Gaza Week in Review: Buchenwald, Riviera, Israel’s Wholesale Prisoner Release (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- February 10, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Your title reads like a bizarre stream of consciousness…

A. It was quite a week. Every event (Gaza), bombastic statement (Trump), or low-key yet momentous mass prisoner release by Israel called up a troublesome association from the past. Even the comparisons of freed Israeli hostages to Nazi camp survivors, while historically problematic, were understandable to anyone who knows the US Army photos of Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen survivors from 1945.

Q. Perhaps you can start with the Israeli release of Palestinian prisoners. That got the least media attention.

A. Every time we see three or four Israeli hostages released by Hamas after being paraded before a ludicrous terrorist pseudo-tribunal, with Red Cross participation and a mass Gazan audience, Israel responds by releasing over 100 (183 on Saturday) convicted or recently captured Palestinian terrorists from its jails--with minimal ceremony and fanfare. 

There are several reasons for Israel to downplay its weekly release of Palestinian prisoners. First, it is extremely unpopular among Israelis, who are well aware that they are potentially setting free the next Yahya Sinwar, the next Hamas or Islamic Jihad suicide bomber. 

Shin Bet statistics show that around 12 percent of Palestinian terrorists who are convicted and later released by Israel are terrorism recidivists. Recall that Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the October 7 attack on Israel, was released in 2011 as part of the deal for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

Second, Hamas quite understandably trumpets the release by Israel of its incarcerated Palestinian terrorists and fighters--some, frankly, also looking emaciated and abused--as a victory. The price Hamas extracts from Israel for a single Israeli--dozens of terrorists--is indeed mind-boggling in the annals of prisoner exchanges. Compare for example to Russians and Ukrainians, whose POW exchanges are roughly one-on-one.

Is one Israeli really the equivalent of dozens or even scores of Palestinians, some of them mass murderers? At a certain philosophical level, there is something insulting here to both sides. Israel, for its part, has no need to help Palestinians celebrate. Indeed, the ceremonies Hamas choreographs in the Strip on Saturdays, with emaciated Israelis thanking their tormentors, are designed to play up Hamas’s ‘victory’ and obvious ongoing control of the Strip and, correspondingly, humiliate Israel.

Releasing terrorists in exchange for emaciated Israelis is one primary price that Israel is paying for the sins of October 7, 2023 that are widely attributed to the leadership under Netanyahu and the security establishment. The Netanyahu government is not comfortable reminding Israelis of that, either.

Q. Along comes President Trump with his scheme to transfer out all Gazans and rebuild the Strip as a luxury Riviera. Anything to add to the near universal condemnation of this latest real estate project?

A. It is “something that will be magnificent”, according to the president of the United States. But wait: this is not going to happen.

First of all, I direct Trump’s attention to the weekly Hamas hostage-release ceremonies, in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Dir al Balach, etc. Note that there are cities sporting functioning built-up neighborhoods in the Strip. Not everything was destroyed by the Israel Air Force. 

Secondly, one way or another most Gazans will not budge, if only because all Palestinian and other Arab leaders will insist they stay. The Trump-Kushner-Witkoff real-estate-messianic settler understanding of the Arab and Islamist world is abysmal. A more constructive approach than exiling 1.8 million Gazans and building a pie-in-the-sky Riviera would recognize that a certain percentage of homes in Gaza, rarely shown by media intent on displaying rubble, survived this war and can be expanded with emergency housing. Indeed, apparently some 30 percent of structures are still usable.

Second, my personal association upon encountering Trump’s Riviera balloon was Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, two far more down-to-earth leaders in their day, whose visions for Gaza were as bizarre as Trump’s. Peres envisioned the Strip as Singapore on the Mediterranean. Rabin day-dreamed out loud of the Strip sliding into the sea and disappearing. And let’s not forget Netanyahu, who in years past openly espoused the notion of ‘economic peace’ for Gaza with its extremist Islamist leadership and now proposes that Gazans be resettled in Saudi Arabia. 

It turns out that an intractable problem inspires extreme, and ultimately disastrous, visions of solutions.

