As the war in Gaza enters a new phase and international pressure grows, the need for a clear vision of where Gaza and the region are headed “the day after” the war is becoming more pressing.
According to most reports, the war is now shifting slowly from a campaign of intensive airstrikes and artillery strikes, alongside a large-scale ground offensive, to more pinpoint raids and operations aimed at clearing specific areas of terrorist threats. The planned release of a large portion of the reservists currently called up is one sign that this process is beginning.
But as that shift takes place, the defense establishment is being left without a clear vision of what they need to achieve and the public and the international community are in the dark about what the actual goals of the war are, if they’ve even been decided yet. While “toppling Hamas” and “defanging Gaza” are catchy slogans, they don’t point to any specific, concrete vision.
What does toppling Hamas mean?
Toppling Hamas could mean hunting down every last Hamas member, it could mean being satisfied with just capturing or eliminating the upper ranks of the terrorist movement, and it could mean any number of other goals.Assuming the goal is, at minimum, to eliminate enough of Hamas’s upper ranks that it becomes dysfunctional and doesn’t pose a threat, then there remains one glaring question: What comes next?
That question isn’t something that can wait till the war is over, especially because the answer to it affects how the war needs to be carried out right now.
There are over a million people crammed in southern Gaza at the moment. As the IDF switches over to more pinpoint raids, navigating amid that crowd of people is going to only grow more difficult.
As areas of the northern Strip are cleared of threats, the rebuilding process will need to begin so that those sheltering in southern Gaza can be moved back there in an orderly fashion. This will help alleviate the humanitarian crisis, assuage concerns in the international community about allegations of planned ethnic cleansing, and give the IDF more freedom of operation in the southern Strip, where Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and other Hamas leaders are believed to be hiding.
Additionally, alongside a mission concerning Hamas itself, the defense establishment and the political echelons need to prepare an outline to deal with the plethora of challenges a de-Hamasified Gaza will pose.
Inherently, the removal of Hamas will create a vacuum, and that kind of situation rarely ends well. While Hamas is bad, there are even more extremist factions in Gaza, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and various Salafi groups such as ISIS. When Palestinians in Gaza look for new leadership, it is intolerable that those groups be the only option they’re left with. That will only perpetuate the conflict, not solve it.
A plethora of options sit in front of the government, but it remains unclear which direction they’re pointed in. Is the government pushing for a military occupation of Gaza, just an adjustment to the already existent controls on Gaza’s border, or a regional policing force? What about civil matters? Who will take care of governing Gaza?
While government officials have made very clear what they don’t want, they haven’t said much about what they do want. In the meantime, the government is pushing off the discussion about the day after the war, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting on Sunday that such a discussion could only be had once the war is already over.
The problem is that in a war like the one being waged between Israel and Hamas, there is no clear endpoint. The best analog may be the war against ISIS. In 2017, Iraq declared “victory” over ISIS, but ISIS is still very much a threat in the region and around the globe even today, six years later. It still conducts terrorist attacks everywhere from Kabul to Paris.
In the current war, Israel is fighting against not just a physical group, but an entire ideology, one that finds its expression in several other groups in Gaza and throughout the region. As the war against ISIS has shown, bombs quite simply aren’t enough. So what is?
One option brought up often in recent months is a plan similar to the Marshall Plan in Europe after WWII, an extensive rehabilitation plan that learned many lessons from the abject failure of the Treaty of Versailles. Instead of seeking revenge and instilling hate, discord, and humiliation which only fostered another world war, the Allies provided many of the former Axis countries with a future to look forward to.
There may be other lessons to learn from Germany’s de-Nazification, both through internal and external measures. The Germany of today is very clearly different from the Germany of 1945. The Nazi movement went from widely supported to abhorrent in the eyes of most Germans.
It is imperative for the future of the security of both Israel and the Palestinians that a similar objective be pursued in Gaza and the West Bank, but such a result cannot come from just war. A policy of pure vengeance is unlikely to accomplish anything more than the Treaty of Versailles accomplished. It will require a civil and diplomatic effort as well, part of which will need to be economic rehabilitation which will work better if started sooner rather than later.Three months into the war and with no end in sight, the government needs to make clear statements about what it intends for the day after. Failing to do so risks losing international support and harming the war effort.
The State of Israel has always had a problem with kicking the can down the road instead of confronting issues, be it the continued failure to form a constitution, the refusal to seriously discuss a lasting solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or a whole plethora of other issues which remain in limbo for years and even decades on end. In a matter of life and death such as the situation in Gaza, there is nowhere else for the can to go. It has reached the end of the road.