Anyone who believes that Israel should resettle in the Gaza Strip is being impractical, and anyone who believes that the Gazan Palestinians should be relocated to the Sinai Peninsula is being delusional.
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Now of course, Israel does have a legitimate claim to the Gaza Strip, because it was part of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Under international law, a new country is supposed to inherit the borders of the former entity. Thus, Israel has a legitimate legal claim to both the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank.
Israel also has a legitimate historical claim to Gaza. According to the Bible, when Jacob divided the Land of Israel among his sons, he assigned Gaza to Judah and his descendants. Gaza is also where the Israelite hero Samson brought down the Philistine temple in which he was tortured, killing him and the other people inside. Jews had lived in Gaza centuries before the arrival of Arab conquerors. Tragically, they were expelled during the Arab-led pogrom of 1929.
But inasmuch as Israel has both legal and historical claims to Gaza, it would be inappropriate to try and rebuild the Israeli communities that were evacuated in 2005, or create new ones. One reason is that Gaza is already very densely populated. In fact, if the Gaza Strip was a country, it would be the fifth most densely-populated country in the world, though still far short of Macau and Monaco, the first and second most densely-populated territories in the world respectively.
In addition, the Israeli government has already said that it will create a buffer zone in Gaza to prevent future infiltrations from the territory by terrorists, which means that the Gazan Palestinians will have even less land after the current war ends. If Gaza is to be successfully rebuilt, its residents will need all of what is left of the territory.
While it is true that many Gazans will choose to leave the territory after the war, any plan to forcibly resettle them in the Sinai is an immoral pipedream. First of all, the Sinai Peninsula is sovereign Egyptian territory and has been considered part of Egypt for millennia. It is ludicrous to think that Egypt will surrender its territory to the Palestinians. What is more likely to happen if there is a mass exodus of Gazan Palestinians to the Sinai is that the Egyptians will do what other Arab countries with a sizeable Palestinian population have done for the last 75 years – house the Palestinians in squalid refugee camps and deprive them of any rights whatsoever.
Furthermore, Israel is not in the business of ethnic cleansing. The myth that Israel forcibly removed the Palestinian people from their land is one of the biggest lies told about the Jewish state. Israel did not ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the past and must not do so in the future. While it is definitely possible that many Gazan Palestinians will choose to leave the territory, just as Palestinians chose to leave what became Israel in 1948, the bulk of the population will almost certainly remain.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said, the Gaza Strip must be de-radicalized and built anew. But this rebuilding should not involve forcibly transferring its Palestinian population to the Sinai, nor should it involve rebuilding Israeli communities or creating new ones.
