The 11 week-long war between Israel and Hamas is only getting more complicated as the days continue. And as the fighting persists, leaders on all sides of the dispute, in addition to those who aren't even engaged in the fighting, will be forced to make some critical decisions about the way forward.
The most immediate task for the Israelis is to free the roughly 130 hostages still under the grip of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and unaffiliated criminal groups in Gaza. While this has been a top Israeli priority since the first day of the war, the issue is an ever-tightening noose around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's neck at a time when Israel's longest serving head-of-state is facing down political threats from all directions. Last week's incident in which Israeli troops in Gaza City shot and killed three hostages, purportedly bare-chested, and waving a white flag, has angered hostages' families who have long since become disillusioned with Netanyahu's war strategy and angered by what they perceive as a lack of compassion for their situation.
The killings have also re-centered the Israeli government's focus and boosted a willingness to enter into a second round of truce talks with Hamas, the very terrorist group it has vowed to destroy. Netanyahu previously blocked Mossad Chief David Barnea's request to return to Qatar for talks, but apparently had a change of heart days later. CIA Director William Burns met with Barnea and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammad bin Abdulrahman al-Thani in Poland earlier this week to probe ideas on how to entice Palestinian militant outfits in Gaza to release the remaining hostages. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' top political leader, traveled to Cairo to discuss the subject with Egyptian intelligence officials as well. Something is clearly brewing; the Israelis reportedly put in an initial offer that would suspend military operations for a week and release more Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Hamas freeing about 40 hostages. Time will tell whether the talks succeed.
Going beyond the issue of the hostages is how Israel plans to manage Gaza after the war ends. Netanyahu and his cabinet spent weeks largely ignoring the question, arguing that it wasn't the time to talk about post-conflict contingencies when conflict itself was brewing. The Israelis were perfectly content with brushing "the day after" under the rug.
But on the urging of the Biden administration, Israel has started providing some hints about what it envisions. Netanyahu's preliminary plan, however, is short on detail, isn't supported by the United States, the Arab-majority states, or the Palestinians themselves, and resembles a Goldilocks proposal amounting to perpetual Israeli security control over more than 2 million Palestinians in the enclave. The rest—service provision, health care, economic development and reconstruction—will be left to somebody else. The problem: The countries most likely to help a post-Hamas Gaza administration with such tasks, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar (among others) don't have any intention of bailing Israel out of a mess it helped create. The same can be said of the U.S., which has stressed on a number of occasions that it won't accept a post-war arrangement that leaves Israel in control of Gaza in perpetuity, or shrinks Gaza's landmass.
But this is precisely what Netanyahu is proposing. Whereas the Biden administration would rather fly the Palestinian Authority (PA) into Gaza, the Israeli premier is dead set against it. Netanyahu doesn't seem to make much of a distinction between Hamas and the PA, the chief institutional creation of an Oslo peace process he never bought into (and actively campaigned against during his first campaign for the prime minister post in the 1990s). "The PA doesn't fight terror, it supports it," Netanyahu told reporters earlier this month. "It doesn't educate for peace, it educates for the destruction of Israel. This isn't the entity that needs to enter there [Gaza]." This stance is getting on the nerves of U.S. and foreign officials.
"We will work to prevent the reoccupation of Gaza, but there aren't any volunteers to govern there besides the PA, which the current Israeli government is determined to weaken, so where does that leave us?" a diplomat asked The Times of Israel.
The Biden administration is asking the same question. Their whole plan rests on the PA returning to Gaza after being kicked out by Hamas more than 16 years earlier. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas last week in Ramallah to begin a conversation on the specifics. The White House hopes that bringing new blood into the old, sclerotic Palestinian leadership would mollify some of Israel's concerns about the PA's return to the enclave, a reshuffling that could even include Abbas delegating more power to a technocratic prime minister with more credibility in the eyes of the Palestinian people. Whether this would be enough to get Israel onboard is an open question.
The U.S. has remained steadfast with Israel thus far, agreeing that Hamas has no place in the Palestinian political space. But the disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem can no longer be papered over.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
