Palestinian children run as they flee from Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Nov. 6, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.AFP Contributor#AFP/Getty Images
The ruination Israel has brought to the Gaza Strip has raised the sobering possibility of a chaotic future for a region whose governance has been called into question.
But in the dark wreckage of Gaza, where countless bodies still lie beneath rubble as bombs continue to fall, hope has flickered to life.
Perhaps, some now say, the destruction will also put to rest the many decades of failed attempts to find a more permanent solution for Israelis and Palestinians. A global effort is under way to envisage a “day after” that moves past all the bloodshed.
French President Emmanuel Macron has planned a “humanitarian conference” in Paris on Thursday. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called for a peace conference. U.S. President Joe Biden, too, has said the war must prompt change: “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our view it has to be a two-state solution,” he said two weeks ago.
In a Sunday meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that if there is a “comprehensive political solution” that involves the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, then the PA is prepared to take charge of Gaza.
Even Hassan Nasrallah, the head of heavily armed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, suggested as much. War has returned “the Palestinian cause, the just cause, as the focal cause for the whole world,” he said in his first public comments since Israel declared war on Hamas, a group allied with Hezbollah.
It’s all part of an optimism that has taken root among Palestinians amid the destruction in Gaza.
“The region needed this shock. The Israelis, in particular, needed to be shocked,” said Qadura Fares, a Palestinian leader who is currently commissioner for prisoners’ affairs. “To ignore the rights, the national rights, of the Palestinian people, it will not work.”
Israel’s war on Hamas is unlikely to be a short one. But it presages a very different future, one in which Hamas has a diminished ability to rule Gaza, in which deeply unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no longer Israel’s most powerful figure and in which the Palestinian Authority is thrust into crisis, either by the West Bank protests that have already erupted against it or by the departure of Mr. Abbas, who will soon turn 88.
“This will open a new era,” said Ismat Mansour, a West Bank specialist in Palestinian-Israeli relations. “Everything will change.”
In Israel, public opinion polls show a collapse of support for Mr. Netanyahu, whose war cabinet has already sidelined far-right politicians with whom the Prime Minister formed government.
For many Israelis, the Oct. 7 attacks have cast a harsh light on the accommodationist policies of Mr. Netanyahu, who sought to maintain a power divide between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. He tacitly supported Hamas by allowing foreign cash to reach the militant group and by creating new economic opportunities for Gazans by increasing the number of work permits.
The advent of war has broken core presuppositions for Israelis, said Donniel Hartman, a rabbi who is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a centre for Jewish thought. One is that “we can keep a group of people intent on killing us at bay with some money and a little self-interest. That concept is gone.”
Another is that the status quo is sustainable.
“The big flaw in Israeli thinking is that we thought we could separate Gaza from Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Israeli term for the West Bank. “The reality is that Gaza is not sustainable as an entity to itself. And I think the day after is going to require a much broader resolution. The problem is that nobody knows or can identify any player within the Palestinian community who is a serious partner.”
The question of Palestinian leadership is a crucial one – made even more difficult by the war. Jehad Harb, an independent political analyst in the West Bank, suggests a “national salvation government” made up of representatives from both Hamas and Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat and, today, Mr. Abbas. Such a government would be mandated to pursue elections and reconstruction.
Others, including former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, have suggested that international troops, perhaps led by NATO, could provide a security force for Gaza after the war.
But optimistic visions for the future of Gaza must confront political and historical realities.
If Israel achieves its goal of laying waste to the leadership of Hamas, it will also have destroyed its governance capacity. Palestinian leaders in the West Bank have already said they cannot be expected to govern Gaza without a vote.
Any attempt to hold Palestinian elections, however, will have to address the question of candidates with connections to Hamas, at a time when Israel is less likely than ever to approve such a thing, said Nathan Brown, a scholar at George Washington University who specializes in Palestinian politics.
Before Oct. 7, a concerted effort was under way to hold local elections in Gaza, as a building block to more consequential voting. That possibility now lies in tatters.
International peacekeeping efforts in the region have been chaotic. In Lebanon, a multinational force of U.S., French, British and Italian troops lasted less than two years, its retreat prompted in part by the 1983 bombing of a barracks in Beirut that killed almost 300 U.S. and French soldiers.
Even if such a force could be constituted for Gaza, who would take care of policing? Police there today are hired by Hamas.
The alternative, Prof. Brown said, is local gangs, of the sort that now run some Palestinian camps in Lebanon. Gaza could become a “supercamp.”
Intense diplomatic efforts and Israeli concessions could forestall such a result. Prof. Brown is not optimistic. Israel, he said, has gone into Gaza in much the same way the U.S. invaded Iraq, with too little consideration of longer-term consequences.
When the war is over, “things are going to be shaken up within Israel. And things are going to be shaken up in Palestinian politics,” he said. “But probably for the worse.”