In 2012, I published The Last Israelis to serve as a cautionary tale to prevent Iran, the world's most dangerous regime, from acquiring nukes. In recent months Iran was accelerating to that doomsday scenario while pursuing an arsenal of 20,000 ballistic missiles that could also destroy the state of Israel. As the “point of no return” quickly approached, the IDF had a narrow window of opportunity to secure Israel's future with bold, preemptive military action.
According to Forbes, “Iran’s total investment in the nuclear project reached more than $100 billion in direct investment, and up to $1 trillion in indirect costs including lost economic opportunities.” Forbes’ also notes that “Iran spent about $16-20 billion per year supporting its proxies and regional regimes,” including “Hezbollah, Hamas, and a series of other organizations, from Islamic Jihad to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.”
Thus, in under two weeks, Israel wiped out over a trillion dollars’ worth of Iranian regime investments in the project of decimating Israel – including the clock in Tehran counting down to Israel's supposed annihilation. Israel's brilliant military campaign not only completely outsmarted and defeated a distant enemy about 80 times larger in land mass and nine times more populous, but it also demonstrated the utter inferiority of the Iranian regime's hateful ideology.
Israel's capabilities and performance in Operation Rising Lion proved spectacular. The Mossad smuggled precision weapons into Iran, built covert drone bases, assassinated top military and nuclear officials, and remotely disabled air defenses to pave the way for Israel’s devastating airstrikes deep inside Iranian territory. Israel’s air force then executed over 1,500 sorties across thousands of kilometers to strike more than 900 targets—crippling Iran’s missile and air defense infrastructure; eliminating more nuclear scientists (bringing the total to eleven), thirty senior military leaders and hundreds of soldiers; and destroying critical nuclear facilities.
Contrast that with Iran's feeble, imprecise attempts to retaliate, harming only civilians (Jews and Arabs alike), without hitting anything of strategic significance, and with total casualties that were but a small fraction of those caused by Israel's devastating and targeted strikes.
The results are an indisputable display of dominance for all of the Middle East to witness. Is there anyone left in the region who really wants to test the Israelis? Is there any state that would rather have Israel as a foe than as a friend? The same innovation and skill that Israel can bring to bear against its enemies can benefit its friends in the form of solutions to countless environmental, medical, agricultural and technological problems.
As so many protests on college campuses and around major Western cities have shown, Gaza demonstrations has been mostly a cover for hatred of Israel and the Jews; they are never about finding an actual solution, but just demonizing and delegitimizing the state of Israel. This reality became even more evident when the same protesters were chanting their support for missiles dropped on Israeli civilians by an Iranian regime that oppresses women and hangs gays. Indeed, the movement has become an unhinged and hateful cult, as Oren Bar-Ner explains.
But Israel's crushing defeat of each Iranian proxy, followed by the regime itself, projects a strength far greater than the empty rhetoric of hate. Every Mideast state knows that the movement to "free Palestine from the river to the sea" has nothing to offer except the terrorism and instability that it brought to Jordan (1968-1971) and Lebanon (1971-1982).
The Middle East of tomorrow should reflect the new realities that Israel, at great cost and sacrifice, has established since October 7, 2023. On that dark day, Gazans invaded Israel with genocidal intent leading to rape, beheadings and countless other atrocities, including the murder of 1,200 Israelis and 250 taken hostage (with 50 still being held), many of whom were among Israel's most committed seekers of peace.
But the rules of history are such that aggressors who start and lose wars suffer the loss of territory and honor. And by every relevant military, social, economic and political measure, the Gazans have lost.
So rewarding their depraved atrocities with diplomatic gains, instead of territorial losses, would set a dangerous precedent.
Thus, the Gazans should no longer be Israel's impossible problem to solve. Rather, in recognition of Israel's new status as the sole regional superpower and a tremendous force for good that can benefit the entire Middle East, Gazans should be relocated to the six states comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman have vast land and wealth with which to give Gazans a much better life.
