2. Land-Loss Deterrence Mechanism

This chapter is the heart of the plan. Everything before it (the separation, the transfer, the fixed borders) exists to make this mechanism possible, and everything after it deals with its consequences. The mechanism is presented here in full, because its power depends on nothing about it being hidden.

The doctrine being replaced

For seventy-five years, Israel's answer to attack has been a single doctrine: hit us, and we hit back harder. It has been carried out with skill and at enormous cost, and it has failed on its own terms. The attacks never stopped, and each round planted the seeds of the next one. The reason is not operational but economic: retaliation asks the adversary to pay in a currency that the adversary holds cheap. Hamas has demonstrated, at catastrophic length, that it is willing to spend lives without limit: its fighters' lives and its civilians' lives alike. A deterrent priced in casualties therefore invites the next round, and with every strike, it also produces the next generation of recruits.

Two more specific defects of the old doctrine are worth naming, because the mechanism in this chapter is built directly against them. First, Israeli deterrence has been vague. The standing message — "hit us and we'll hit you back harder" — never specified what any particular act would actually cost. The demolition of an attacker's family home stood for decades as nearly the only codified consequence in the entire arsenal. Second, Israeli deterrence has been priced in replenishable things. Fighters are replaced. Homes and rockets are rebuilt. Tunnels are re-dug. And in a movement steeped in martyrdom, human losses often convert into ideological fuel rather than deterrent weight. October 7 was planned inside exactly this structure: its authors surely expected a ferocious response, but the vagueness left room for calculated risk, and every cost they anticipated was a cost their organization had absorbed and rebuilt from before.

Effective deterrence, then, must do two things differently. It must be specific about consequences, and it must price them in the one asset that does not replenish. For a national movement, that asset is land. Land cannot be smuggled in, rebuilt, or replaced. Once lost, it is lost.

One image captures the character the new deterrent needs to have. Imagine a man who desperately wants to cross a river, but the river is full of crocodiles. However strong his desire, and however strong a swimmer he is, he does not cross. And, importantly, he does not hate the crocodiles for it. He does not recruit his brothers to take revenge on them, because there is no one to negotiate with and nothing to be enraged at. The crocodiles are not malicious. They are simply part of nature: neutral, physical, automatic. That is the design goal here. Retaliation is a decision made by people in a war room, and people can be provoked, blamed, baited, and turned into the next recruitment poster. A published, automatic schedule cannot. The mechanism described below is an attempt to build the crocodile river: consequence as a fact of the landscape, rather than as an act of an enemy.

With that in mind: under this plan, Israel exits the business of military retaliation inside Palestinian territory entirely, from independence day onward. No airstrikes, no incursions, no targeted killings. In their place stands a published schedule of consequences. When the first rocket is fired at Israel after independence (and the plan assumes there will be one), there is no war room weighing a proportionate response, no cabinet debate about escalation, and no one to negotiate with. The schedule, which the rest of this chapter lays out, is simply applied.

The rule

Every Israeli killed in an unprovoked attack costs the State of Palestine five square kilometers of land.

The amount is fixed in square kilometers, not percentages, and it is anchored to the day-one map, forever. This detail matters more than it might appear. A percentage of a shrinking territory would make each death cheaper than the one before it, which would amount to a quiet discount for sustained violence. Under this rule, the price of a life stays constant, whether it is the first life lost or the five-hundredth.

What counts as an attack

The schedule prices incidents, and it sorts them into three classes:

A few notes on the design of these classes. Israelis killed abroad count exactly the same as Israelis killed at home, so that exporting the conflict buys no discount. The flat rate for mass-harm attacks exists to solve two problems at once: without it, an atrocity engineered to maim rather than kill would be priced as trivial; but counting individual injuries would hang the mechanism on the most contestable and manipulable number in any attack's aftermath. So the adjudicator makes one simple finding (did this incident hospitalize three or more people, yes or no) and applies one number. And land is deliberately reserved for the severe classes. Land is a severe currency, and the schedule treats it that way.

Just as important is what does not count. The schedule prices organized armed attack, not crime. A weapon of war crossing the border (a rocket, an armed drone, an explosive device, gunfire) enters the ledger. A teenager throwing a stone is a matter for the police, exactly as he would be on any other border in the world. The distinction rests on two questions: the means (was this a weapon of war, or a capability that implies organization?) and the state's response (did Palestine police the incident, or shelter it?). Ordinary crime, policed, never touches the schedule. However, if the Palestinian state demonstrably tolerates a pattern of such incidents rather than policing them, the adjudication body can certify that pattern into the schedule as a nuisance batch. This gives the new state exactly the incentive every state should have to police its own frontier, without ever pricing an individual delinquent as an act of war.

