Haviv Rettig Gur on the Fate of Gaza

"Hamas is Gaza's inner cultural weakness made flesh and sent to walk the world."

One of the most rational voices since the massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023 has been Times of Israel correspondent Haviv Rettig Gur, who posted a long tweet this morning, partially in response to Trump announcing, onstage with Bibi, that the US was going to “take over” Gaza.

(For more on Trump’s sharpening taste for imperialism, a taste no doubt developed in the shark tank that is New York real estate, I lead you to a recent piece from Matt Welch in Reason.)

I find Rettig Gur’s take so smart, I’ve pasted it below, as well as the video from a pro-Hamas rally yesterday in DC, which also seems to have incited the response from Rettig Gur. Follow him on Twitter/X @havivrettiggur

Here's a take on Trump's plan to "take over" Gaza that's so utterly obvious and ordinary that no one seems to be talking about it.

Leave aside for the moment great questions of war and peace. Take the conflict off the table for a second.

What had Hamas made of Gaza, its society and economy, before the war? A land with so much natural beauty and potential, and recently discovered offshore gas - and what did Hamas build there?

Even under the Israeli and Egyptian blockades, the GDP per capita in Gaza was higher than Morocco's before October 7. Its potential was always enormous.

And here's the thing: That potential remains.

But not with Hamas. Because Hamas doesn't see that potential, and if someone points it out to them, they don't care.

They chose the catastrophic war that began on October 7. They built a vast tunnel system for 17 years whose only purpose was to force the enemy to cut through cities to get to them when that war came. And given what they think of Israelis, they actually expected Gaza's destruction to be even worse than it is.

One powerful signal that they always intended this destruction: That tunnel system is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, and Hamas built nothing else in Gaza in all their years of ruling it.

Our enemies, in their stupidity, are convinced Israeli strength is about weapons systems and infantry regiments. They do not grasp what real strength is. They do not plan, they do not build, they do not invest. They do not free their people, especially their women, politically and economically.

They expect wealth and military strength and geopolitical power to land on them deus-ex-machina because of their great piety and willingness to sacrifice and destroy everything for their religion. And they genuinely do not understand why it never works.

Hamas's supporters, the self-styled "pro-Palestinian" activists in the West, are worse than immoral. They're stupid. Even if you justify Hamas's cataclysmic war on Israel - cataclysmic for Palestine, not Israel - how do you justify Hamas's utter neglect of every other facet of Palestinian life? Of the economy, education, of the happiness of each and every Gazan?

You can hate Israel for the blockade, but it was Hamas, not Israel, that dragged Gaza into the Egyptian civil war in 2013 and led to the *Egyptian* side of that blockade. They just don't care about Gazans.

Gaza's education system routinely - even now - produces videos of children dancing to military odes and singing of the coming victory. It does not produce mathematicians or coders or marine biologists. Even the Israel of the 1950s and '60s, when it had what was basically a third-world economy, when it was poorer than the Gaza of October 6, was hard at work educating great scientists and engineers.

Hamas is Gaza's inner cultural weakness made flesh and sent to walk the world. Hamas is everything wrong with Gaza, and not just Gaza; these are the very weaknesses eating away at Egyptian society, the weaknesses that shattered Syria and Iraq, the weaknesses that hold back the Arab world generally.

Could America reverse that weakness? No, of course not.

Could a serious Palestinian leadership, the sort not now visible on any horizon and hardly imaginable in the foreseeable future, do so? Absolutely. It wouldn't even be that hard. Any economist who isn't actually illiterate or utterly ideological could tell you how to do it. One of the few advantages of being at rock bottom is that it's not that hard to rise dramatically.

If you find Trump's proposal horrifying, if you find Gaza's destruction heartbreaking, if you don't want Gaza's present to be its future -- find that leadership, back it to the hilt, and be crystal clear about what brought Gaza to its current state.

And if Palestine's supporters weren't a bunch of daft, narcissistic windbags, they'd grasp that hating Israel isn't enough. Every word of the above is true even if Israel really is the bad guy.