Q. Then there was Paraguay . . . 

A. After Israel conquered the Strip in 1967, a host of schemes were launched to alleviate its poverty and overcrowding. 

I was then in the Mossad, where I encountered the most advanced program. In the late 1960s Gazans were offered $10,000 apiece to emigrate, with Israel’s logistic help, to Paraguay, which apparently needed an influx of immigrant manpower. Everything went quietly and smoothly, until a disgruntled Gazan migrant attacked the Israel embassy in Asuncion, killing one Israeli. That ended that.

It was not always this way. In 1949 the Strip was occupied by Egypt in the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence. Its population was primarily Palestinian refugees from southern Israel (whose great-grandchildren were the barbarian Hamas invaders of southern Israel on October 7--that is the meaning of ‘historic conflict’). Prime Minister David Ben Gurion offered to repatriate to Israel 100,000 Palestinian refugees from Gaza (according to another version, even 200,000, meaning most of the refugees; in yet another version, Israel takes in everyone, including native Gazans). 

Ben Gurion’s condition was that Israel occupy and annex the Strip and that the Arab world make peace with Israel. Egypt and the other Arab countries refused.

Israel in 1949 numbered around 700,000 Jews. Holocaust survivors were flooding in. Absorbing even 100,000 Palestinian refugees would have been a huge burden. Ben Gurion wanted the territory of the Strip as a military buffer against an Egyptian invasion targeting Tel Aviv, which the nascent IDF rebuffed at great cost in 1948. 

In the ensuing decades, Israel and Egypt made first more war, then peace. The Strip lost its military significance. Until October 7 . . . 

Q. Bottom line?

A. Notwithstanding Netanyahu’s statements to credulous and compliant American TV interviewers to the effect that Israel is poised to defeat Hamas, Israel is actually withdrawing and the hostage-for-prisoner exchange continues apace. Hundreds of Palestinian terrorists are being released back to Gaza. 

Israel has no viable plan for defeating Hamas, which can legitimately claim to have survived this war despite awesome losses in both leadership and rank-and-file. Absent a working alternative--which Israel refuses to offer--Hamas is the leader of Gazans. 

With all due respect to Trump, he too has no viable plan. Netanyahu cannot bring himself to embrace phase II of the Gaza withdrawal plan. His repeated postponements over the past year of a hostage deal in favor of more death and destruction in Gaza and his own political survival have cost the lives of countless Gazans, hundreds of IDF soldiers and dozens of hostages. One stomach-churning outcome was evident in the Dir al-Balah hostage release on Saturday.

Fantasy check: Were Trump’s transfer scheme actually to transpire, we would likely see another chapter of the Arab-world domino effect that recently toppled the Assad regime in Syria. Remember, the Arab state system is undemocratic and fragile. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians in Jordan could topple a regime that is militarily allied with Israel and promotes regional stability. Hundreds of thousands of Hamas supporters in Egypt could strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood there that threatens a regime friendly to Israel. King Abdullah II and President a-Sisi will presumably explain this to Trump in person in the days ahead when they visit Washington.

Singapore, Riviera, Atlantis (Rabin’s dream), ‘economic peace’? Let’s face it: We are stuck with the Strip. 

But here is an unintended positive-outcome scenario--whose likelihood is impossible to predict--to conclude with. Netanyahu embraces Trump’s Gaza transfer idea. His defense minister has already set the wheels in motion. Along come the Saudis and offer normalization if only Netanyahu will abandon transfer. 

Sounds incredulous? That is what the UAE did in 2019-20, at least at the declarative level: normalization in return for Netanyahu backing off from annexing the West Bank. Never mind that the transfer idea is not feasible and that West Bank annexation (three million more Palestinian Israelis is not a serious idea) was not really in the cards. Back in 2020, Trump actually got some credit.

And here on earth? Netanyahu and his government are delaying negotiating another phase of hostage release. They refuse to appoint a national commission of inquiry to investigate the events of October 7 that they helped trigger. They prefer to dream of destroying Hamas and ‘relocating’ two million Gazans. And they are selling these fantasies to gullible Israelis.