The legal foundation underneath all of this is an old one, the oldest principle of state responsibility, affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its very first case: no state may knowingly allow its territory to be used to harm another state. Every sovereign country in the world already carries this obligation. The schedule adds exactly one thing to it: a published price list.

For more discussion, see the FAQs "Why exactly five square kilometers?", "A drone crosses the border and dents a roof — what happens?", "A teenager slings a rock over the barrier — land loss?", and "Who counts as 'an Israeli' for the schedule?" on the FAQ page.

What happens to the land

When a forfeiture is adjudicated, no Israeli flag rises anywhere. The buffer zone between the two states simply widens: after a six-month grace period, the movable barrier on the Palestinian side advances by the scheduled amount, any structures in the forfeited strip are taken down, and the ground returns to nature: unfarmed, unbuilt, unowned, and possessed by no one, indefinitely. Israel's own border (the heavy barrier) does not move a meter, ever. Israel gains no territory, no resources, and no real estate from any forfeiture. In fact, Israel bears the implementation costs.

"No one gets the land" is the operating principle. The plan must leave no room for doubt on this point: Israel has NO hidden agenda of enlarging itself through this process. The mechanism's credibility depends on making it impossible to believe that Israel profits from being attacked. That is why Israel's borders are fixed forever, why Israel pays for every implementation, and why an international body exists with the power to hold Israel to all of it.

There is also no mystery about which land goes. The forfeiture order is published on day one as a standing queue: the empty outer band of New Gaza first, then progressively inward, sector by named sector, with low-value desert absorbing the early losses and inhabited or cultivated land standing far back in the line. The queue serves transparency, but it also serves a deeper purpose. The residents, farmers, and investors of the next sector in the queue know exactly whose land the next attack would take. They have names, mayors, and everything to lose. In other words, the queue creates something no counterterrorism doctrine has ever managed to create: a permanent, self-interested, domestic Palestinian constituency against violence, one that exists before any attack occurs, not after.

The tiers

A flat formula, left to run forever, would eventually become monstrous, and this plan says so openly rather than hoping nobody notices. The schedule slows down, changes character, and then stops entirely, according to published tiers:

The logic of this structure is worth walking through. A young state whose rejectionists attack during its fragile early years (which is the realistic scenario, and the plan treats it as such) loses land it never previously held, at the full rate, from the empty tracts. That loss is painful, visible on every map, and politically mobilizing. But it is also entirely earnable back, through nothing more than quiet. Tier 2 is different in kind: reaching it requires exhausting the entire cushion and continuing anyway, which is no longer a weak state failing to stop every cell. It is a sustained societal trajectory, and its permanence is what makes every warning above it credible. Tier 3's reversibility is the mechanism acknowledging that near the floor, it must offer an exit, or it stops being deterrence and becomes strangulation. Reversal runs on the same clock as Tier 1's recovery: once the restoration condition is met, land returns at the published rate, most recently forfeited first, with the permanent Tier 2 band staying lost in between. And the floor itself is absolute: below 80% of today's territory, the formula stops, no matter what happens, because no formula should ever be allowed to run to the end of a country. Below the floor, the schedule no longer answers violence at all; Israel's response reverts to the conventional military and economic tools it holds today, exactly as it does above the act-of-war threshold.

The recovery rules carry the design's sharpest point, and it deserves plain statement. Restoration requires consecutive clean years: zero Israeli fatalities and zero mass-injury attacks. This means that a faction which keeps killing or maiming, at any rate, however low, freezes the nation's healing at zero, visibly and indefinitely. There is no version of this in which a militant group budgets a modest level of violence while the land quietly replenishes behind it; one death a year, or one bombing that fills a hospital ward, keeps every lost dunam lost. The map's recovery is, in effect, held hostage by the men preventing it, and every Palestinian can see exactly who is holding the ransom note.

A useful way to hold the whole structure in mind is the image of a bathtub. The Palestinian state is born with the tub filled to the brim: 110% of today's territory, its maximum size, forever. Nothing the state ever does can raise the brim. No decade of exemplary peace adds a meter beyond 110%, for the simple reason that a map which can still grow is a map that is not final, and finality (in both directions) is what the whole plan rests on. Violence drains the tub. Sustained quiet refills much of what was drained. And the tub can never be drained below the 80% line, where the schedule stops for good. The only genuinely open question in this design is whether anyone chooses to drain the bath, and that choice belongs entirely to those who would attack.

