The Economist: Israel’s harsh choices for the long-term future of Gaza

Us president, Joe Biden’s public statements during his lightning visit to Israel on October 18 didn’t raise much doubt about the impending Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.

However, the US president’s advisers secretly hoped to press Israel’s leaders on an urgent question, what should happen after the war?

Israeli officials say they are focused on overthrowing Hamas, in retaliation for the massacre it committed in southern Israel on October 7.

“Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel… We’ll reject Hamas having any authority in Gaza,” says Eli Cohen, the Israeli Foreign Minister.

Even as the dangers of fighting in such a densely populated place were made clear by the deadly October 17 bombing at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza, which Israel blamed on a Palestinian rocket that lost its direction, Israel’s stated war aims didn’t change.

Israel’s post-war plans remain uncertain, as it has four main options, all of which are bad.

The first is a long-term occupation of Gaza, such as the one it carried out from 1967 to 2005.

Israeli forces would have to secure the Strip and, in the absence of a Palestinian government, may have to oversee basic services as well.

This may satisfy a segment of the Israeli religious right, which is still angry about the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005 as an abandonment of part of the biblical Jewish homeland.

But no one else wants to see Gaza reoccupied, given the heavy financial burden, the prospect of endless bad press and a continuing decline in casualties.

Biden warned on October 15 that permanent occupation would be a big mistake, as most Israeli strategists agree with this.

The second option is to launch a war that beheads Hamas and then leaves the Gaza Strip.

This is arguably the worst way forward, it’s possible that some Hamas leaders and supporters will emerge to reshape the group.

Even if they don’t, some other unwanted force will take their place.

The Middle East has a history of extremist groups exploiting spaces beyond state borders.

The best outcome, from Israel’s point of view, is the third option in the return of the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank in coordination with Israel, but this path is full of obstacles:

The first is that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, hates doing this, and no one could be that stupid and think they can return to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank,” according to Ghassan al Khatib, a former Palestinian minister.

Even if Abbas were able to seize power in this way, he may not want to.

Yasser Arafat, the former president of the Palestinian Authority and the long-time symbolic head of Palestinian nationalism, was fond of Gaza; He lived there for a while after being allowed to return to Palestine in 1994.

People close to Abbas say that, by contrast, he views Gaza as a place of hostility toward him.

It’s almost certain that Gaza will be hostile to the Palestinian police sent to secure it.

The Palestinian Authority employs about 60,000 people in its security services, which has authority in about a third of the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority cannot control even that limited area, parts of Jenin and Nablus, two cities in the northern West Bank, are so disturbed that Palestinian Authority forces don’t dare patrol them for fear of being attacked.

Morale is low… If the Palestinian police return to Gaza, they will be a target for the remnants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other extremists.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority fought a bloody civil war in Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Ultimately, Hamas prevailed and expelled the Palestinian Authority from the Strip in 2007.

Security isn’t the only question, after Hamas came to power, Abbas asked the bureaucrats in Gaza to stop working.

Hamas hired tens of thousands of supporters to fill the civil service instead, while the Palestinian Authority continued to pay its employees to sit at home.

Maintaining this bureaucracy means working with some 40,000 people hired because of their ideological loyalty to Hamas.

Its refusal would repeat the mistake of the US “de-Baathification program in Iraq, which threw hordes of angry, unemployed men into the streets.

The fourth option is to form a kind of alternative administration, composed of local notables who work closely with Israel and Egypt.

Israel relied on this type of arrangement until 1990, before the Palestinian Authority began assuming civilian functions in the occupied territories.

There was talk of trying to recruit Mohammed Dahlan, the former security chief of the Palestinian Authority who grew up in Gaza, to take over from Hamas.

However, Dahlan has spent the past decade in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

He disagreed with the Palestinian Authority; In 2016, a Palestinian court convicted him of corruption.

There are also old feuds between him and families in Gaza after he led the fight against Hamas in 2007.

“I think this is an illusion… I’m not even sure he wants to come back… He would be worried that people would want to kill him,” says Michael Milstein, a reserve colonel in the Israeli army and an analyst at the Moshe Dayan Center, a think tank in Tel Aviv.

Dahlan’s case points to a larger problem.

The Palestinians have been divided for nearly two decades.

The division is largely their fault: Although the leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority meet every two years to pay lip service to reconciliation, neither side wants to compromise.

But the division was also exacerbated by the divide and rule policy pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, who believed it was a useful tool to thwart the Palestinian dream of establishing an independent state.

“Netanyahu had a flawed strategy to keep Hamas alive and kicking,” says Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister.

Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority rule their statelets as one-party authoritarian regimes.

In 2021, Nizar Banat, a critic of Mr. Abbas, was beaten to death by Palestinian police in his home in Hebron.

