“You have no idea what we would pay to have Gaza sawn off from the mainland, pushed and swept away from us into the wide open Mediterranean,” a senior Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity recently. “Not just us. The Egyptians, too, would like this to happen as would the Palestinians in Ramallah who would not touch Gaza with a ten-foot pole,” the source added, arguing that Israel’s military occupation of the Gaza Strip following the 1967 Six-Day War was one of the cardinal mistakes in the history of the state. “[Egyptian] President Anwar Sadat did not even demand the return of Gaza within the framework of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, and even had Israel tried to force him to take it back, he would have refused.”

The Gaza Strip defies military or diplomatic solutions, as everyone in Israel and everywhere else knows. That does not deter successive Israeli politicians from pledging to “solve the problem.” Late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005 and threw the keys into the sea. As head of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu promised that once in power as prime minister, he would instruct the military to topple the Hamas regime, rid the enclave of terrorists and restore calm. Various defense ministers made similar claims. Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman declared that if appointed he would present Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a 48-hour ultimatum to return the Israeli civilians and bodies of soldiers held by his organization, or else. Yamina leader Naftali Bennett presented grandiose plans to “pulverize” Hamas and bring it to its knees once appointed to the job. After taking office in 2019, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Aviv Kochavi announced a policy of “lethality” on Gaza.

They all made promises, but once on the job were forced to accept the inevitable conclusion — that there is no military solution to the Gaza problem. Even leaders of Blue and White party Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi, both former IDF chiefs turned politicians, goaded Netanyahu during three election campaigns over the monthly cash deliveries that Qatar transfers to Hamas under Israeli auspices, dubbing it “protection” money. Currently, as ministers of defense and foreign affairs, respectively, they have accepted that the “protection” money is what keeps Gazans’ heads just above the waterline and maintains the fragile, relative calm on the piece of the most densely populated land on earth where no Israeli would survive longer than two weeks.

When Israel declared independence in 1948, 150,000 Arabs lived in the Gaza Strip. By 1967, when Israel conquered the enclave, there were already 400,000 residents there. In 1994, after the signing of the Oslo Accord and the return of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his people from exile in Tunis to the West Bank and Gaza, the population was about 900,000. The population had grown to almost 1.4 million by the time Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and now numbers close to 2 million.