(The specific rates and band widths are offered as a considered starting point, not as revealed truth. Refining them is among the working group's first assignments, and the public Calculator on this site lets any reader run the schedule against historical levels of violence, or against rates of their own choosing.)

"Doesn't recoverable land soften the deterrent?" Consider the realistic middle case: a cooperating Palestinian state fighting pre-2023 levels of terrorism and slowly winning (roughly 130 deaths over a decade). Under a lost-is-lost rule, that state would end its first, mostly successful decade permanently smaller than it was before the plan. Its enemies would compute that result publicly and gleefully, and the domestic politics would flip from "police the rejectionists" to "reject the deal." Recoverability under the clean-year condition (no deaths, no mass-injury attacks) rewards only total quiet, keeps a good-faith state whole across its hardest years, and gives every Palestinian government something to campaign on rather than only something to mourn. The permanence that the deterrent needs lives one level down: in Tier 2, and in the development ledger, where nothing ever comes back.

The threshold above the schedule

The schedule governs sub-war violence. It does not pretend to price war itself. Above a stated threshold (a single attack killing fifty or more people, or a rolling twelve months exceeding one hundred dead), the adjudication body certifies what everyone would already know: this is no longer terrorism emanating from a state, but an act of war by or from it. At that point the framework suspends, Israel reverts to conventional doctrine, and the schedule resumes only if and when the framework is reinstated.

This threshold is stated in print for two reasons. The first is honesty: a formula that priced an event like October 7 at some arithmetic multiple of territory would be grotesque, and pretending the schedule scales up to atrocity would discredit everything below the threshold. The second is deterrence: there is no advantage in "going big to escape the formula," because the exit from the formula leads back to the old doctrine of conventional war, and the most recent demonstration of what that doctrine costs is the reason this plan exists.

Suspension, it should be said, is not designed to be permanent. The framework is built to be reinstated after the war it implies: unilaterally by Israel, exactly as it was first imposed, so that no faction holds a veto over restoration, and better still by mutual agreement with a post-war Palestinian government. Reinstatement restores the pre-war ledger; the borders will not have moved, because they never move; the war itself is not additionally priced in land, because the war was the consequence; the transitional clocks resume where they paused; and the escrow, frozen during the suspension, reopens.

Violations without attacks

The schedule prices attacks, but attacks are not the only obligations in this plan. The weapons tiers and the ban on foreign forces (see The Failsafes) are adjudicated commitments too, and the mechanism would have a dangerous blind spot if breaking them cost nothing until a rocket flew: a hostile government could dig tunnels and build drone factories in the open, and Israel would face a daily choice between watching in silence and striking — the exact dilemma this plan exists to abolish.

So an adjudicated violation is itself a ledger event. Development tranches are struck, permanently, with findings that repeat and escalate for as long as the violation persists. The meter runs, visibly, in the calculator, on the tunnel program itself. Violations are priced in money only, never in land: land prices blood, and money prices metal, and the schedule's moral clarity depends on keeping those two currencies separate. Israel's instrument is the ruling and the running meter, never the airstrike. Under a live framework, an Israeli strike inside Palestine is an Israeli violation, and violence that follows it would be adjudicated as provoked. And at industrial scale (missile production lines, a foreign garrison), the adjudication body can certify the violation as crossing the act-of-war threshold before any rocket flies, suspending the framework publicly, with published reasoning, ahead of whatever follows. The chapter Setting Up for Success walks through this scenario in full.

The second ledger: the development schedule

Land is the mechanism's severe currency. Its everyday currency is money, and the two run off the same ledger of violence.

The development program attached to the new state (Annex C lays it out project by project) is deposited in escrow with a neutral trustee before independence: tens of billions of dollars in Gulf capital, committed irrevocably, under a published disbursement schedule of named tranches — the university district, the solar park, the SoWeBa agricultural corridor, the new linear city on the rail spine. Disbursement runs front-to-back over fifteen years. Forfeiture runs the other way, back-to-front: every adjudicated attack, in addition to any land price, permanently strikes tranches from the far end of the schedule. The most aspirational projects stand, deliberately, closest to the fire. Nuisance attacks burn money only; serious attacks burn both.

Struck tranches never return. The funds revert to their donors, never to Israel, and never to any other beneficiary, because the land principle has a twin here: no one gets the land, and no one gets the money.