The GCC states are also among the greatest beneficiaries of Israel's military campaign to remove the Iranian threat, so their contribution to a comprehensive solution would appropriately show their gratitude. Absorbing Gazans would also advance GCC interests by replacing the conflict with long-term regional stability.
There are numerous historical precedents of enemy populations being relocated: the forced expulsion of over 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II; the mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other ethnic groups by Stalin’s Soviet regime during the 1940s; and the partition of India in 1947, which triggered the migration of up to 20 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs amid communal violence and suspicion.
The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus resulted in the de facto partition of the island and the relocation of over 170,000 Greek Cypriots from the north and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots from the south. Despite decades of diplomatic efforts, the population transfer has remained in place and the international community has largely adapted to the new demographic reality.
The 1995 Dayton Accords formalized the ethnic partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina after years of war and effectively froze population transfers that had occurred during the conflict, including the displacement of over 2 million people.
More recently, in September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive that led to the displacement of approximately 100,000 ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh—a move that, while criticized, was not reversed by international actors and was effectively accepted as a fait accompli.
These cases illustrate that while population transfers are controversial and often painful, they have been used—sometimes explicitly, sometimes tacitly—as tools for ending conflict and stabilizing post-war regions. In each case, the international community ultimately accepted new demographic and territorial realities in the interest of long-term peace and regional order.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, there are approximately 1.6 million refugees in Gaza, so the vast majority of Gazans aren’t even indigenous to Gaza.
Moreover, as President Donald Trump noted last February, Gaza is effectively a “demolition site,” so why insist on keeping Gazans in an uninhabitable wasteland?
Not only is resettling Gazans consistent with history and improving life for Gazans, but it also solves a labor shortage in the Gulf. The foreign labor force in GCC countries totals nearly 32 million people, representing 54.2 per cent of the total GCC population. Remittances totaled $131.5 billion in 2023, which means GCC states likely paid $200-300 billion to foreign workers.
So absorbing and employing two million Gazans, who are more religiously, culturally and linguistically similar to GCC countries than many of the laborers currently imported, would be an obvious win-win for Gazans and the GCC. And GCC countries have plenty of room for Gazans – approximately 2.4 million square kilometers, with a population density of 23.9 people per square kilometer (compared to nearly 6,000 people per square kilometer in Gaza).
There is nothing sacred or historic about Gazans ruling the Gaza strip, which has been controlled by seven different powers since the year 1900:
1. Ottoman Empire (1900–1917)
2. British Empire (1917–1948)
3. Egypt (1948–1967)
4. Israel (1967–2005)
5. Palestinian Authority (1994–2007)
6. Hamas (2007–2024)
7. Israel (2025)
Now that Israel once again controls Gaza, it is the sovereign power there and can decide what to do with the land. Israel should annex half of Gaza both as compensation for how much Israel has suffered from Gazan terrorism and as a powerful deterrent to any future, neighboring aggressor.
Israel should transfer the other half of Gaza to an autonomous, international free trade zone that is jointly developed and governed by Israel, the U.S., and the GCC countries, in recognition of their help in resettling the Gazan population.
President Trump deserves tremendous credit for being the first leader to recognize that resettling Gazans could actually produce far more long-term prosperity for both Gazans and Israelis than reverting to the same failed policies of the past, which effectively allowed Hamas to take over the territory, radicalize the population, and condemn the region to perpetual war, punctuated by occasional ceasefires that Hamas consistently violated.
In recognition of Trump's boldness in changing the Overton Window, the Trump Organization should be given a special leadership role in the development of the autonomous zone, and can quickly make the “Trump Gaza” vision a reality.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump had the vision and courage to take the bold actions needed to remove the global threat of a nuclear Iran. By doing so, they also crippled the main source of terrorism, instability and extremism in the Middle East, effectively laying the foundations for a much brighter future in the region.
The next step is to expand the Abraham Accords in a way that resettles the Gazan population to the GCC states and thus ensures long-term Mideast peace and prosperity.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Image: Wikimedia Commons via Picryl // public domain