FAQ

Calibration, not numerology. The rate is set against the 565 km² cushion and historical violence levels: at 5 km² per death, pre-2023 "ordinary" terrorism visibly eats the map without bankrupting a cooperating state overnight, while an intifada-scale campaign exhausts the cushion within months — which is the message. At 2 km², a decade of normal terrorism barely dents the bonus land, and the deterrent reads as decorative; at 10 km², a good-faith state loses the whole cushion in its fragile early years. The figure is published as a considered starting point; the Calculator on this site lets you test the schedule under each candidate rate yourself, and refining the number is among the working group's first assignments.

Nuisance attack. A drone is a weapon of war implying organization and intent; it enters the ledger regardless of damage — priced in money, from the development schedule, not in land. Land is reserved for lethal and mass-harm attacks.

No. That is a crime, not an attack — referred to Palestinian police, like cross-border delinquency on any frontier on earth. It can reach the ledger only one way: if the Palestinian state demonstrably tolerates rather than polices a pattern of such incidents, the adjudication body can certify the pattern as a nuisance batch. The default is that crime is crime.

Lethal attack: five square kilometers, from the next sector in the published queue, plus the corresponding strike from the development schedule — after adjudication and the six-month grace period. One death is never rounded down to a nuisance.

It depends on the two-part test. A lone attacker with a kitchen knife is a crime — policed, prosecuted, logged. Evidence of organizational direction (a faction's planning, recruitment, payment) converts it into an attack, classed by its casualties. The adjudication body's pre-committed evidentiary standards decide which, publicly.

Priced identically to an attack at home, by the same classes. Exporting the conflict buys no discount — otherwise the schedule would simply relocate the violence.

Not priced in land unless it kills or hospitalizes — in which case it is classed by its human toll, like any other attack. Pure infrastructure sabotage is handled as a pattern question (state toleration) and through ordinary interstate remedies. The schedule prices bodies and organized armed force, not code.

Working definition: Israeli citizens and permanent residents, wherever attacked. An attack on Israeli soil that kills foreign nationals is classed by the incident (lethal or mass-harm) with its full toll. The precise definition is a calibration item for the working group — published in the evidentiary standards before day one, like everything else.

The sequence: investigation and attribution, then the adjudication ruling (target: weeks, on pre-committed standards, with reasoning published in three languages), then the ledger debits, the calculator updates, and the named development tranche is struck. The six-month grace clock starts on the queued sector, and then implementation. No Israeli military action occurs at any step.

Unknowable, and the plan does not claim otherwise — counterfactuals about a massacre are not evidence, and this document refuses to spend the dead as debating points. What can be said is narrower. The calculus October 7's planners actually ran was made possible by two features of the doctrine then in force: consequences vague enough to leave room for calculated risk, and costs — fighters, tunnels, buildings — that their organization had absorbed and rebuilt from before. The schedule removes both features: under it, the full cost of any operation is computable in advance, to the square kilometer and the named tranche, and it is denominated in the one asset that does not replenish. Whether that would have changed those particular men's decision cannot be proven. Changing the decision environment is the most any doctrine can do — and the previous one did not.

No. The adjudication body rules; the escrow trustee executes the ruling mechanically, the way a bank executes a court order. The donors pre-committed to exactly this at the moment of deposit — that is what makes the escrow irrevocable, and what makes the schedule a deterrent rather than a lobbying contest fought in donor capitals after every attack. The donors' protection is structural: struck funds revert to them, in full.

Then the war is fought under the old world's rules — that is what suspension means, and the war itself is the consequence that the act-of-war threshold exists to acknowledge. What the plan adds is the day after. The framework is designed to be reinstated: unilaterally by Israel, exactly as it was first imposed (so that no faction holds a veto over restoration), and better still with the compact's concurrence or by mutual agreement with a post-war Palestinian government — the likeliest ending, since the war that suspends the framework is most plausibly ended by the fall of the government that caused it. Reinstatement restores the pre-war ledger; the borders will not have moved, because they never move; the war is not additionally priced in land; the transitional clocks resume where they paused; and the escrow, frozen during suspension, reopens. The case for re-entering the plan after a war is the same as the case for adopting it before one.

