Israel already needs a plan for the day after it topples Hamas - analysis

On US President Joe Biden’s flight to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, National Security spokesperson John Kirby said Biden would be asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “some tough questions.”

Among those tough questions were certainly ones about what Israel would do to prevent as many civilian casualties as possible inside Gaza, what Israel would do to prevent a humanitarian crisis, and how Jerusalem planned to respond to Hezbollah provocations in the north.

And one of those tough questions was surely a simple one: what is the endgame? What is Israel’s plan and vision for the Gaza Strip the day after?

Israel clearly stated the goal of this war: to destroy Hamas and remove its control over Gaza. But what happens the day after? Then what?

Amid the horror, shock, and fury that has gripped this country since October 7, there has been little public discussion inside Israel of this issue and the future of the Gaza Strip.

From an Israeli point of view, this is entirely understandable. With the blood still boiling from the horrific Simchat Torah massacre, the country’s focus is simply on uprooting Hamas, on delivering the terrorist organization a mortal blow. 

Everything else can wait, including apportioning blame and responsibility for the catastrophe and thinking about what comes next.

But for Washington, a “we-will-deal-with-this-later” attitude is not enough, and for Biden to be able to sell continued support for Israel to his party and his country, he obviously wants to know what policy he is supporting and what Israel wants to do after Hamas is expelled.

Hamas: Short-term vs long-term goals

Delivering a devastating blow to Hamas and removing them from power in Gaza are short-term goals. But what is the long-term goal? This is important to define because some will only support short-term goals if they know the long-term plan.

And this places Israel in a dilemma because it has never articulated any long-term plan for Gaza.

Before October 7, Israel’s policy toward Gaza could be summed up as containing terrorism until Hamas either realizes that it is not in their interest to pursue terror or something big happens and it is driven from power.

Well, now something big has happened, and Israel is determined to drive Hamas from power. Biden came here partly to hear from Israel what comes next.

On the face of it, the options are rather limited.

The first option is that Israel re-occupies Gaza --either the whole area or part of it -- and remains there indefinitely.

The logic behind this is that the only way to ensure that, once kicked out, Hamas does not return is for Israel to be in control.

While two weeks ago this idea would have been dismissed as the rantings of the far-right, the Simchat Torah atrocities have brought discussion of that into the mainstream. Even though President Isaac Herzog has said publicly that Israel has no intention of doing this, the idea is out there.

In a 60-minute interview on Sunday, Biden related to this and said that, in his estimation, such a move would be a “big mistake.” He certainly made that position clear in his meetings here on Wednesday.

After dismantling Hamas, a second option is for Israel to hand control of it and its more than two million residents to the Palestinian Authority.

The problem with this option is that the Palestinian Authority, both weak and highly unpopular among Palestinians, can barely control the areas in the West Bank currently under its control, let alone take on a much bigger project.

 In this scenario, handing Gaza over to the PA, which the Palestinian Authority lost control of in 2007 in a bloody coup, would likely necessitate Israel retaining the right to enter the Gaza Strip, as it does currently in Palestinian towns in the West Bank, for security reasons.

A third option would be for Egypt to take control of the area, something Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made abundantly clear he has no interest in doing.

And another option would be for Gaza to come under the administration of some kind of international consortium, perhaps an international peacekeeping team or a group of states from the Organization of Islamic Conference.

This option, too, is considered unrealistic. First, few countries are biting at the bit to take on this chore. Second, Israel’s experience with international peacekeepers keeping terrorist groups out of territory has not been good, as evidenced by the situation in southern Lebanon, where peacekeepers have been unable to keep Hezbollah from taking control and threatening Israel.

In addition, inviting international actors into an area where Israel might continuously need to engage militarily is only inviting trouble.

Since none of those possibilities are particularly attractive, developing other, perhaps more creative ideas is needed to present as an endgame.

Having an endgame is essential not only to answer Biden’s question but also for other reasons, including to help Israel’s public diplomacy efforts as the war grinds on and the focus, as is already the case, moves from the October 7 massacre to the devastation in Gaza.

Israeli spokespeople interviewed about the situation have so far been able to deflect questions about an endgame by saying “first things first,” first let the country defeat Hamas, and then Israel will deal with the future of Gaza. 

But the country’s public diplomacy efforts would be helped if the spokespeople said, “We are destroying Hamas today, and this is what we want to see happen tomorrow.”

In the need for an endgame, Israel should learn from the experience of the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel won that war, but never succeeded in clearly defining what it hoped to see down the line. It never defined clearly, and still has not defined clearly, what its endgame was for Judea and Samaria. And it suffered from that lack of clarity.

As the Palestinians demanded a complete return to the 1967 lines, Israel always said what it wanted depended on what the Arabs said, what the Americans wanted, and what the Palestinians would agree to. But Israel never stated clearly what it wanted to do with the territories. It always depends, but depends is not policy. One cannot achieve what one does not define.

Israel already needs to define what it wants to see happen in Gaza when the war ends and Hamas is destroyed. Only then, maybe, will this be achievable.