Those who oppose Hamas in Gaza risk torture and execution.

Most Palestinians choose to remain silent, avoid politics, and focus on their daily struggles.

The latest poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 65% of Gazans would vote for Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, in a direct presidential race against Abbas (who would also lose the West Bank).

Hamas will win 44% of the vote in Gaza in the parliamentary elections, while Fatah, Abbas’s faction, will receive only 28%.

At first glance, this may indicate permanent support for Hamas.

But such polls only offer a binary choice between hardliners and incompetents 80% are addicted to the Palestinians who want Abbas to resign.

Hours after the hospital explosion there were protests in cities across the West Bank, with demonstrators chanting: “The people want to overthrow the president”.

Abbas is 87 years old and has no designated successor.

None of his potential replacements spark much enthusiasm.

In a hypothetical race between Haniyeh and Muhammad Shtayyeh, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority who has no known political principle, the former will win by 45 points in Gaza and 21 points in the West Bank.

Again, this is less a testament to Haniyeh’s popularity than Shtayyeh’s lack of it: a poll in 2019, after his first 100 days in office, found that 53% of Palestinians didn’t even know he was prime minister.

Open-ended questions yield more meaningful results.

When the Palestinian Council for Policy and Survey Research asked Palestinians to name their preferred successor to Abbas, a majority said they did not know.

The second most popular answer, in both the West Bank and Gaza, was Marwan Barghouti, a member of the Fatah movement serving several life sentences in an Israeli prison for organizing terrorist attacks in which Israeli civilians were killed.

Several other key choices, such as Dahlan and Khaled Meshal, a former Hamas leader, don’t even live in the Palestinian territories.

Exiles or prisoners – or no one: Palestinian political life is dying.

Palestinians blame this unfortunate situation on Israel, arguing that the lack of meaningful peace talks has deprived the Palestinian Authority of its raison d’être.

The Israelis assert that the Palestinian Authority has undermined itself through rampant graft.

Billions of dollars in foreign aid have been withdrawn over the past three decades to buy luxury villas in Jordan and open bank accounts in Europe.

When asked about the main problems in Palestinian society, a greater percentage of people cite the corruption of their government 25%, than the continued Israeli occupation 19%.

There’s enough blame to share, however, the result is that Fatah is perhaps irredeemable in the eyes of most Palestinians, a liberation movement that has turned into an ossified and decadent movement.

In recent years, some Israelis have begun to wonder whether Hamas can become a communicator, along the same path that Fatah took decades ago, from violent hardliners to flexible bureaucrats.

Hamas has focused on improving Gaza’s economy, and some of its leaders have also shown some acceptance of the two-state solution.

That would have been a remarkable shift for a group whose charter called for the destruction of Israel.

There are two other questions that will shape Gaza’s future.

The first is the role that the Arab countries will play.

In private conversations over the past week, several Arab officials floated the idea of ​​establishing a foreign peacekeeping force for the narrow outpost called Gaza — but they quickly added that their country was not keen on participating.

Egypt is unpopular in Gaza, both because it joined Israel in the blockade of the Strip and because of its previous history as ruler of Gaza from 1948 to 1967.

“The UAE would be reluctant to play a major role… We don’t work alone, perhaps the same applies to Saudi Arabia,” says an Emirati diplomat.

Israel is likely to use its veto power against any role for Qatar, which is one of the most influential countries in Gaza.

Over the years, the emirate has helped stabilize Gaza’s economy with Israel’s blessing, distributing up to $30 million a month in welfare payments, civil servant salaries, and free fuel.

But its support for Hamas – some of the movement’s leaders live there – will now make it suspect.

Although Arab countries don’t want to secure Gaza, they may be willing to help rebuild it.

After the last big war, in 2014, donors pledged $3.5 billion for reconstruction (although by the end of 2016 they had disbursed only 51% of that).

The bill will be larger this time.

The other question is what happens to the Palestinian Authority.

Half of Palestinians tell pollsters it should be dissolved.

This would deprive many of them of income (the Palestinian Authority is the largest employer in the West Bank) and could lead to more violence.

But it would also raise the costs of the Israeli occupation, and perhaps force Palestine’s long-term future back onto the Israeli political agenda after two decades in which it was rarely discussed.

There is no lasting solution for Gaza alone.

Despite the long division, Palestinians there still see themselves as part of a larger polity.

In any case, the Gaza strip is too small and deprived of natural resources to flourish on its own.

Its economy depends on Israel’s everything from strawberry farms to furniture factories depends on exports to its wealthier neighbor.

Whoever takes charge, Gaza will neither be stable nor prosperous as an isolated state.

The only way to achieve lasting calm in Gaza is through a broader settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.