Rates and procedures can be refined through the adjudication body's published process — prospectively only, never retroactively, and never in the middle of a live case. Two things can never change: the 110% ceiling and the 80% floor. The brim and the bottom are constitutional.

The full treatment is Objection 1 on the Objections page. The short version: every operating consequence regime in this conflict — and the sanctions architecture of the international system itself — imposes collective costs; the legal family this mechanism belongs to is the countermeasure (pre-announced, proportionate by published schedule, non-violent, independently adjudicated, reversible), responding to the oldest wrongful act in the book: a state's territory used to attack its neighbor.

Objection 5 on the Objections page, in full. The short version: the package — ending the occupation, withdrawing from the vast majority of the territory, transferring sovereign land so that the Palestinian map grows, sponsoring statehood at the UN, and permanently barring future Israeli expansion — is the largest Israeli territorial contraction ever proposed, and sits closer to the land-swap logic the international community has endorsed for thirty years than to the conquests the doctrine was written against. Where the plan strains existing doctrine, it says so, and says in which direction: fewer dead, less occupation, more statehood.

No. Nothing in the architecture requires Palestinian signature, recognition, or consent — by design. The plan expects official denunciation and is built to function through it. Palestinians benefit from the adjudication body, the escrow, and the statehood itself whether or not they ever endorse the framework that delivered them.

Expect litigation on every element, indefinitely — the plan assumes it and budgets for it. Its posture: full participation, on the comparative ground of Objection 5. Note also that the new state gains standing it never had: Palestine can sue Israel as a sovereign equal, including before the mechanism's own adjudicator — which is the forum built to rule against Israel quickly.

Contracted engineering firms under the adjudication body's authority, internationally observed, protected by their own security detail — never the IDF inside Palestinian territory, except in the extreme case of sustained armed assault on an operation, where a bounded, pre-announced protective deployment covers the works. Israel pays for all of it, and gains nothing: the no-profit rule, made expensive.

No one is ever removed by force — the plan's one absolute. The new line is built regardless; the holdout pocket loses legal status and services; compensation remains claimable without expiry; and the standoff resolves on a timescale of months or years, never at gunpoint. The plan flags this openly as the scenario its working group must pressure-test hardest.

Yes — individual owners and residents are compensated for property and relocation, from an international fund established alongside the escrow and administered through the Palestinian state, claimable without expiry. The nation bears the territorial loss; the family is made financially whole. The fund's size and rules are a calibration item, published in advance.

The adjudicated sector is published to the meter; residents relocate with compensation, managed in practice by the Palestinian state (whatever it says publicly); structures are documented, then cleared by the implementation crews; the movable barrier advances; the ground is left to nature. Filmable at every step — deliberately.

Roughly: Israel pays for what Israel does (relocations of its citizens, the barriers, implementation operations, its share of Jerusalem's arrangements); the Gulf escrow funds the development program; an international consortium funds the Foundation Package and the compensation fund; and the reconstruction of Gaza remains its own international undertaking. Annex C carries the figures.

Yes — through the heritage-access provision: vetted short- and long-term visas to visit ancestral villages and homes, to pray, and to see family among Israel's Arab citizens. Presence rather than citizenship, and access rather than return. The separation is between states and armies, not between people and their memory. A capped annual number of visa holders may go further and apply for permanent residency in Israel: non-voting, non-citizen status, under the same vetting, with the quota set by Israel. Presence extended to residence, without touching the citizenship settlement.

Refugee status ends the way it has ended everywhere else in history: in citizenship — of the State of Palestine, with full standing, plus the development program's absorption capacity in New Gaza and SoWeBa, plus heritage access to the places of origin. There is no return to homes inside Israel; the demographic question is settled by the two-state architecture itself, permanently, and the plan says so without euphemism.

