How to Boost Gaza’s Economy without Boosting Hamas

To give Gazans a stake in their economic development, Israel could encircle Gaza with economic opportunities just beyond its borders—and thus just outside the terrorists’ control.

With over 50 percent of Gazans unemployed and a similar number suffering from food insecurity, Michael Oren is obviously correct to say that “Hamas wants the Gazans to suffer.” It would seem then that to consider economic development for Gaza while Hamas remains in power is to dream an impossible dream.

How can the cynically calculated intention to keep ones’ own people in squalor and degradation, to repress deliberately the standard of living in order to achieve political ends, be overcome?

A plan to do so can be built on two working assumptions. The first is that most ordinary Gazans want to escape poverty more than they want their rulers to fire rockets at Israel. The second is that if they had a way to alleviate their poverty by circumventing Hamas, they might then have something to lose by continuing to let Hamas do as it wishes. In such a situation, the people of Gaza would force the terrorist group to stop holding them hostage.