Gaza should be made an Abraham Accords protectorate led by Mohammed Dahlan - opinion

Back in December 2023, barely two months after the horrors of October 7 and the resultant war to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, I posted my original thoughts in a Jerusalem Report article (“A new Gaza – A new Middle East”) on how to achieve peace and a better future for Gaza. I envisioned nothing less than a regional partnership to rebuild Gaza into becoming the Cote d’Azur of the Middle East. A far-fetched dream, but an achievable project. Nothing less than Gaza as an Abraham Accord protectorate, based on past successes of such a construct.

A vision must be given to the people of Gaza that their fate rests with themselves and their desire for a better future, but only after an essential period of deradicalization. The reconstruction of Gaza cannot only be physical. Along with the rubble, an essential element must be deradicalization because without this, the same rot will re-emerge and take us back decades, even to more conflict.

There have been two examples of protectorates that included essential elements of deradicalization.

In Germany, in which an Allies protectorate sheltered the West Germans from the threat of the Soviets, this reconstruction included a denazification program and brought Germany into the Western democratic world. Another example is Japan, in which the United States had to deploy two atom bombs, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to force its surrender. Japan came under an American protectorate which not only helped rebuild Japan but essentially deradicalized the Japanese while nurturing a new leadership into a future of peace, progress, and prosperity.

Other protectorates are numerous. As a political and governing system, the concept of protectorates has been successful in the past and is currently working well in the international arena. The United States has five protectorates, ranging from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands to Guam and Samoa in the Pacific.

France has several protectorates, which include Guadeloupe, Guiana, Martinique, La Réunion, Mayotte, Saint-Barthélemy, and even several Polynesian islands. All are peaceful and prosperous.

The United Kingdom has 14 protectorates, known as UK Overseas Territories, perhaps the most famous being the Falkland Islands, where the British came to its defense when it was invaded by Argentina in 1982. The status of protectorates is recognized under international law, and the specific relationship between the protectorate and the protector is set out under a treaty signed by both parties.

An essential element, and duty, of the regional partners in a Gazan protectorate would be not only its physical reconstruction but also the deconstruction of its radical political and ideological structures. That must be supervised and executed from the outset by having the moderate Muslim partners not only reconstruct the mosques and the madrassas [educational institutions] but also to train and employ the imams and the religious teachers by introducing and educating their moderate form of Islam. 

Israel and the United States could devise a modern educational curriculum based on languages, mathematics, sciences, hi-tech, medicine, business studies – elements to give the next generation of Gazans the grounding and skills for future success. To protect this project against malevolent intruders and criminals, it would be necessary to create a multinational policing force. This cannot be surrendered to any United Nations involvement, given its egregious failures in Gaza and in Lebanon.

This temporary Abraham Accords policing must ensure that there will no lapse back into old bad habits by the population. The huge investment of money, resources, and personnel must be protected from outbreaks of local grievances, civil wars, and terrorism. Those days are over. 

This protection force would also recruit and train Gazans to become the protectors of their own communities once they have matured into independence. The presence of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, even when seen to be closely coordinating and partnering with allied, even Arab, personnel, may be perceived as a provocation to the local population. Therefore, there would need to be a physical presence of a multinational force, including a new unified patrol force of US-UAE-Saudi armed personnel to give assurance to the local population that they are there for their protection and benefit, but also to ensure zero infiltration of bad actors.

However, low-profile Israeli intelligence headquartered with allies somewhere in Gaza is essential due to their skills and intimate knowledge of how Gaza ticks. intelligence sharing is essential. Intelligence reports would be fed into Israeli intelligence systems within Israel, where it would be coordinated with the allied forces on the ground to head off any internal or external danger. 

Taking the correct steps to revitalize Gaza to a better future depends on resourceful and responsible foreign partners. It also relies on nurturing Gazans with talent and ability to dedicate themselves to a future of progress, not propaganda. 

Mohammed Dahlan: The next leader of Gaza?

If inspiration and leadership are needed in Gaza, I suggest a charismatic figurehead to become their ideal leader. That person is Mohammed Dahlan. It may come as a surprise to learn that Dahlan, now a UAE billionaire, was born in Khan Yunis, today an epicenter of Hamas’s last violent spasms in Gaza. 

Dahlan, 62, received a BA in business administration from the Islamic University of Gaza. As a young man, he was arrested 11 times by Israel for his involvement as the Gaza leader of the Fatah youth movement. After the signing of the Oslo Accords, Dahlan was made head of the Preventive Security Forces in Gaza. He built up a force of 20,000 men and became one of the most powerful Palestinian leaders, dealing regularly with the CIA and Israeli intelligence officials.

