(JNS) The latest Trump-backed “Great Trust” plan for Gaza is being marketed as bold, visionary, even humanitarian. Whether this is the final iteration or not, it demands scrutiny.

At its core, this plan is morally incoherent, strategically flawed and historically blind. It suggests awarding financial aid, subsidized housing, food assistance, and digital currency to a population that, for nearly two decades, has chosen to empower and legitimize Hamas—not only through elections, but through collective silence and celebration of its atrocities.

This is not hyperbole. On Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli civilians were raped, burned, mutilated, and abducted. Children were slaughtered. Families were annihilated. The streets of Gaza responded not with mourning, but with celebration. Offers of $5 million per hostage failed to compel even a single Gazan civilian to intervene or protect innocent lives. These are not the actions of a population hijacked by terror. They are the response of a population complicit in it.

It is time to stop pretending that Gaza is merely “ruled” by Hamas. Gaza is Hamas. The distinction between civilians and terrorists collapses when generation after generation is raised on a steady ideological diet of jihad, martyrdom and Jew-hatred, often in classrooms funded and run by UNRWA. To now propose rebuilding Gaza with billions in Western and Gulf aid, without first dismantling the structures and ideologies that produced Oct. 7, is not diplomacy. It is national self-destruction dressed up as humanitarianism.

This is not simply a conflict over land, borders, or settlements. The war against Israel is theological, not political. It is part of a broader 1,400-year-old ideological struggle against the existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. From Tehran to Ankara, and from mosques in Qatar to the streets of London, the chant is the same: the erasure of Israel is the end goal.

The modern Palestinian national identity itself is a Cold War-era invention, manufactured in the 1960s with the assistance of the Soviet KGB to serve as a proxy against Western influence in the region. Before that, no independent Palestinian nation was ever claimed, and the term “Palestinian” was widely used to describe Jews under the British Mandate. Even Golda Meir, a future prime minister of Israel, once held up her Mandate-era passport and declared, “I am a Palestinian.”

The continued Western embrace of this narrative, long after it has fueled decades of bloodshed, is not only historically inaccurate but deeply irresponsible.

There is, however, an alternative path forward.

It is rooted not in appeasement, but in clarity. Gaza must return to Jewish sovereignty. The Jewish people have deep historical roots in Gaza, including spiritual and cultural leaders such as Rabbi Yisrael Najara, the 17th-century chief rabbi of Gaza, whose liturgical poems are still sung today.

Jews lived there peacefully until they were expelled by the British in 1929, who refused to protect them from anti-Jewish riots. That episode is not ancient history; it is a direct precedent for the situation we now face.

Any lasting solution must include full Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea,” not as a slogan of dominance, but as a recognition of the failed experiment of partition and the moral clarity of self-defense. The Arab world, which has for decades refused to absorb the refugees created by its own wars of aggression, must now take responsibility. Qatar, Syria and Turkey, all of whom fund and foment jihad, must open their doors to those who can no longer remain in Gaza.

Israel has done its part. It has absorbed Jewish refugees from around the world, from Yemen to Iraq, from Iran to Ethiopia. The time has come for the Arab world to do the same with the population it radicalized and abandoned.

The principle is simple: genocidal behavior must never be rewarded. It must be eradicated. You do not negotiate with it. You do not finance it. You do not offer beachfront property and cash incentives to those who cheer the slaughter of civilians.

Calls to deport radicalized individuals from the United States are met with little protest from the political right. Why should Israel, the primary victim of radical Islamic terror, be held to a lower standard? To permit the return of this population to a rebuilt, Western-funded “Gaza Riviera” is not a peace plan. It is a suicide pact.

Israel must not sign it. Instead, it must assert its rightful claim, defend its future and make Gaza Jewish again.

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