Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – General David Petraeus, as he prepared to help lead an invasion of Iraq, famously asked journalist Rick Atkinson, “Tell me how this ends.”
No one doubted that the US could invade and occupy Iraq. It just wasn’t clear even to insiders what the US could possibly do to get back out of Iraq once it went in, or what the future of Iraqi politics would be. In some ways, Petraeus’s question still has not been answered, since less than a decade ago the Iraqi army and government virtually collapsed and President Obama had to try to rebuild them, so that he was pulled into a war he had opposed.
Petraeus’s question would be a good one for the Israeli generals to ask themselves. There was never any doubt that the Israeli armed forces could bomb Gaza to smithereens and send in tank brigades and special operations forces.
There was also never any doubt that the ground war would be messy. Israeli troops have had to operate on the margins of the major population centers, and despite the successful population transfer of over a million people from north Gaza to the south, the Israeli military still does not appear to control key urban areas such as Gaza City in the north, much less cities in the south. This is so even though, as Haaretz reports, Gaza’s main drag where shops and hotels used to be has been reduced to rubble.
BBC Monitoring laid out three possible plans for the day after the fighting ends.
1. The Biden administration wants the Palestine Authority, essentially the Palestine Liberation Organization, to take over. Egypt strongly supports this plan. But PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayeh is aware that many Palestinians now see the PLO as little more than an adjunct to the Israeli military. He said that he wouldn’t go into Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks.
The most popular PLO leader is not PA President Mahmoud Abbas or PM Shtayyeh but Marwan Barghouti, who is in jail for directing terrorist attacks that killed numerous Israelis. He has also been floated as a possible leader in Gaza. The Israelis would, however, have to release him from prison and they’d have to trust him to turn over a new leaf. Trust is hard to come by as a commodity right now.
Another old time Fateh leader, strongman Mohammad Dahlan, is in exile in the United Arab Emirates and apparently in the good graces of Mohammad Bin Zayed, its leader. He is a businessman and deal broker and could gather up some capital, but he isn’t popular with Palestinians the way Barghouti is.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vehemently rejects PA rule in Gaza, and is campaigning among Israelis as the only one who can stop a PLO takeover of Gaza. He definitely would not accept Barghouti. Apparently not Dahlan either.
2. The Israeli government itself is all over the map as to whether Gaza will become like Areas B and C of the West Bank, permanently under Israeli military rule. Netanyahu sometimes talks like that. But I saw a clip of Defense Minister Yoav Galant saying that the Israeli army would not remain in Gaza. The two figures seem not to agree on much and can’t even share a podium at a common press conference.
Some in the Biden administration and European governments have floated an international force to come in and establish order.
Netanyahu, however, also rejects this plan.
“Gaza Guernica 15: Samer Abu Daqqa,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ IbisPaint/ PS Express, 2023; Aljazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa wounded by Israeli drone strike, bleeds out over 5 hours on the floor of a building as Israeli sniper fire kept medics from reaching him. RIP.
3. Hamas political leaders (the ones who survive Israel’s current attempt to wipe them all out) still haven’t given up on coming back to power under some arrangement. Mousa Abu Marzouk has floated the idea that Hamas could recognize Israel now the way the PLO did in 1993. Old Hamas war horse Ismail Haniyeh, who lives in Qatar, has been insisting that Hamas cannot be excluded from the future governance of Gaza.
The Israeli government would like to just kill all those Hamas leaders. But it isn’t in fact clear that it can do so. Hamas should be dissolved as an organization after the atrocities it committed on October 7, but its former members are unlikely all to be killed. It should be remembered that a lot of officials in the West German government in the 1950s were former Nazis., as Der Spiegel has also reported.
Shtayyeh has floated the idea of folding the remnants of Hamas into the PLO in Gaza and reducing them to junior partners.
Me, I think no Israeli government could accept anything that included the Hamas name. But apparently the decision-makers about October 7 were a small, closed clique, so there could be Hamas members that don’t have massive blood on their hands.
So none of these three plans — The PLO, Israeli direct control, or a return of a chastened Hamas, seems very likely to succeed. Two of the three are vetoed by the Israeli prime minister, though admittedly his government may fall before too long.
Likely the next prime minister of Israel will be Benny Gantz, a former general and recent minister of defense, who heads the Blue and White Party. My guess is that practically speaking, he and Biden will have to make a deal on some post war arrangement.
The danger is that a traumatized Israeli leadership used to saying “no” to everyone else and getting away with it will be at loggerheads with the Biden administration, which wants peace and quiet during the ’24 presidential campaign, and that the disposition of Gaza will become a football and that the issue will be allowed to drift.
That’s how we got into this mess in the first place.
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