A new occupation is not a great prospect, but it’s the only one.
A new occupation is not a great prospect, but it’s the only one.
I t would be unwise to draw from Israel’s battlefield successes in the early stages of its war against Hamas a straight-line projection of total victory. No plan survives contact with the enemy. But those successes have surely focused the minds of Israel’s post-war planners. What is Israel’s plan for the Gaza Strip after Hamas? Does it even have one?
“There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October the 6th,” President Biden declared several weeks after the 10/7 massacre. There are, however, no guarantees that whatever replaces that status quo will be more stable than the intolerable conditions that preceded it. Moreover, the White House has made its opposition to a new Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip clear.
“No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said of the conditions it intends to impose on Israel. “No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza.” The administration shares Israel’s intolerance of a Gaza that could once again become a “platform for terror,” but does not have the stomach for a Gaza that is functionally an Israeli military project. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority,” Blinken said of the civilian governing authority he hopes will succeed Hamas. Easier said than done.
The Gaza Strip is a problem no one wants to own. Only ignorance of the region’s history could lead observers to conclude that Israel is champing at the bit to reassume sovereignty of this troubled parcel. It has gone to great lengths to be rid of its obligations to Gaza. Israel only recommitted troops to the Strip when the 18-year experiment in de-occupation and autonomy failed in spectacularly barbaric fashion.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has flatly ruled out the prospect that the Palestinian Authority could reassume control of the Strip, but it’s not like the PA is eager for that outcome either. Its officials, scarred by the memory of the 2007 coup in which Fatah officials were hurled unceremoniously from rooftops by Hamas terrorists, are as wary of the place as are the Israelis. Like Israel, the governing authority in the West Bank has every reason to believe that Gaza is ungovernable.
A poll conducted this month by the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) recently took the temperature of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, and the survey’s findings are discouraging. The poll confirmed the long-standing observation that Palestinians have deep dissatisfaction with their rulers, whoever they may be. Gazans look more fondly on the Palestinian Authority than the Palestinians who languish under its misrule in the West Bank. Likewise, residents of the West Bank are fonder of Hamas than are Gazans. But that dynamic notwithstanding, the poll suggests that the Palestinian people have not lost their taste for terror.
Seventy-five percent of respondents in both Gaza and the West Bank have a positive opinion of the atrocities Hamas unleashed on October 7. Seventy-six percent express support for Hamas. When given the choice between a “two-state solution for two peoples” and “a Palestinian state from the river to sea,” which implies the eradication of Israel and the relocation (or worse) of its people, 75 percent chose the latter. Both West Bankers (77 percent) and Gazans (66 percent) believe Israel will ultimately lose its war with Hamas, which precludes the prospect of a political solution to the conflict. To one extent or another, 79 percent said they expect the outcome of this war will be “victory” that “achieves the liberation of Gaza from the Israeli invasion.”
Given the prevailing sentiments in the region over which Israel is about to take custody, it’s understandable that Netanyahu has come to the resigned conclusion that his government will have to assume “the overall security responsibility” in Gaza for an “indefinite period.” After all, “we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it,” he added.
“Really?” Senator Bernie Sanders replied to Netanyahu’s assertion. “Should US funds support a long-term military occupation over an already battered [and] impoverished people? I think not.” That sentiment, while probably representative of progressive opinion on the matter, is wholly divorced from our shared reality. Sanders may not want his conscience stained by proximity to Israel’s conflict, but he cannot offer a competing vision for Gaza’s future because no practical alternative exists. And to judge by the polling, the appetite in Gaza for more bloodshed has not yet been sated.
A rough consensus has emerged in the West that the post-9/11 enterprise of democracy promotion in places like Afghanistan and Iraq was an utter failure. That’s a debatable premise — America gave up on the former, and the conditions of the latter, while imperfect, vastly improve on those that preceded them. But what else is Israel to do with a post-war Gaza but try to craft and impose on the Strip a new social compact designed to anathematize its people’s affinity for bloodshed? Gazans have spent generations steeped in a milieu that promotes Jew hatred, glorifies martyrdom, and prepares its people for little more than to serve as fodder in Hamas’s wars. What other option does Israel have but to try to replace this toxic civic covenant with a better one?
International talk shops and Western governments can fantasize about the prospect of some neutral, peace-loving authority coming to power in Gaza all they like, but none can articulate the outlines of what that entity would look like. No one wants responsibility over Gaza — that’s what put Israel in its unenviable position in the first place. So, Jerusalem will aim to put into place a provisional authority with as much local civilian representation as possible while preserving its control over security operations in the Strip, all while enduring the endless grousing of international observers who will insist that there is a better way out there, somewhere. They will not be more specific than that because they are retailing a fantasy. A new occupation is not a great prospect, but what is the alternative?