Middle East: Could A 99-Year Lease Give Everyone Peace?

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Dear critical reader, in the AI age with its many exciting nation-building possibilities, all earthlings deserve to strive for a planet free of wars and the unimaginable suffering of innocent civilians, do they not?

In the final analysis, all wars are leadership failures. Failures of first-principles imagination.

A wise old Akan traditionalist, a creative thinker with unique insights, used to say: if two brothers keep fighting over the same stool, build a second stool. Then lasting peace will break out.

The Middle East has been fighting over the same metaphorical stool — land — for 77 years.

Watching the Prime Minister of Qatar walk into Tehran on August 27 on a BBC news report, it struck me that a bold-thinking leader from a tiny gas nation was in town trying to stop a giant war from sinking his country.

In six months, Qatar's LNG cargoes collapsed from 509 to 18. Not because Qataris fought anyone. Because they hosted an American base that made them a target when America and Iran went to war.

That is the life of the Gulf. Sitting on the world's energy, yet unable to guarantee its own ships get through its own sea.

Many people of goodwill across the world keep asking America to stay, while others simultaneously ask America to leave. Both at the same time.

Surely, there is a better way to proceed?

In a world in flux where rules-based geopolitics no longer anchors the global system, ought we to stop importing security and build regional security, by thinking the unthinkable?

Dear critical reader, in a sense, Israel is already half the answer. Since 2020, Israeli radar watches with Emirati and Bahraini radar as one sky. In this war, Israeli technology helped shoot down drones heading for the Gulf. No flowery speeches. Just focused engineering.

Let us be honest about it. The Gulf can make the deal with Iran - gas, shipping, no more hitting civilians. Israel, with its ability to strike deep, becomes the quiet guarantee behind that deal. Not as an occupier. As a partner for creating unlocked Ubuntu shared-value.

The truth is that no deal on Hormuz will hold while Gaza burns. Gaza is the wound that infects everything.

Gaza is too small, too broken, too crowded to be a real state today. 2.3 million people on 365 square kilometers of rubble. No young man or woman can dream there.

Sinai is next door. 60,000 square kilometers of almost empty coastline. Same language. Same culture. A port at El Arish. Gas offshore. Sun enough for all the electricity the region needs.

There is no need to sell it. Egypt will never sell Sinai. Too much blood paid for it. Its constitution says it cannot be sold. And it should not be in the AI age full of endless possibilities.

It should be leased instead, using the brilliant Hong Kong model that worked so well for both Britain and China.

In 1898, China did not sell Hong Kong. It leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years. Sovereignty stayed Chinese forever. But Hong Kong was allowed to build its own laws, its own courts, its own free port. And it became a miracle.

A similar deal in which Egypt leases 3,000 square kilometers from El Arish to Rafah for 99 years to a new model Sinai Palestine Authority will ensure that sovereignty stays Egyptian, forever.

The Gulf pays Egypt $20 billion a year in rent. That alone pays Egypt's foreign debt interest. The Gulf also builds the new cities - climate-resilient, with water from the sea, power from the sun, factories that can sell to Egypt, to Israel, to the world.

It is a scenario in which Israel guarantees, with the Arab League and Egypt, that it is demilitarized and safe. In return, it gets a real neighbor that trades software and tomatoes, not rockets.

And the people? Palestinians are not given a tent in a desert. They are given founders' shares in a new Hong Kong of the Mediterranean. Their own courts. Their own elected council. Their own port.

After 99 years, like Hong Kong in 1997, the people there vote. The new Palestine could stay autonomous inside Egypt. It could also become fully independent, or perhaps choose another path. No one is forced. Peace reigns.

Naturally, some will say Palestinians will never leave Jaffa or Haifa in their hearts. That is true. Hearts do not move. But children need a place to live today, not only a memory to die for.

Some will also say Egyptians will never lease Sinai. But Egypt already leased the Suez corridor for development zones. A landlord does not lose his house by collecting rent. He or she saves it.

I am a humble elderly Ghanaian writing from a once idyllic backwater, Gomoa Buduburam, in Ghana's beautiful and bountiful Central Region in which all ethnicities coexist peacefully. I have no land in this fight. Maybe that is why I can say it plainly.

We cannot keep waiting for Washington to fix this with tariffs announced one day and canceled the next, or with bases that make small nations into targets.

We need a second stool.

A 99-year lease in North Sinai. An Israeli-Gulf air shield that protects all tankers, not just some. And a new city where a Palestinian child can be an engineer, not a refugee.

Israel secure. Palestine built. Egypt paid. Gulf safe.

That is peaceful coexistence. Not on paper. On the ground, by the sea, between El Arish and Rafah.

Earthlings, let us build it. In the AI era, our biosphere needs it.