The escrow is what gives the mechanism a permanent edge that the recoverable land deliberately lacks. Territory can heal with quiet; a cancelled city cannot. A community can watch its forfeited strip return after three clean years, and still know that the Phase 5 corridor that would have employed its children is gone for good, with a specific attack's name attached to the cancellation. In this way, those who force the schedule leave lasting scars on a body that otherwise recovers: a permanent record, in the landscape itself, of what their violence cost their own people.

Two design notes complete the picture. First, the state's survival infrastructure (the port, the airport, the rail line, water, power) sits in a separate, non-strikeable Foundation Package. The mechanism burns prosperity, never organs, because a state with nothing left to lose deters nothing. Second, the escrow is finite, and the plan says so rather than hiding it: under catastrophic sustained violence, the ladder would exhaust within a handful of years, after which land carries the schedule alone. By that point, however, the conflict would be deep in the tiers, and money was never going to be the thing that stopped it.

Who decides

Every important question in this chapter runs through a single institution: Was the attack unprovoked? Which class does the incident belong to? Does the forfeiture Israel implements match the schedule to the meter, and not one meter more? These answers cannot belong to Israel. A mechanism in which the beneficiary of a ruling is also its judge would look like — and could easily become — conquest by installments. So the plan is demanding about the adjudication body it requires:

• Independent of any single government or leader, with its members' tenure, funding, and succession insulated from every capital, Jerusalem included;
• Palestinian and Arab-state representation on the body itself, alongside internationals;
• Evidentiary standards committed to in advance (what constitutes attribution, what constitutes hospitalization, what constitutes a tolerated pattern), published before the first case ever arrives, so that rulings apply existing rules rather than invent new ones;
• Published reasoning for every determination, in Arabic, Hebrew, and English;
• A mandate as permanent as the mechanism it oversees. Existing international institutions could be adapted to this role, but only if they meet this bar in full.

It is worth being clear about what this body is and is not. It is constituted unilaterally: Israel establishes it and submits to it, as a way of binding itself. It demands nothing of Palestinians: no recognition, no participation in its creation, no acceptance of its legitimacy. And its rulings bind Israel. It is the institution with the power to say: no, that attack was not unprovoked; no, you may not take that hill; no, the schedule does not permit this. Crucially, the word "unprovoked" cuts in both directions. If Israel were ever to violate its own commitments (an incursion, a strike, an unscheduled seizure), the body can rule that subsequent violence was provoked, in which case no forfeiture follows at all. The mechanism disarms itself in the face of Israeli cheating, and that is exactly what makes it credible when Israel plays by the rules. Structurally, this body is the Palestinians' shield, and it protects them whether or not they ever acknowledge it. The realistic forecast is that Palestine will denounce the body and petition it in the same week, and that is perfectly fine. The mechanism asks for behavior, not blessings.

The ledger and the fence

The state's territory has two representations, and keeping them distinct answers most of the practical questions about how this works on the ground.

The ledger is the official, adjudicated account of Palestine's area. It updates the instant a ruling lands (every debit, and every accruing restoration credit), and it is visible in real time in the public calculator. Deterrence lives on the ledger: the militant's calculations, the queue's advance, and the political consequences all move at the speed of adjudication.

The fence (the movable barrier) is the ledger's physical implementation, and it moves asymmetrically, on purpose. Penalties are implemented promptly after the grace period, because a consequence must be seen to be believed. Restorations accrue on the ledger continuously but are carried out in batched operations: consolidated, infrequent, and deliberately ceremonial. A barrier retreating toward Israel, with land formally restored to Palestine, is the single most hopeful image this plan can produce, and it deserves to be staged properly rather than dribbled out. One further rule prevents spirals: penalties incurred during an implementation operation post to the ledger immediately, but they are executed in the next operation, never by widening the current one. Each move is planned, announced, and completed before the next begins.

How the fence actually moves

Every forfeiture will be resisted. The plan expects denunciation, litigation in every international forum, and crowds. It also expects the Palestinian government, whatever it does in practice, to condemn each implementation loudly. The implementation doctrine consists of three rules, published in advance, and the third is the most important.

Fire meets fire. The physical work (demolition of evacuated structures, construction of the new line) is performed by contracted engineering crews under the adjudication body's authority, internationally observed, and paid for by Israel — which takes no land and no money, and bears the cost, so that the no-profit rule is not just stated but expensive. Armed attack on those crews is met with protective force, and it is itself an unprovoked attack under the schedule. Shooting at the fence costs more land, publicly and predictably. In this way, the mechanism guards its own implementation.

