Hamas must be destroyed. But the path to lasting peace is the real minefield
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When the lives of your children are on the line, it is hard to make plans for after the war. Yet international support for Israel is conditional. Partly it rests on keeping civilian deaths to a minimum, which is why Hamas does its best to maximise casualties. And partly it rests on reassurances that Israel is not intending to reoccupy Gaza. For this and other reasons, the Biden administration has been pressuring Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – whose cabinet includes several hardline radicals – to declare his vision for the territory once Hamas has been vanquished.
Early in the conflict, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced his plan for the campaign. Hamas would be destroyed militarily, followed by a counter-insurgency operation to mop up “pockets of resistance”. A closed military zone would then be established along the frontier to prevent future incursions, as part of a “new security regime”. After that, the border would be sealed. No more jobs for Gazans in Israel. No more access to Israeli medical facilities with Arabic-speaking Jewish volunteers ferrying Palestinian patients back and forth in their cars. No more public services provided by Jerusalem to the Strip. The international community could play a part, but so far as Israel was concerned, Gaza would be on its own.
Given that Hamas timed its savagery to derail rapprochement between Israel and the Saudis, a long-term victory will involve getting negotiations back on track. Normalisation with the desert kingdom – which has refrained from condemning the Israeli offensive with full conviction – would be historic. International security agencies must strangle Hamas International, the birth pangs of which we saw in the thwarted terror plot in Europe this week.
When it comes to the governance of Gaza, however, there are no easy answers. After October 7, Israeli counter-terrorism forces must maintain operational freedom in every corner of the Strip. That much is a given. But who will be in charge?
The United States favours the Palestinian Authority (PA), which administers the West Bank. This would place Gaza under indigenous control, but is hardly a promising option. If they entered behind Israeli tanks, the PA would forfeit local legitimacy. They would likely struggle with it anyway, given that they were driven out in a coup in 2007. That may happen again.
In the intervening years, the PA has become only more authoritarian, weaker and more corrupt. Some snapshots from the West Bank will suffice. The city of Jenin, a hotbed of militancy, has slipped from PA control; last year, the gay Palestinian Abu Marhia was decapitated; a state-of-the-art hospital in Halhul, near Hebron, built with aid dollars, has sat empty because local officials have taken kickbacks to direct patients to other facilities; Mahmoud Abbas is enjoying the 18th year of his four-year term in office; the schools are rife with Israelophobia; and in 2021, Nizar Banat, an Arab pro-democracy campaigner seen as a challenger to Abbas, was beaten to death by Palestinian security officers trained by Britain. Handing the 88-year-old PLO leader more territory would hardly seem ideal.
At the other end of the spectrum, Israel could re-occupy the Strip. From one point of view, it would make sense. The Jewish state withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, turning over its vacated kibbutzim to the Palestinians who destroyed them. There followed years of fundamentalism and militarisation alongside a slide into economic dysfunction, a situation that must be reversed if October 7 is not to be repeated. As Netanyahu revealed recently, any postwar strategy for Gaza must include deradicalisation efforts akin to the denazification of Germany after the Second World War (a topic I explored in these pages in November). This may be easier to enforce with full Israeli control, though the Israelis would not have the local credibility to deliver it.
But nobody serious, least of all myself, is suggesting a return to the full-fat occupation that emerged in 1967, after the Six Day War. Even the Israeli far-right has been largely quiet on this point. Not only would it be unsustainable morally, logistically and economically, it would turn Israel into a pariah among its few remaining friends.
There are few other options. An international administration would betray legitimate Gazan desires for self-rule. A UN peacekeeping force would collapse under fire, as has happened in Lebanon. But the worst outcome would be chaos. As Britain and America learned to our cost in post-2003 Iraq, while nature abhors vacuums, jihadis love them. The uncontrolled demise of Hamas could allow a brace of other fanatics to vie for supremacy. There is an Islamic State presence in the Sinai Peninsula; armed attempts to establish a caliphate in Gaza would be nightmarish.
The remaining option would be for Gaza to be delegated to its dominant clans. Palestinian society is very tribal, and as unpalatable as this proposal seems to western democratic sensibilities, it may be the least bad plan. It would require international funding, especially from the Gulf, and perhaps oversight from friendly Arab states, while the Israelis would maintain security control.
When Israeli forces left Gaza in 2005, it could have become a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Hamas killed that dream. Today, the best we can hope for is stability and even that remains uncertain. But first the war must be won.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of Israelophobia