Sovereign corridors — rail and covered road — under Palestinian authority from end to end, with no Israeli checkpoint and no permit. Jenin to Rafah is a train ride. The corridors sit in the non-strikeable Foundation Package: connectivity is an organ of the state, not a privilege.

An internal security force: unrestricted, and assisted on invitation. A conventional army: constrained by the tiers — the existential categories permanently, the middle tier for thirty years. Alliances, diplomacy, trade blocs, foreign aid: entirely Palestine's affair. The plan bars foreign armies and bases, never friendships — Palestine may ally with anyone; it may garrison no one.

It might — Gaza in 2007 is the precedent, and the plan treats the danger as central rather than waving it away. Two answers. The mechanism itself is built to survive a contested statehood: attacks are priced, the queue advances, and the incentives keep working whatever the state of Palestinian politics (Objection 8 on the Objections page). But surviving is the floor, and the plan's real strategy is the chapter Setting Up for Success: an Arab-led compact spends the years before independence building the transitional government, the gendarmerie, and the institutions — so that the state arrives with a monopoly on violence rather than a contest for one.

A transitional government convened with the Arab compact during the pre-independence years — drawing on the Palestinian Authority's institutions, technocrats, business figures, and the diaspora — governing until the first national elections, which occur on an automatic, published date in the state's second or third year. Any party may contest them, including Hamas, on one condition that applies to every party equally: no private army. Beyond that, the plan imposes nothing about the government's composition or its attitude toward Israel. See Setting Up for Success.

An Israeli zone, a Palestinian zone, and a shared civic zone holding the sites sacred to both — the one deliberate exception to separation, and the one place where the two peoples keep mixing daily. It has its own chapter.

Because it buys what the Gulf has publicly priced for years: normalization with Israel made politically survivable by a resolved Palestinian question, a flagship role in the region's marquee development story, and the strategic defeat of the Iranian axis's best narrative — for capital that the sovereign funds deploy at this scale routinely, protected by escrow and guarantee structures that never leave donor money hostage to militants.

Egypt gains a stabilized Gaza border, the Rafah logistics economy, and relief from the permanent fear of the conflict spilling into Sinai. Jordan gains a settled western border, the end of annexation scenarios that threatened its demographic balance, and a stake in the Valley's new trade geography. Both are precedents the plan leans on — the Sinai model, the quiet-border model — and both are expected participants on the adjudication body's regional bench, and expected leaders of the stabilization compact described in Setting Up for Success.

That is outside the mechanism entirely. The schedule governs violence from Palestinian territory; a direct Iranian attack is an interstate act, answered by Israel's conventional and allied deterrence, exactly as today. What the plan changes is the proxy route: see Objection 10 on the Objections page.

Require, no — the acting party is Israel. But the realistic version runs under an American umbrella: Security Council cover, the normalization architecture, and anchor participation in the guarantee structures. That umbrella exists now and is not guaranteed later — which is half of the Why Now page.

The plan is published on its own arguments, which are all on this site; a working group of named expertise — security, law, diplomacy, cartography, Palestinian and Israeli politics — is being assembled to pressure-test and develop it. Inquiries: tzabarplan@gmail.com.

This site is the master version. The Why Now page is dated and revised as events develop; the plan's chapters are versioned, with substantive changes logged. Criticism that survives scrutiny gets incorporated, with credit where its authors want it.

A fair question that every plan should answer. Three things, principally: a rival framework that passes the first-rocket test in comparable operational detail; evidence — modeled or empirical — that the mechanism's social-pressure channel fails (that is, that priced land does not mobilize Palestinian society against attackers); or the emergence of a negotiated path with a partner empowered to sign and to survive signing. Any of these would be taken seriously, in public, on this site.

Same address for both, and the second is as welcome as the first: contact@tzabarplan.org. The most useful attacks come with arithmetic.