Crowds meet patience and geography. The barrier is never — under any circumstances, for any reason — moved through a crowd. There is no need. The debit landed on the ledger on adjudication day; the schedule has no expiry date; and the queue holds many eligible sectors. A human chain can defend one field for one season, at the cost of camping indefinitely in a strip that has already lost its legal status. The implementation owes a quantity of land, not a particular coordinate, and it arrives where and when the crowd is not. Time, in other words, is entirely on the schedule's side.

Protest is never priced. Unarmed assembly, however large, however hostile, however clearly orchestrated, is not an attack. It enters no ledger and costs nothing, ever. The mechanism prices bullets, not speech. This rule is not generosity; it is what keeps the definition of "unprovoked attack" clean and uncorruptible, and it is what makes the first two rules defensible in front of any audience in the world.

Beneath all three sits one absolute: no one is ever forcibly removed from their home. The grace period, compensation that can be claimed without expiry, and patience do the work that force must never do. Where a community refuses to leave a forfeited strip, the new line is built regardless, the pocket loses its legal status and services, and the standoff resolves over months or years, never at gunpoint. The plan flags this holdout scenario openly as the one its working group must pressure-test hardest, because the one image that would cost this plan more than any amount of territory is a Palestinian dragged from their home, or killed, in the collection of the penalty. The mechanism's deepest moral claim is that its application takes ground and never lives, and that claim has to survive its ugliest day.

For more discussion, see the FAQs "What if residents refuse to leave a forfeited strip?", "Are owners of forfeited land compensated?", and "Who physically moves the barrier?" on the FAQ page.

"Won't the Palestinian government simply refuse to cooperate with any of this?" Officially — almost certainly, and the plan is built for it. The realistic posture is denunciation-plus-compliance: reject the mechanism's legitimacy, litigate against it, condemn every forfeiture — and still manage the evacuations in practice, because managing them means controlling the compensation, sparing one's own citizens unmanaged chaos, and owning the most useful political argument in the new state: look what the militants cost us. No signature is sought, and none is needed. Sovereign states comply with arrangements they denounce every day of the week.

The calculator

One provision remains, and it answers an objection that has probably been building over the course of this chapter: all of this is far too complicated to deter anyone.

The traditional assumption is that deterrence must be simple enough to hold in an attacker's head. That assumption comes from a world before software. The requirement now is different: the mechanism must be simple enough to hold in an app. The plan therefore establishes the public calculator as a formal organ of the mechanism itself, built, maintained, and certified by the adjudication body, in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. It presents the live ledger, and it computes any hypothetical: enter an attack, and see exactly how many square kilometers would be forfeited, from exactly which named sector, and exactly which development tranche would burn. Enter years of quiet, and watch the restoration schedule run. Every rule in this chapter (the classes, the tiers, the recovery conditions, the queue, the escrow) collapses, for any user, into a slider and a map.

The goal is that a Hamas planner can compute the full, exact cost of his operation before he runs it. And so can the mayor of the sector his operation would forfeit. And so can every journalist, every diplomat, and every sixteen-year-old in Rafah. Nothing about the deterrent is left to interpretation, because nothing about it needs to be interpreted; it can simply be read.

What this mechanism cannot do

The chapter closes with its own limits, stated plainly, because a mechanism that overclaims will have its edges discovered by its enemies.

It cannot deter the truly undeterrable. The nihilist (the man who would rather see the whole place burn than accept Israel's existence, and who might even welcome the forfeitures as theater) is not deterred by this mechanism, and he is not deterred by airstrikes or occupation either. Nothing deters him. What the mechanism does to him is slower: it drains his ecosystem — his recruits, his shelter, his funding, and his society's patience — by making his project visible, to his own people, as theft from them. And even his total "victory" is repriced. A decade of his killing, driven all the way to the 80% floor, would cost a small fraction of the lives of a single conventional war. The full accounting of this actor, the plan's hardest case, is Objection 7 on the Objections page.

It cannot price war. The threshold above the schedule exists because pretending otherwise would be grotesque.

It cannot survive Israeli cheating. This is why the adjudication body exists, why the provoked-attack rule exists, and why the two commitments Israel can never adjust (borders fixed in space, and fixed in time) stand behind every promise in this chapter.

And it cannot make anyone love it. It is built to function amid rejection, which is not a flaw but the design brief. The mechanism's success would be measured, in the end, by a calculator that never has to run: a schedule published, understood, believed, and untouched, while two states get on with the much duller business of being neighbors.

Next: The Failsafes