The Virtuous City of Gaza and the House of Wisdom and Peace

The Divine Template for Gaza’s Future

The Spiritual Mandate for Gaza

Realistically, the Gaza Strip has no future worth imagining. Twenty years from now, it could be a depopulated and devastated enclave, governed by dysfunction, trapped between permanent reconstruction, military occupation, and internecine conflict—largely forgotten by the generations who watched it be flattened.

This scenario does not have to occur. But only if the Palestinian people adopt, modernize, and operationalize the one philosophical framework created for the Gaza Strip: Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City.

The Goals of Nations

Every strong nation begins with a telos—a purpose anchoring legitimacy, guiding discipline, attracting allies, and sustaining succession. America and modern Europe drew theirs from Enlightenment ideals of secularism, egalitarianism, and natural rights. Marxist-Leninism drove the Soviet Union and China. Zionism fused Jewish historical trauma with sovereignty. Much of the Arab and Islamic world remains rooted in the Prophet Muhammad’s vision of a just society.

Gaza: The Nexus of Palestinian Resistance

Gaza’s purpose has long been resistance. After 1948, Hajj Amin al-Husseini established the All-Palestine government there, and fedayeen raids were launched with Egypt’s tacit support. Resistance was essential for survival, but it is not enough to build a flourishing future. The Palestinian national project inherited Ottoman collapse, British betrayal, and Zionist colonization, but never formed a positive telos beyond resisting domination.

Today, Gaza remains the heart of the Palestinian project, and the Israel-Hamas war endures because it is ultimately an argument over Gaza’s future. A new vision is needed—one that enables the world to support the rebuilding of Gaza as the center of Palestinian renewal. That requires a philosophical framework to underlie the extensive nation-building project that rebuilding Gaza will entail.

What a Philosophical Framework Must Achieve

To succeed, such a framework cannot appear as an imposition, while simultaneously resonating with both Palestinians and the world. It must:

• Be rooted in Palestinian culture and history. It must honor Gaza’s suffering and sacrifices while grounding itself in Arab and Islamic tradition.

• Be compatible with both nations’ values. It must speak to the moral languages, fears, and aspirations of both peoples.

• Restore dignity without domination. It must enable Palestinians to rise through their own interpretation of values, not as subjects of a neo-colonial project.

The Virtuous City of Gaza

There exists a singular philosophical and spiritual template capable of giving Gaza a future worth building: the Virtuous City of Abu Nasr al-Farabi. Al-Farabi, the 10th-century Islamic philosopher known as the “Second Teacher” after Aristotle, synthesized Greek philosophy within an Islamic worldview to articulate a vision of society oriented toward sa‘ada—human flourishing rightly ordered.

In Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, Al-Farabi defined flourishing as the collective pursuit of intellectual, spiritual, and moral perfection. A virtuous society is not organized around domination, vengeance, or mere survival, but around the cultivation of reason, the alignment of the soul with the divine, and the formation of ethical character. This triad constitutes the highest end of political life.

From this foundation emerges Gaza’s new Telos.

First, the Virtuous City of Gaza is oriented toward intellectual, spiritual, and moral perfection as the highest purpose of civic life. Education is therefore sacred: it cultivates the rational faculties, deepens spiritual consciousness, and forms moral judgment. Leadership derives legitimacy from wisdom and virtue rather than coercion or factional power.

Second, the Virtuous City demands the reconstruction of the Palestinian mind, body, and soul. For Al-Farabi, a city cannot flourish if its people are broken. Human renewal precedes political stability. Education, dignified labor, health, and civic participation are not auxiliary concerns—they are the means through which a wounded people are restored to agency, dignity, and coherence.

Third, the Virtuous City exists to transform collective suffering into collective flourishing. Gaza’s history of sacrifice is neither denied nor sanctified for its own sake. Instead, suffering is given meaning by being redirected toward life, continuity, and generational prosperity. Citizens, like organs in a living body, fulfill distinct roles that contribute to the health and harmony of the whole.

The values of Virtuous City bridge the Israeli-Palestinian divide:

• Intellectual perfection: cherished in Jewish tradition, cultivated by Palestinians through education as resistance.

• Spiritual perfection: central to Islam, yet resonant across all Abrahamic faiths.

• Moral perfection: universal, echoing prophetic calls for justice and mercy heard in both Jerusalem and Medina.

• Reconstruction of the mind, body, and soul: A civilizational task familiar to the Jewish people after their own repeated bouts of destruction—collectively restoring learning, physical security, and spiritual confidence

• Transformation of collective suffering into collective flourishing: the moral conversion of trauma into responsibility for life, continuity, and renewal—where suffering is neither denied nor sanctified, but redirected toward the repair of society and the future.

