The Economist : The path to Israel’s preferred outcome is littered with obstacles - Oct 19th 2023 | RAMALLAH

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Briefing | When the shooting stops

Israel’s four unpalatable options for Gaza’s long-term future

The path to Israel’s preferred outcome is littered with obstacles

Oct 19th 2023 | RAMALLAH

The public statements Joe Biden made during his lightning visit to Israel on October 18th did not suggest many misgivings about Israel’s impending invasion of the Gaza Strip. In private, however, the American president’s advisers hoped to press Israel’s leaders on an urgent question: what should happen after the war?

Israeli officials say they are focused on toppling Hamas from power, in retribution for the massacre it committed in southern Israel on October 7th. “Gaza will no longer be a threat for Israel,” says Eli Cohen, the foreign minister. “We will not agree that Hamas will have any power in Gaza.” Even after the risks of fighting in such a densely populated place were illustrated by a deadly blast on October 17th at Gaza’s Ahli Arab hospital, which Israel blamed on an errant Palestinian rocket, Israel’s stated war aims have not changed.

Four-way stop

But Israel’s post-war plans remain uncertain. It has four main options, all bad ones. First is a prolonged occupation of Gaza, like the one it undertook from 1967 to 2005. Israeli troops would have to secure the enclave and, in the absence of a Palestinian government, might have to oversee basic services as well.

This might please a segment of Israel’s religious right, which still fumes about the withdrawal in 2005 of all Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza as the abandonment of a sliver of the biblical homeland of the Jews. But no one else wants to see Gaza reoccupied, given the heavy financial burden and the likelihood of endless bad press and a steady trickle of casualties. Mr Biden warned on October 15th that a lasting occupation would be a “big mistake”. Most Israeli strategists agree.

The second option is to wage a war that decapitates Hamas and then leave the territory. This is arguably the worst way forward. Some of Hamas’s leaders and supporters would probably emerge to reconstitute the group. Even if they did not, some other undesirable force would take its place. The Middle East has a history of radical groups taking advantage of ungoverned spaces.

The best outcome, from Israel’s perspective, would be the return of the Palestinian Authority (pa), which governs parts of the West Bank in co-ordination with Israel. But that path is littered with obstacles. The first is that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is loth to do it. “I don’t think anybody can be that stupid and think he can go back to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank,” says Ghassan al-Khatib, a former Palestinian minister.

Even if Mr Abbas were able to take power that way, he may not want to. Yasser Arafat, the previous president of the pa and longtime figurehead for Palestinian nationalism, had a fondness for Gaza; he lived there for a time after being allowed to return to Palestine in 1994. People close to Mr Abbas say that he, in contrast, views Gaza as a hostile place.

image: the economist

Gaza would almost certainly be hostile to Palestinian police sent to secure it. The pa employs around 60,000 people in its security services, which have authority in roughly a third of the West Bank (see map). It cannot control even that limited area: parts of Jenin and Nablus, cities in the northern West Bank, are so restive that the pa’s forces dare not patrol them lest they be attacked. Morale is low. If Palestinian police returned to Gaza, they would be a target for the remnants of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militants. Hamas and the pa fought a bloody civil war in Gaza after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006. Hamas eventually prevailed and ejected the pa from the strip in 2007.

Nor is security the only question. After Hamas came to power, Mr Abbas told bureaucrats in Gaza to stop working. Hamas hired tens of thousands of supporters to fill the civil service instead, while the pa continued to pay its workers to sit at home. Keeping that bureaucracy would mean working with around 40,000 people hired for their ideological loyalty to Hamas; dismissing it would repeat the mistake of America’s “de-Baathification” programme in Iraq, which threw legions of angry, unemployed men on the streets.

A fourth option would be to cobble together some sort of alternate administration, composed of local notables working closely with Israel and Egypt. Israel relied on that sort of arrangement until the 1990s, before the pa began to take over civil functions  in the occupied territories.

There has been talk of trying to enlist Muhammad Dahlan, a former pa security chief who grew up in Gaza, to take the reins after Hamas. But Mr Dahlan has spent the past decade in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (uae). He has fallen out with the pa; in 2016 a Palestinian court convicted him of corruption. There is also bad blood between him and families in Gaza: he led the fighting against Hamas in 2007. “I think that’s an illusion,” says Michael Milstein, a reserve colonel in the Israeli army and an analyst at the Moshe Dayan Centre, a think-tank in Tel Aviv. “I’m not even sure he’d want to come back. He’d be worried people would want him dead.”

The case of Mr Dahlan points to a larger problem. The Palestinians have been divided for almost two decades. The split is largely their fault: though Hamas and pa leaders meet every couple of years to pay lip service to reconciliation, neither party wants to compromise. But the schism has also been exacerbated by the divide-and-rule policy of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who thought it a useful tool to stymie the Palestinian dream of an independent state. “Netanyahu had a flawed strategy of keeping Hamas alive and kicking,” says Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister.

Both Hamas and the pa rule their statelets as one-party authoritarian regimes. In 2021 Nizar Banat, a critic of Mr Abbas, was beaten to death by Palestinian police at his home in Hebron. Those who oppose Hamas in Gaza risk torture and execution. Most Palestinians choose to keep silent, shunning politics and focusing on their day-to-day struggles.

The most recent poll from the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (pcpsr) found that 65% of Gazans would vote for Ismail