Israel doesn’t have good options

@DanielSeidemann says: “A lone protester now I’m Tel Aviv: Bibi in exchange for the hostages.”

From what I hear on NPR this morning, the Israelis have now focused their Gaza objective to destroying the military capability of Hamas, rather than destroying Hamas altogether. That is good news, as the latter objective was unachievable. It would have required not only a massive deployment of Israeli troops but also a post-war effort to rebuild governance. Like it or not, Hamas provides health, education, social welfare, and other civilian services to the more than 2 million people who live in Gaza.

The traps

There is still however a question of whether an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza is a trap, as Hussein Ibish has argued. Hamas will have prepared carefully for that eventuality. Booby traps, small-unit resistance, organized and spontaneous protests will prolong the Israeli presence. That will provide ever greater opportunities for murder and mayhem. Israel was already stretched thin maintaining its external embargo on Gaza before the Hamas assault. Re-occupying the territory is bound to lead to a prolonged and bloody mess.

It could also lead to a wider war. There has been some exchange of fire across Israel’s northern border with Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. But the lid is still on that front. An Israeli effort to eradicate Hamas could well lead to a green light from Tehran for Hizbollah, and possibly also Iranian proxies in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. All could launch missiles and drones against Israel from the north and south.

The Israeli government is still a problem

The Israeli army no doubt knows all this. But the Israeli government, even with the addition of a few more moderate opposition figures, is still hard right. Their constitutency will demand revenge and more. They were already blood and territory thirsty before the Hamas attack. The wave of settler violence in the last year against Palestinians on the West Bank was no accident. The Israeli government allowed it.

Hamas’ intentionally brutal and deadly assault and its taking of hostages will unhinge Jewish supremacists. They may well retaliate against West Bank Palestinians. Or even seek to drive many Gaza Palestinians into Egypt, which has agreed to partially reopen its Rafah checkpoint. Even with the best of intentions, the Israeli army is likely to make deadly mistakes in its air attacks on Gaza. But intentions are not the best.

What are the alternatives?

We can hope that the Israeli deployment of ground forces around Gaza is both preventive and intimadatory. It could incentivize Hamas into surrendering at least some of the hostages. Their number is unclear, but it may be 100 or more, which is a lot of people to hide, house, and feed. Hamas is not above offering to return some women and children, in order to gain credit with at least some in the Muslim world. Prospects for the men however are grim, as the history suggests the they may be kept for a long time.

Israel could consider a much tighter embargo on Gaza than it maintained in the past. It had allowed money, supplies, electricity, and water into Hamas-ruled Gaza. Some Gaza residents were allowed to work in Israel. Cutting those connections would amount to a siege of the civilian population, which is arguably a war crime. Even the current siege might be considered both unnecessary and disproportional to the military objective, which is to end Hamas’ military capabilities.

Israel could also try to implant in Gaza a less hostile governing capability, presumably an offshoot of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that has helped to maintain order in the West Bank. But the PA is widely discredited with the Palestinian population. It is hard to picture how it could gain traction in Gaza, where any effort to do so would likely lead to a deadly fight with the remnants of Hamas. Letting the Palestinians fight it out however might be an appealing scenario to some in Israel, even if there is a risk that Hamas might win.

Pie in the sky

Israel might conclude from recent events that its policy of denying the Palestinians a state and making their lives hard by occupying the West Bank and embargoing Gaza was the wrong approach.

It could instead decide to entrust a large portion of the West Bank to unrestricted but democratic PA rule and help the Palestinians to achieve a much higher level of security and prosperity. This would aim mto revive the Palestinian political project, as Paul Scham has suggested. Having achieved success in the West Bank, Israel could then hope to move Gaza in the same direction.

The United States is in a tough spot too

That would be hard and it won’t likely happen. Israeli politics for decades have pointed in the opposite direction. Israel under Netanyahu and his mostly likely successors is committed to a one state reality with unequal rights. Jews get full rights, Palestinians and other minorities who live in Israel proper get less. Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza get little.

This reality puts the United States in a difficult spot. So far, the Biden Administration has shown no inclination to rein in Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians. But what is about to happen in Gaza could test that restraint.