Dahlan angered PLO leader Yasser Arafat in November 2001 by expressing dissatisfaction over Arafat’s lack of a coherent policy that would lead to a better future. Even so, he employed tough measures against the radical elements in his society, which led him to be criticized by human rights groups for the methods he employed in his crackdowns on Islamic terrorists. Divorcing himself from the anti-Israel terrorism of Arafat, he attempted to garner support for an electoral challenge to Arafat; but despite this, he stepped back after the Bush administration demanded a change in PA leadership in July of that year.

Dahlan was well known to the Americans and Israelis. Prior to his resignation from the PA in June 2002, he was a member of negotiating teams for security issues in peace talks, even attending the Camp David Summit in 2000. In 2006, Dahlan was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in the Palestinian legislative elections as a representative for Khan Yunis. He took an increasingly tough stance against Hamas, calling their 2006 election victory a disaster, and threatening to “haunt them from now till the end of their term.” On December 14, 2006, gunmen attempted to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and Hamas accused Dahlan of orchestrating that attack. 

On January 7, 2007, Dahlan held the biggest-ever rally of Fatah supporters in the Gaza Strip, where he denounced Hamas as “a bunch of murderers and thieves.” In response, Hamas accused Dahlan of bringing Palestinians to the brink of civil war. In March 2007, despite objections from Hamas, Dahlan was appointed by Mahmoud Abbas to lead the newly reestablished Palestinian National Security Council, overseeing all security forces in the Palestinian territories. In April 2008, Vanity Fair revealed that, after the 2006 elections, Dahlan had been central in a US plot to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power.

According to the report, the US provided money and arms to Dahlan, trained his men, and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. However, the elected Hamas government forestalled the move and carried out their armed counter coup in a bloody civil war against the Fatah-PLO Palestinian Authority in Gaza and have controlled it since.

In 2007, after Dahlan resigned from his post as national security adviser, the Bush administration exerted heavy pressure on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to appoint Dahlan as his deputy. In June 2011, Abbas saw Dahlan as a serious political rival and expelled him from the Fatah party on false claims that he had murdered Arafat. Dahlan moved to the United Arab Emirates, where he made his fortune. Today, he is a billionaire and a respected close associate of the crown princes of the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. It has been reported that Dahlan played a crucial role in crafting the Israel-UAE peace agreement. Dahlan also represented the leaders of the moderate Arab states in negotiating on their behalf in trouble spots in the Middle East and Africa. 

If he returned to Gaza, he would be welcomed as a hero and a savior. Although some elements may initially be resentful of his return, there is no doubt about his legitimacy to return to Gaza and Khan Yunis, his place of birth, in order to lead Gaza into a future of peace and prosperity based on his personal example. 

He is a tough man who has no great love of Israel nor the current Palestinian leaders, but his loyalty to the UAE and Bahraini leaders should keep him in check, particularly with an enticing future role as president of an independent state of Gaza ahead of him. 

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that in talks earlier this year between Hamas and Fatah, Dahlan presented himself as someone who could lead the assistance to establish a new administration in Gaza. The WSJ also reported that US and Arab mediators between Israel and Hamas were trying to promote Dahlan as the potential leader of the Gaza Strip after the war. All this points to Dahlan being the perfect candidate as the senior executive to head the new Gaza Abraham Accords project, and potentially to become the head of a future State of Gaza.

His brief should be to turn Gaza into a new independent state and a member of the United Nations. Gazans will have a Gazan identity and a Gazan passport. 

This may upset myopic diplomats who have been dragging the dead camel of a two-state non-solution through the burning sands of the Middle East for far too long. It is time for a fresh concept, and that begins with a new Gaza as the promise of a new Middle East. As the leader of an independent Gaza bordering Egypt and Israel, Dahlan would find both countries eager to do business with him. 

Israel once had plans to construct, with international partners, an offshore airport and marina connected to the mainland of Gaza by a land bridge. That was before the international community forced Israel to withdraw from the agricultural and tourism paradise we had begun to create in the Gaza Strip. Those diplomats thought this withdrawal would lead to peace for Israel and a better future for the Arabs in Gaza. As usual, they were wrong. 

However, Israel’s ambitious plan can be realized for the Gazans by Dahlan with the willing cooperation of his Abraham Accord partners, including Israel. The vision of Gaza becoming a successful tourist, trade, and hi-tech country would be an example to a Palestinian Authority floundering under a corrupt leadership misdirecting its people into a festering ambition to occupy Israel.

A successful, peaceful, and vibrant Gaza, in the image of the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel itself, would be the model not only for a better Middle East but also for the wider world.■

Barry Shaw is a senior associate for public diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the three books Israel Reclaiming the Narrative; 1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel; and Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Antisemitism.