President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff have reportedly pitched “Operation Sunrise,” a plan to transform the Gaza Strip into a high-tech city and hub. It is impressive and ambitious. Team Trump always deserves credit for thinking outside the box rather than repeating the tired, old proposals of the past. In this case, however, one basic mistake will condemn the project to disaster: It fails to account for the self-destructive ideology that consumes Palestinian society.

Highlighting what could be in Gaza is welcome. What became Israel was a malarial patch of land, a discarded backwater until Zionist settlers drained swamps and transformed it into rich agricultural land. For all the talk by Palestinian advocates of Zionists as outsiders to the land, the Palestinians themselves were. The Arab influx into the land originated from today’s Syria and coincided with Zionist eradication of malaria. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed that, “the Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period,” with migrants coming from both Syria and Egypt. As Palestine filled, real estate prices soared—a basic calculation of supply and demand. In 1937, the British-sponsored Peel Commission reported that a “shortfall of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.” If Israel and later Singapore could take a resource-free wasteland and thrive upon it, there should be no reason why Palestinians could not.