstruction. It is also being translated into languages that are not its own. It becomes a humanitarian file, a security problem, a donor project, a diplomatic test, a moral symbol, a battlefield, a future investment zone, a trauma image, a proof of someone else’s argument.

That is why the coming reconstruction of Gaza may become the clearest example of a deeper Palestinian condition: not simply occupation, not simply suffering, not simply war, but the external administration of meaning.

Reconstruction sounds innocent. Who could be against rebuilding homes, hospitals, roads, water systems, schools, electricity networks? But reconstruction without authorship is not reconstruction. It is the continuation of capture by other means.

If the people of Gaza become beneficiaries, data points, security risks, displaced clients, future workers, or symbolic inhabitants of someone else’s master plan, then the future itself has been taken from them before it has begun. The bulldozer and the architectural rendering belong to different moments, but both can participate in the same theft if the people of the place are denied authority over what the place is to become.

This is not an anti-Israel argument. It is not an argument against Israeli security, nor against the reality of Israeli fear. Hamas’s violence, armed control, and refusal to disarm cannot be wished away by slogans. No serious discussion of Gaza’s future can pretend that weapons, authority, and control are secondary matters. They are central.

Nor can any serious discussion ignore that a powerful current within Palestinian political discourse has not merely opposed Israeli policy, occupation, settlement expansion, military rule, or inequality, but has denied Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state at all. That refusal is real. It cannot be dissolved into humanitarian language, softened into a misunderstanding, or hidden behind Western activist sentimentality.........

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