Recently, articles have begun circulating which state that Israel has no plan for Gaza after their military operations cease. To the extent that Israel hasn’t stated what its plans are beyond the immediate military operations, this is true enough. I think that this is a horribly naive way of assessing the situation, and it ignores the history of cynical politics that have brought us to this point.
Up until the last couple of iterations of the Netanyahu regime, Likud has more or less managed to keep the most extreme elements of Israeli politics on the margins of government. The current coalition has a much different composition, with some highly radicalized players playing significant roles in the cabinet. These more radicalized people are opposed to any kind of peace arrangements with regards to the Palestinians, and are often active proponents of the Israeli “settlements” programs which clearly are intended to erode Palestinian presence on the lands and replace it with Jewish settlers.
From an external perspective, this creates a significant problem because these hardline activists generally seem to carry the belief that the only acceptable outcome is a contiguous Jewish State from the West Bank through to the Mediterranean Sea. This is presumably in part driven by religious beliefs, as well as a now toxic blend of propaganda that has been used to dehumanize the Palestinian people as well. (To be fair, Hamas no doubt does the same propaganda regarding the Israelis)
The stated goal of the current military operations in Gaza is to “destroy Hamas”. Sounds like a nice clean goal, except Hamas is just as much a part of the culture in Gaza as it is a governing body. If Israel’s government truly believes that blowing up buildings and rendering tunnel complexes unusable is going to destroy Hamas, they’ve missed the boat.
Israel might even be able to kill or capture much of Hamas’ organizational leadership, they’ve still missed the boat. Just as the idea of Israel as a state is a cultural and religious truth among the Jewish peoples, Hamas and its goals of liberating the Palestinian people from what it sees as Israeli oppression is now a cultural and religious truth. It is this very matter of “truth” that stands in the way of making meaningful progress towards a functional peace. Destroy the physical parts of Hamas, and a new Hamas will rise up among the people because you will have done nothing to address the issues that gave rise to Hamas in the first place.
Netanyahu has played a very cynical game with Hamas. It’s perhaps among the worst kinds of cynical politics, because while he was perfectly aware of what Hamas was, and what it represented, it was convenient to him to use them to drive political division between the Palestinians. With much of Hamas’ senior leadership living outside Gaza in other countries, flattening Gaza ultimately does very little to “destroy Hamas”. It may be disrupted for a period of time as a result of the current muscle-flexing by the Israel Defence Force (IDF), but it will re-emerge in a new form sometime after Israel ends its military operations.
To this point, Israel’s military response in Gaza looks a lot like US Vietnam-era “carpet bombing”. Drop lots of large explosives in the area and level as much of the city as possible. While the IDF continues to insist that they are “targeting militants”, that doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny when they level entire residential neighbourhood. It’s a bit like burning down a house because you saw a spider in it.
The IDF at this point has basically ordered civilians in Gaza to move south towards the Rafah border crossing, including ordering that hospitals be evacuated. Evacuating a hospital is a whole lot more complex than ordering the residents of an apartment complex to move, and sends a disturbing message about the IDF’s intentions. Hospitals are, even in wartime, places that you do not bomb deliberately.
No doubt, the IDF will argue that either Hamas is using the patients of the hospital as “human shields”, or that they have to destroy the facility in order to get at the tunnel complexes Hamas has dug underneath them. But that’s really no different than declaring that anybody they see in the evacuation area after their deadline will be assumed to be a militant. It provides easy justification for their actions, while avoiding the necessarily difficult problems of urban warfare.
So, what does this tell us about Israel’s unstated plans for Gaza?
It seems as though Israel is gearing up to render it uninhabitable. In other words, I fully expect that anything resembling a major population centre in Gaza is going to be bombed into rubble, followed by the use of “bunker buster” bombs to render the underground tunnel complexes unusable. This will effectively render most of the cities in Gaza uninhabitable. My guess is that Israel will do this with “northern Gaza” (everything northeast of the Wadi Gaza river), whether they move on to do the same towards Egypt depends on how hardline the Israeli government gets.
Flattening Gaza in the north will be justified by Israel in terms of “further securing Israel from Hamas incursions”, and would effectively split the Gaza into two pieces, with the bulk of the Palestinian population sandwiched southwest of the Wadi Gaza with Egypt and Israel bordering.
There have been rumours for a while now that Israel’s plan is basically to push Gaza’s Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai, and those come from multiple sources. Further, states like Egypt have expressed resistance to taking Palestinian refugees in. So, I’m hardly the only person who sees Israel’s ground strategy as further pressuring the Palestinians to leave Gaza. I suspect that the discussions within the Israeli government are revolving around depopulating Gaza by making it unlivable for the Palestinians.
They’ve already effectively doubled the population of southwest Gaza, which will inevitably create much larger problems as civil order breaks down due to the resource pressures that will create.
So, what does Israel do with Gaza once they declare that they have achieved their military objectives?
They will have a “tiger by the tail” problem at that point. There are a few options:
1. Israel undertakes a major military occupation while allowing the Gazans to pick up the pieces and rebuild. This will be the messy route because Gazans will be angry and IDF troops will rapidly find themselves targets of anything from thrown stones to active sabotage.
2. Israel could modify the above scenario by requesting UN or foreign (US?) peacekeeping forces come in and keep order, although one does wonder if that wouldn’t create a whole new set of problems.
3. If Israel stops at the Wadi Gaza line, it could establish a new “Gaza border” there, and leave Gazans in even more compressed circumstances. I do not think this would be wise, as the resulting pressure cooker in Gaza would quickly descend into a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli goal in this situation is that Palestinians caught in this pressure cooker will seek the “path of least resistance” and flee into Egypt by bypassing the Rafah border crossing.
4. It seems highly unlikely that Israel will simply pull out of Gaza at this point. The military / security perspective would be that doing so opens the door to allowing Hamas to rebuild far too easily. The minimum stance would be a locked down Gaza border with only “food and fuel” being allowed through. Again, this returns to the “pressure cooker” analogy, and is very likely to explode in Israel’s face sooner rather than later.
This is all rather gloomy, because the longer term outcomes of any of these is further suffering for Palestinian civilians, and it could quickly turn the Middle East into a war zone as countries around Israel fight back to either ensure their own political stability (e.g. Egypt), or because they come to perceive that Israel has lost all sanity. Further, militant “Islamist” groups may see this as an opportunity to further their own goals in the midst of the ensuing chaos.
All this because a very cynical Netanyahu decided that it was politically advantageous to try dividing the Palestinian peoples against themselves so he could claim that “there was no one to sit down at the table with” while the Palestinians were squabbling with each other.
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