Skip to footer
Trust
The Monitor's View

To fix Gaza, a glint of trust

In a region where suspicion runs high, Israel plans to rely on a few trusted Palestinians in Gaza to self-govern.

|
AP
Palestinians walk through Gaza City amid destruction from the Israel-Hamas war, Feb. 10.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

During conflicts in the Middle East, any peace-feeler often takes a touch of trust. A good example was reported Wednesday by Israel’s Channel 12 news. Israel plans to start restoring Palestinian governance in Gaza even before the war with Hamas ends.

In a pilot project, the Israel Defense Forces will work with trusted community leaders in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City to be in charge of aid distribution, or what are called “humanitarian pockets.” The IDF will still provide security but not govern the process.

A future Palestinian government in Gaza, said wartime Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz this week, “cannot be Hamas and should not be Israel.”

The plan faces severe tests. Any Palestinian in Gaza working with Israel is a target for radicals. And the violent, anti-Israel ideology of Hamas might be difficult to suppress. The answer is to build more or different bridges of trust. Israel, for example, hopes to back up the new Palestinian governance in Gaza with “an international administration of moderate Arab countries with the support of the US,” Mr. Gantz said.

Peace in Gaza will indeed need a regional response. Since the war started four months ago, the Gulf state of Qatar, which has trusted contacts across the region, has played the role of mediator between Hamas and Israel in arranging temporary cease-fires and the release of hostages and prisoners. This week, another Arab country with a history of peace facilitation, Oman, stepped in.

It called for an urgent international conference on creating a Palestinian state, similar to the 1991 Madrid Conference that helped lead to the creation of the Palestinian Authority. Oman’s plan would include Hamas.

“Hamas cannot be eradicated,” wrote the Omani foreign minister, Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi, in The Economist. “Movements of national liberation like Hamas are too deeply rooted in their communities. Their cause will be kept alive however many militants die. So, if there is ever to be peace, the peacemakers have to find a way to talk to them. And to listen.”

Can Hamas, despite its horrific attack on Israeli civilians, be trusted? Mr. Busaidi gives this response: “There is an assumption that the people of the Middle East are so imprisoned by sectarian logic that they are incapable of making the kind of sophisticated judgments that the people of the liberal and democratic West are used to making. This is deeply condescending. It is also factually wrong.”

He adds, “We must also believe that there exists an Israeli leadership that can be persuaded to engage in good faith.”

Oman’s suggestion of a large-scale peace conference relies on the idea that talking alone can be a trust-maker. Results will come later and need not be specified upfront. Like cat’s feet, trust can come quietly and quickly if warring parties simply talk privately. Past crises in the Middle East have sometimes led to negotiated and surprising solutions.

Distrust is now high in the region. Only a third of Israelis, for example, trust their own government. Any plan to rehabilitate the devastated Gaza Strip is a starting point for trust-building. It is also one for a larger peace.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to To fix Gaza, a glint of trust
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0222/To-fix-Gaza-a-glint-of-trust
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe