A parade of high-ranking officials from the United States have visited Israel to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse a post-Gaza war peace plan that’s to Washington’s liking.
Netanyahu has indicated repeatedly that discussion of “day after,” post-war planning must await the crushing of Hamas’ government and military capabilities in the Gaza Strip.
Last week, he canceled a five-member War Cabinet meeting scheduled to take up the subject and delayed it until January 3 at the earliest to include a larger number of his government allies.
At the core, Netanyahu’s overriding war aim differs from the goals of Israel’s chief military and economic benefactor, US President Joe Biden.
The Israeli leader has unabashedly ignored Biden’s direct calls for a long-term solution to the entrenched Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.
The difference is stark: While Biden is already focusing on long-term issues of peace, Netanyahu has primarily laid out proposals to plug short-term security holes that he believes provided the opportunity for Hamas to launch its October 7 attack on Israel.
His stand is seemingly popular with the Israeli public, which is still angry and traumatized by the Hamas raid into southern Israel that killed about 1,200 Israeli civilians, including women and children. Reports of how Hamas weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 assault have fueled the thirst for revenge.
Meanwhile, local health authorities say more than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, most of them civilians hit by Israeli bombing. Half of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people are at risk of starvation due to Israeli restrictions on aid delivery and the lack of security for aid workers within the territory, the United Nations says.
Netanyahu has laid out elements of his own vision of the future, in bits and pieces, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, to his Western allies.
His first priority, beyond killing Hamas operatives and leaders, is to establish buffer zones inside Gaza along its northern, eastern and southern borders to prevent repeat raids into Israeli territory.
Israeli troops would be permanently based inside the Gaza Strip, much as they are within territory occupied by Israel in parts of the West Bank. There, Israeli troops frequently pre-emptively raid Palestinian areas to rout Palestinian guerrillas and suspected terrorists.
The creation of this cordon sanitaire has been preceded by military tactics meant primarily to destroy Hamas’ military and political power.
In the first phase of the operation, Israel bombed and shelled Gaza Strip neighborhoods thought to shelter Hamas officials and guerrillas. The assaults were then supplemented by ground forces seeking out Hamas gunman said to be operating from underground tunnel complexes.
Israeli troops are currently engaged in a third phase involving lower-intensity ground-level search and kill operations to rout remaining pockets of Hamas resistance. This phase is designed to lay the groundwork for a permanent presence inside Gaza designed to prevent future Hamas attacks.
On January 1, the Israeli military said it would begin withdrawing, at least temporarily, several thousand troops from the Gaza Strip. The military cited the war’s growing toll on Israel’s economy for the move.
The model for the permanent presence plan in Gaza already exists in the West Bank, where Israeli troops have long operated to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and are currently raiding towns to battle scattered violent opponents.
“No one wants to take control of Gaza. After the war, Israel will deal with Gaza like the West Bank. Israeli forces will go in and out as they wish,” predicted Marwan al-Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan and currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
Parallel to combat operations, Netanyahu has proposed the creation of a client Palestinian government that would administer civilian life in Gaza. However, he has rejected participation in such a regime by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank.
Instead, he envisions a yet-unidentified corps of Palestinian “technocrats” to be recruited to govern and be protected by a foreign armed contingent, possibly made up of Arab troops.
In recognition that many Palestinians will have no housing to return to in Gaza’s bombed-out and ruined neighborhoods and refugee camps, Israeli officials have approached European Union governments to take in thousands of refugees. Egypt and Jordan, neighbors that have diplomatic relations with Israel, have said neither will accept refugees.
Theoretically, if there are no takers willing to administer the Gaza Strip, the responsibility would fall on Israel as the only organized power capable of taking charge. Israeli military officials are reluctant to play such a future role, Israeli officials have said.
But some fear an unexpected health disaster, including a possible outbreak of disease, might arise that would put pressure on the army to administer to a sick and war-ravaged population, including by bringing some of them inside Israel itself.
“For now, Netanyahu is keeping the specifics of his intended solution for post-war Gaza close to his chest. That is, if he even has his own vision for a viable Gaza on the day after,” noted a writer for the Times of Israel, which is frequently critical of Netanyahu.
In any event, Netanyahu’s wartime sequence suggests open-ended rather than finite hostilities, coupled with some sort of Israeli governing oversight.
The US has a much different script in mind. Biden, for one, has cautioned Israel not to occupy Gaza permanently. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly expressed Biden’s desire for a revival of the so-called “two-state solution”, a formula Netanyahu has long opposed.
There are rising indications that Biden has become exasperated with Netanyahu’s public and private stands. The New York Times reported that Biden has sometimes “shouted” at Netanyahu during advisory phone calls about the postwar future in Gaza.
Over the weekend, Blinken criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Netanyahu, a three-time prime minister, has backed over his long political career.
“We’ve been clear that this includes things like settlement expansion, the legalization of outposts, demolitions and evictions, disruptions to the historic status of the holy sites, and, of course, incitement and acquiescence to violence,” Blinken said.
Blinken is scheduled to visit with Netanyahu this week. Since the war began, Biden, his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns have all met with the Israeli leader.
Neither Biden nor his foreign policy team, despite their rhetorical devotion to the two-state formula, has yet to describe a mechanism for negotiating such a solution to the imbroglio.
The creation of a Palestinian state was first broached more than 30 years ago, under US President George H W Bush. Negotiations and the broad notion withered away during subsequent administrations.
Prolonged warfare may provide the political space for Netanyahu to resist the two-state revival. Biden faces what is expected to be a heated reelection contest in November against former president Donald Trump, who is uninterested in a two-state outcome and is known to have friendly relations with Netanyahu.
Current polls say Trump will win in November. It might also be a win for Netanyahu’s stand against a two-state outcome.