What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks?

Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available smaller players can yield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world. 

Just look at how shipping companies across the globe are having to reroute their traffic and pay higher insurance rates today because the Houthis, Yemeni tribesmen you never heard about until recently, have acquired drones and rockets and started disrupting sea traffic around the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal.

This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.

The Israel-Hamas war. It was not as inevitable as some want you to think.

What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? 

The short answer is visionary leadership.

And it has all been done in the shadow (and with the envy) of a dangerous Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Reem al-Hashimy, who oversaw the building of Dubai’s massive 2020 Expo City, which was repurposed to hold the event. In three hours spent walking around, we were stopped at least six or seven times by young Emirati women in black robes in groups of two or three, who asked if I could just step aside for a second while they took selfies with Reem or whether I would be their photographer. 

She was their rock-star role model — this Harvard- and Tufts-educated, nonroyal woman in a leadership role of government contractor.

Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.

Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, killing some of its officials and making clear that it would not abide by the Oslo Accords or the Paris protocol. That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza 

Hamas has never wavered from being more interested in destroying the Jewish state than in building a Palestinian state

Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all.

The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank 

Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multi-front war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.

Thomas L. Friedman New York Times 29 December 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/opinion/israel-hamas-war.html