Millisphere: Fred's peace plan for Gaza

The Sinai Peninsula plus Gaza make a millisphere. Map / Fred Frederikse

Opinion:

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by approximately one-thousandth of the world population - around 8 million.

Disasters can reveal some previously unacknowledged feature of human geography. The stranding of the Ever Given in the Suez canal revealed that, despite Covid, sea transport through the Suez was stretched to capacity - about 50 ships per day each way.

The most cost and energy efficient method of moving cargo is with the new 20,000 plus super container ships, like the Ever Given, and the Suez Canal Authority is half way through building another canal beside the original. Cargo may be moving "more sustainably" but at unprecedented volumes.

The prosaic task of finding enough people to make up a millisphere can be as revealing as a disaster.

The Egyptian governates bordering the Suez Canal (Suez, Ismailia and Port Said) only have a bit over 2 million people - sustained by freshwater canals dug from the nearby Nile delta. All the rest of the Sinai peninsula (also a desert) only has another half a million - still not enough to form a millisphere - and it is only by adding Gaza (2020 pop. 2 million) that Sinai can qualify.

After the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 the residents of Egyptian Sinai and neighbouring Gaza considered the area a single territory.

Free movement lingered on after Israel captured Gaza and the Sinai during the Six Day War in 1967, but after the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979 a border wall was built at Rafah, separating the two.

The residents of Gaza have now lived for 40 years in an open air prison - complete with the occasional prison riot. Overcrowded Gaza also suffers from shortages of water, power and medicines.

In a previous millisphere I had included Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Israel in a millisphere I called Palestine - a one state solution seemed inevitable.

It is interesting to note that Gaza was included with part of the Sinai in Jared Kushner and Donald Trump's peace plan for the Middle East - but the Egyptians were against it.

The original inhabitants of the Sinai are the Bedouin tribes, who have roamed the Sinai, Palestine, Arabia and Egypt since before the time of Moses and are treated as second class citizens by both the Egyptian and Israeli states.

The Bedouin have recently been driven out of the border town of Rafah, where between 2013 and 2020 the Egyptian government demolished more than 12,000 homes.

In 2017 235 people were killed in a mosque attack near El Arish. The attack, targeting the Egyptian police and army, was thought to be carried out by radicalised Bedouin. Egyptian president Sisi (backed by Israel) responded with airstrikes, house demolitions, arbitrary arrests and torture.

Sitting between Israel and Egypt, Sinai has twice been invaded by Israel. In 1956, backed by France and the United Kingdom, when Egypt nationalised the Suez canal - but they were not backed by the Soviet Union and the United States and were forced to withdraw - and in 1967 Israel captured the canal again.

Now it is time for both Egypt and Israel to withdraw from the millisphere of Sinai.

Back when the British ran the Sinai, before WWII, there was a railway between Suez, Port Said and Gaza. It wouldn't take long for the Chinese to apply some "Belt and Road" money and labour to get the line running again and Gaza could be open to the world. Combined with the new canals, Sinai could act as a global container hub.

As well as the world heritage coral reefs of the tourist town of Sharm el Sheikh, Sinai has proven oil fields along the Red Sea and the largest gas field in the Mediterranean has recently been discovered off Port Said.

Time to give Sinai back to the Bedouin and long past time to set Gaza free.