The starting point of the “day after” the war should find Hamas in a state of surrender. That is, we will have to see the complete disarmament of the organization and all its supporters. Anything less than that could be considered a return to “the day before”.
If we take into account that Hamas’s movement encompasses about 30,000-50,000 active armed terrorists in the Gaza Strip, than the entire population of Gaza, numbering about 2.7 million Palestinians, potentially includes many more terrorists. This is for the simple reason that Hamas, similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and other such factions, is not only a movement but an embodiment of an ideology, one which has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the Palestinian public over the years.
It is true that not all Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas. However, this does not mean that those Palestinians who do not are necessarily interested in living in peace side by side with Israel. Their teaching materials, their sermons in the mosques, and their content in the media all comprise of extreme incitement, leaving little room for independent thinking when it comes to Israel and/or Jews. While other Arab countries have begun the process of making the content of the textbooks more inclusive and tolerant, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jordan have remained steadfast in their refusal to change even a single word in this regard.
The United Nations funds the Palestinians through the UNRWA agency, while the USA supports them via USAID, the European Union, Canada and more. In theory, they all fund the Palestinians’s welfare, but in practice, these countries may also be supporting incitement.
Following the events of October 7, the European Union has made the decision to stop funding the Palestinian Authority, starting in 2024, owing to its realization of the aforementioned reality. Yet there is still a lot of work to be done in order to make sure that what will nurture the minds of young Palestinians from now on will be completely different from the contents they have been exposed to thus far, so as to make it possible to build a saner future in this region. So, any solution that is adopted in the Gaza Strip the day after the war may become an abject failure if it is not backed up by a fundamental change mentioned above.
At the same time, there must no longer be a situation where only a fence or a wall separates Israeli citizens from residents of the Gaza Strip. In the new reality, a security strip should be established, similar to the one that exists on the Egyptian side of its common border with Gaza. Any movement in the area in question should be dealt with severely. No sovereign country can accept the presence of hostile elements on its very borders, so it is unreasonable to expect of the State of Israel to put up with such an extreme reality.
After the subjugation of Hamas, it should not be assumed that Israel will remain in the Strip for too long. It is still important to remember that Hamas’s ideology does not only threaten Israel. This is a threat to the entire enlightened world and therefore it is appropriate to examine the handling of the stabilization of the Gaza Strip on the day after from a broad prism and not simply a local one.
Who will rule Gaza temporarily after Hamas is deposed?
It is also clear that in post war Gaza, a new temporary sovereign must be instated, which is neither Hamas nor the radical Sunni Islamist leadership, Fatah al-Islam, as suggested by some senior officials in the international arena. First, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has already stated that he is not interested in bearing responsibility for the Strip. It is difficult to blame him, considering that only in 2006, following the withdrawal of the IDF from the Gaza Strip and Hamas’s rise to power in democratic elections, the movement’s activists lynched their Palestinian colleagues belonging to Fatah. Second, there is much incitement in the West Bank too making it also not suitable to govern Gaza in a peaceful manner alongside Israel - at least for the time being. Without eradicating this hatred, the West Bank cannot possibly be expected to lead as a stable, peaceful entity alongside Israel. Third, given Iran’s systematic and very thorough efforts to root its extreme ideology into the young people in the West Bank as well, Hamas has also grown there in recent years, alongside the Islamic Jihad and other extreme movements that are simply fed up with Fatah’s perceived corrupt leadership in the West Bank, making this entire area also unsafe and not devoid of extreme ideological influence.
Hence, Gaza should be divided into several parts, with each part being managed by a different international body, which is not the UN.
The management should not only be security oriented, but also civilian and logistical, similar to the way in which Germany was managed after World War II. Because the crimes perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against civilians on October 7 are not fundamentally different from those carried out by the Nazis during World War II. If the IDF had not stopped them, their scope would have been much greater than it was on that Black Sabbath.
Therefore, we and the world should treat the management of the Gaza Strip with a degree of severity that is consistent with the one adopted following World War II. In this wise, the USA, Great Britain, France and Germany should be the bodies which shall bear responsibility of governing the Strip. Only following the stabilization thereof, and after a decade, elections for an inherent Palestinian leadership should be able to take place there. During this time, no Palestinian workers should enter Israeli territory. The aforementioned four countries must bring about the dismantling of the refugee camps that have been maintained as such for 75 years, despite being under Palestinian autonomous rule. The US, UK, France and Germany can work together to create sustainable sources of income and to diversify employment opportunities, as well as establish housing solutions for the residents of the Gaza Strip.
Although it is very difficult to think of a solution to the Gaza Strip without solving the entire Palestinian issue, at this stage - and until the Gaza Strip is stabilized - it is not possible to connect these two geographical entities, both in terms of leadership and from a practical-geographic point of view. Therefore, at this stage, I will not deal with providing a holistic response to the broad Palestinian issue.
In any scenario however, managing Gaza on the day after will set an example for the treatment of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the whole question of coexistence between Arabs and Jews within the State of Israel. Strengthening internal security in the country and strict, systematic and equal enforcement for all citizens of the country will be a condition for this, including the uncompromising collection of all illegal weapons in Israel and the eradication of crime and violence in the Arab Israeli society. It should no longer be possible to ignore the fact that an uncontrolled criminal infrastructure within Israel’s borders constitutes a fertile ground for the promotion of foreign interests by Iran and terrorist entities.
The writer is a former MK from the Blue and White party, a former adviser to president Shimon Peres, and past deputy ambassador in Cairo.