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Israel says it will destroy Hamas. But who will govern Gaza next?

2023-10-24 23:41:18Fokus SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Israel says it will destroy Hamas. But who will govern Gaza next?
Images from the Israeli army on the border with the Gaza Strip

By Steven Erlanger*

At a time when Israeli soldiers are massed to force their way into Gaza, the defense minister addressed them saying “You now see Gaza from a distance; you will soon see it from the inside.”

But despite this pledge from the minister, Yoav Gallant, it is not clear when Israel will carry out a ground invasion. And while the government appears reluctant to enter Gaza — more than two weeks since a Hamas attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis — there are reasons to enter.

What awaits is the kind of sustained urban warfare the country's military has not seen in nearly a decade, and in pursuit of a political end that remains unclear, other than defeating Hamas, which controls Gaza, in order to never threaten Israel again.

In itself, this is a tall order that will require the Israelis to establish control over Gaza for themselves, and that will cost significant amounts of blood, treasure, and international outrage over civilian deaths.

And hanging over everything is the political puzzle of what happens to Gaza after the war ends. Once in, how does Israel get out? Having dismantled Hamas, if he can, to whom will he hand the keys? If Hamas no longer governs Gaza, who will?

For now, Israeli officials say, these questions are not their immediate concern. But they will be inevitable, even if Gaza becomes the responsibility of a new Israeli government.

"Really, there are no good options for an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza," Tom Beckett, a retired British Army lieutenant general and Middle East executive director for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in a brief analysis. .

"Regardless of how successful the operation is in defeating Hamas as a military organization, Hamas' political imperative and popular support for the resistance will continue," he wrote. "Israel either reoccupies Gaza to control it, or, retreating after an offensive, gives the land to people for whom resistance is existence."

Adm. Daniel Hagari, the spokesman for the Israeli army, has said that the army "is focused on the objectives of the war as defined by the political echelon: the destruction of Hamas and the elimination of its leaders after the massacre they carried out on Shabbat"

"This organization will not rule Gaza militarily and politically," he added.

But someone has to. This is a weakness of the Israeli strategy because Hamas represents a political and religious idea that cannot be dissolved, and is an organization that has thrived on its reputation among Palestinians for embracing armed struggle and "martyrdom" against Israel.

"Even if defeated militarily, Hamas cannot be neutralized," said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East Institute at London's SOAS University. "That the existence or legitimacy of Hamas is tied to its military success is false. It can be defeated militarily and remain politically important," she said. "It can present any defense as heroic martyrdom for the sake of the liberation of the Palestinian people"

For Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London, Israel's challenge is to "match its military means with its political goals." No matter how competent a military is, he said in an interview, a political goal that is too ambitious will result in disappointment or failure.

Numerous examples, including US military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of broad and ambitious political goals such as democratization and gender equality, have resulted in failure. The easy invasions ended in long, ferocious campaigns against local militias and radical Islamic fighters who knew the territory, lived among the population, and did not obey the Geneva Conventions or the rules of war.

And American-created governments required large and constant amounts of money and Western military support to survive.

Mr Freedman wrote about some of his concerns in the Financial Times.

Israelis, he said in a later interview, risk a similar fate. "They have set themselves an ambition that is extremely difficult to fulfill, because even if they deal a heavy blow to Hamas, they cannot stop its regeneration," he said. Israel cannot occupy Gaza indefinitely and does not want to, he said, adding, "and it cannot push the population into Egypt, which wants nothing to do with Gaza either."

So, without a clear political strategy, Mr. Freedman said, "it's hard to see if this goes anywhere"

In August 2014, after a serious Israeli-Hamas conflict, ideas about what to do with Gaza were floated in a confidential options document provided to The Times. He declared, predictably, that "a return to the status quo will produce a new war" and that the Palestinian Authority is "too weak and divided to govern."

The best solution, the paper suggested, was to authorize United Nations forces to control Gaza's borders while Palestinian militias are disbanded and disarmed and the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza is gradually lifted. In 2014, the paper assumed that Hamas would continue to control Gaza but could agree to moderate its behavior in return.

The paper also pointed out that the existing UN Armistice Monitoring Organization, established in 1948, retains a legal mandate to patrol Gaza, even though it left in 1996 after the Oslo Accords. Under a reconfigured mandate, UNTSO could patrol Gaza's borders and help disarm militias, while another existing international committee would coordinate donor aid.

Nine years later, the newspaper can serve as a starting point. If Hamas and similar groups are destroyed in Gaza, as Israel promises, perhaps UNTSO can help keep the peace even inside Gaza as a kind of supplementary police force while the status and credibility of the Palestinian Authority is somewhat revived there.

The 2014 debate was real, said Robert Serry, a Dutch diplomat who served as the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. "We had hoped that the Palestinian Authority could be restored," he said.

While that may be as unrealistic now as it was then, each time "we allowed the situation to revert to the status quo," with a fragile cease-fire and "minimal adjustments to keep Gaza afloat," Mr. Serry said.

Now, he said, “I hope Israel learns a lesson. If they continue to ignore the Palestinian issue, it will occasionally erupt, the question is when"

Israel tried to escape responsibility for Gaza before and failed. Her political answer to who would run Gaza turned out to be wrong, and she essentially threw the keys to Gaza into the street.

In 2005, Israel withdrew all its troops and citizens from Gaza, and handed power there to Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority. But Fatah lost legislative elections the following year to Hamas, and in 2007, when Fatah broke a deal with Hamas, Hamas seized power in Gaza in a brief and brutal civil war, dividing the Palestinians not only territorially but politically.

In the current conflict, Israel will have to control what is left of Gaza and garrison Israeli forces there until a political settlement allows them to leave, which will prolong the military's presence, especially if Hezbollah opens a second front from southern Lebanon or if violence increases in the occupied West Bank between Israeli settlers and Palestinians.

Of course, if Gaza's urban centers are destroyed and ground operations lead to the displacement of large parts of the population, it will be easier for the Israeli army to control Gaza without completely occupying it, said Ms. Khatib from SOAS. "It's a war tactic used by other regimes in the Middle East," she said, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his scorched-earth tactics against his opponents there.

Mr. Beckett agreed. "Brutality can reduce the numbers needed for a counter-insurgency," he wrote, citing the 1982 crackdown on resistance in Hama by former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.

His son, "Bashar Assad, supported by Russia, has applied indiscriminate brutality throughout the Syrian civil war," he added.

While the world is appalled by the killings of Hamas and is likely to give Israel more time than in the past to defeat Hamas, there are now concrete signs that Israel will obey the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war, including President Biden and Secretary of State Antony. J. Blinken.

The inevitable civilian deaths and injuries, as it always has, will eventually put considerable pressure on Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, pressure, especially from Washington, that may become too much to bear before Israel complies. its stated military purpose.

Israel is already trying to prepare its supporters around the world, and especially in the United States, to resist that kind of pressure to stop its operation before Hamas disintegrates.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, recently urged the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Washington-based pro-Israel lobby group, to stand with Israel despite the criticism.

"Even when the going gets ugly and the scenes from Gaza will be hard to deal with then we will need the support of everyone who loves freedom and wants to stand up for what is right," Colonel Conricus said in a online broadcast, referring to two Israeli villages where Hamas killed civilians.

In the past, he said, after "a small window of international legitimacy and support," public opinion changes "and Israel is forced by powerful countries around the world to limit its movement. We've seen that, and that's unfortunately what we have faced in the past. This time, - he said, - it must be different".

*New York Times


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