The rebuilding required to restore some semblance of everyday life in Gaza is daunting. The BBC recently confirmed that over 2 million Gazans (more than 90 percent of the total population) were homeless. Another recent report from Doctors Without Borders explained that 70 percent of all structures in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, including 92 percent of all housing units.

This grim reality prompted a grotesque suggestion from US President Donald Trump that all Gazans should now relocate so that America can oversee the construction of a “Riviera of the Middle East” where Gaza formerly was. Steven Cook, writing in Foreign Policy, soon after described this project as “sheer lunacy”.

Since then, according to the BBC, Arab leaders have approved a $53 billion Gaza reconstruction plan that was agreed upon after an emergency summit in Egypt. Under this three-stage plan, homeless Gazans would be rehoused in temporary housing while the vast amount of rubble was removed. Substantial rebuilding of Gaza would then commence. Funding still needs to be agreed upon. According to Egypt, a central aim was for Gazans to be able to “stay on their land without displacement”.

The White House almost immediately rejected this plan — as did Israel.

There is, of course, another contemporary war zone that has witnessed the terrible destruction of civilian facilities and homes. According to Relief Web, an organization administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 2 million homes in Ukraine have been “damaged or destroyed, representing 10 percent of the country’s total housing stock”. Over 3.5 million people remain displaced, struggling to afford alternative accommodation due to soaring rents. Before the war, 95 percent of the population in Ukraine owned their own homes.

According to a recent Reuters report, $300 billion to $350 billion in Russian sovereign, foreign-denominated assets were held in a European securities depository prior to the outbreak of the Ukraine war. When the Ukraine war began, these assets were frozen, so Russia could no longer access them.

The level of destruction in Ukraine and strong opinions about Russia’s responsibility for the Ukraine war have led certain Western leaders and commentators to argue, increasingly, that those Russian reserves should be confiscated to fund the reconstruction of Ukraine. Previously, before the new Trump administration took office in Washington, it was more commonly argued that these reserves should be confiscated to enhance Ukraine’s military response. Some European leaders are now arguing that the assets should be seized to fund the rearming of European Union countries, given Washington’s new skepticism about protecting Europe based on the NATO alliance.

So far, no formal confiscation of these reserves has occurred, although interest generated by the reserves has been appropriated to assist Ukraine. Some argue that customary international law allowing “countermeasures” plainly justifies confiscation in some instances, but others, including Germany, the European Central Bank, and now France, are measurably less convinced.

However, after the extraordinary recent Washington-Moscow discussions on securing peace in Ukraine, the Reuters report noted above claimed (citing “senior sources” in Moscow) that Russia was open to discussing using its foreign reserves to help rebuild Ukraine once a peace settlement was agreed upon, provided one-third of those reserves was earmarked for reconstruction in the now Russian-occupied precincts in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Globes Israel Business News, quoting a recent Bank of Israel report, confirmed that Israel’s foreign exchange reserves had risen to over $220 billion at the end of February.

If the West’s vaunted rules-based international order was genuinely grounded on the evenhanded evaluation of geopolitical crises, we could have expected serious Western discussion over the last year about how, as in the case of Russia, these Israeli reserves could be applied (and possibly even confiscated) to rebuild Gaza following its genocidal scorched-earth treatment of Gaza. There has been no such discussion, of course. Unfortunately, the rules-based international order has been so selectively deployed and, thus, comprehensively discredited in the eyes of much of the world that it is now seen as useful only for fish-wrapping.

Still, Israel’s reputation as a contemptible pariah state in the eyes of many has been intensifying for over a year, according to both global commentators, like the UN special rapporteur on human rights, Francesca Albanese, and certain prominent Israelis, including retired Israel Defense Forces major general Itzhak Brik and former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas, writing in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. What can be done about this?

Here is a justice-based, circuit-breaking suggestion. An exceptional opportunity has presented itself for Israel to show the world that it is not wholly obsessed with dragging the US-led Global West into another endless war. This is the time for Israel to step forward, as Russia appears to have done, and throw its weight behind a necessarily massive rebuilding project, at the same time beginning to atone for its atrocious treatment of Gazans. The best way to do this would be to support the new Arab plan to rebuild Gaza unambiguously by offering to finance it from that very healthy stockpile of Israeli foreign exchange reserves. This could yet provide a pathway to finally foster the peaceful coexistence between the two peoples that has been shunned by Israeli leaders, especially, for over 70 years.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.