One of the bigger questions we’ve been grappling with ever since the beginning of the Israeli counterassault in Gaza has been what the Strip would look like after Hamas is (hopefully) fully rooted out and destroyed. It’s a prickly question with no easy, obvious answers. Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble and Hamas was the only recognized form of government that the Gazans had. None of their neighbors want to take them all in as refugees and even the Palestinian Authority has no interest in being put in charge of that mess. This weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to answer these questions by releasing a report titled, “Plan for the Day after Hamas.” To make a long story short, almost nobody seems to be satisfied with it, including the White House. (Jerusalem Post)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the “Plan for the day after Hamas” to members of the political and security cabinet after midnight on Friday, according to Israeli media.
The main points of the plan deal with identifying a civilian-level body that will be responsible for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and will preserve the IDF’s freedom of action.
“Israel will maintain operational freedom of action in the entire Gaza Strip, without a time limit, for the purpose of preventing the renewal of terrorism and thwarting threats from Gaza,” reads the beginning of the document.
To be fair to Netanyahu’s critics, this plan is very vaguely worded and really doesn’t seem to incorporate any compromises that even some of Israel’s allies have been calling for. It’s basically a summary of what Bibi Netanyahu has set forth as Israel’s operational plan from the beginning. He wants to permanently establish a clear firing zone around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip and halt any future flow of weapons into the region by maintaining operational control of all border crossings. He also plans to allow the IDF to maintain a presence in Gaza for the foreseeable future. None of this will make the Islamic forces in the region happy.
As to who will take responsibility for establishing a functional government to replace Hamas, Netanyahu only references an undefined “civilian-level body.” Presumably, such a body would be composed of Gazans, but the vast majority of them supported Hamas and likely still do. Therein lies the problematic nature of a proposal titled “The Day After Hamas.” When would Hamas supposedly be “gone” permanently? You can kill or imprison each and every one of their fighters wearing uniforms, but there are plenty more who never put on any official military garb. The horrible videos from October 7 show plenty of people in civilian garb (including children) storming over the border into Israel and committing war crimes. They will never be fully rid of them as long as there are still people living in the Strip.
It’s also unclear how much of a difference it will make whether or not there is a functional civilian government in Gaza or what it is called. Hamas was never a truly functional government in the sense that most of us understand the word. The Gaza strip was a place of misery, poverty, and despair under their rule. They took most of the useful supplies coming into the Strip for themselves and left the supposed civilians to largely fend for themselves. They left it up to Israel to supply almost all of the food, water, and power used by Gaza while they focused on arming their fighters and constructing terror tunnels.
The point is that the Gaza Strip was dysfunctional on the best of days. Simply hunting down the Hamas fighters isn’t going to make the rest of that society any more functional. With all of that in mind, Netanyahu’s plan may come up short in terms of details, but it’s unclear what else people expected Bibi to propose. Perhaps the White House should draw up its own plan to offer as an alternative. But I doubt anything Biden’s team might suggest would do much more than pave the way for the rise of the next version of Hamas.