These values are native to Arab and Islamic culture, while also aligning with what Israelis long for in their neighbors. Without such a vision, both nations remain trapped in cycles of violence and radicalization.

Practical Needs Require a North Star

A revitalized medieval philosophical framework will not feed two million starving Palestinians. But without a vision, geopolitical solutions remain triage and symptomatic treatment. A North Star is needed to honor the blood of sixty thousand martyrs and to actively build towards something better. But only Palestinians can implement any proposed vision. My aim is only to surface the ideas from the annals of human history.

The House of Wisdom and Peace: The Future Heart of the Gaza Strip

The Virtuous City cannot live as paper philosophy alone: it requires a heart—an institution where its values take flesh. That heart will be the House of Wisdom and Peace: the future keystone of Gaza’s renewal, capable of inspiring hope, sustaining global attention, and delivering tangible benefits to Palestinians and Israelis alike. Without it, the Virtuous City will not exist.

Inspired by Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom and Peace would rekindle the Arab world’s legacy of intellectual leadership while ensuring that governance, policy, and culture are built on firm intellectual foundations. Much like Andalusia at its height, it would reclaim the spirit of a Golden Age where diverse scholars shaped a flourishing and interconnected world.

Palestinians have long treated education as resistance—recently reopening tent schools under bombardment, and achieving a 97% literacy rate even under a crushing occupation. The House of Wisdom will immortalize this spirit, restoring educational justice to a people for whom learning has always been both a right and a survival strategy.

Future Truth and Reconciliation

The House of Wisdom must also become a sanctuary for reconciliation. It must confront the unfinished reckonings of the Abrahamic world: the estrangement of Jews and Muslims since Medina; the long confrontation of Islam and Christendom, from Crusades to colonialism; the unhealed wound of the Israel–Palestinian conflict itself; the shadow of empires whose legacies still divide and bind nations; the formation and deaths of nations and their states, and the ancient tension between faith and reason, once debated across all three traditions.

These will not be watercooler conversations. They are the fault lines of human civilization, and Gaza sits at their intersection. The House of Wisdom must be where they are named without flattery, confronted without denial, and transformed into a foundation for peace.

Joint Arab-American Sponsorship of The Virtuous City

Building the Virtuous City of Gaza, anchored by the House of Wisdom and Peace, will demand immense diplomatic effort. It would serve as a legacy-defining initiative for the current American administration, should they choose to invest in it. A Compact of Free Association (COFA) would be an appropriate framework, which would signal a durable American commitment to building the Virtuous City of Gaza and provide for the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Qatar, with its links to American universities, and Egypt, with its proximity, are natural partners for the House of Wisdom and Peace. Yet it is the United Arab Emirates that is uniquely positioned to serve as principal sponsor of the Virtuous City Vision and the future of the Gaza strip. Its history of non-belligerence toward Israel, its deep financial resources, and its growing diplomatic stature in the region make it the most credible Arab custodian of a vision designed to inspire trust on both sides.

Gaza’s Rebuilding Must Honor Its Martyrs

Palestinians universally deserve self-determination. The world cannot dictate Palestine’s future, but it will not rebuild Gaza without asking what future it is being asked to build and sustain. That future cannot be a return to the same conditions that guaranteed Gaza’s repeated destruction.

To end the Israel–Hamas war, we must first have a vision for Gaza’s renewal. Unlike previous proposals, the Virtuous City is grounded in the shared cultural heritage of the Islamic and Jewish worlds. It offers a framework for Gaza integrated with Israel and the wider Arab World, bridging the deepest fault line of the conflict.

This moment of global awareness is fleeting, with global attention on the Palestinian plight having long passed its peak. The Gaza Strip will only rise from the ashes of extermination if its suffering is transfigured into a vision worthy of its martyrs. The Virtuous City, anchored by the House of Wisdom and Peace, may be that vision. If not, then Palestinians must articulate their own that is clear, coherent, and legible to the global conscience.

If they fail, the disaster of sixty thousand martyrs will pass without meaningful advancement in liberation. But whatever happens, the Palestinians in Gaza must not return to martyrdom, resentment, and resistance as the core to their identity, as that path leads not to liberation, but to planetary devastation.

The next step is civilizational and covenantal: the Virtuous City must be joined to a Colaition for Canaan—the geopolitical architecture and set of nations that will directly build upon Trump's Board of Peace and 20-point plan to finish the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and to provide the pathway to the two-state solution required for Saudi and broader Arab Normalization with Israel under the Abraham Accords.