When Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East on his most recent visit, one of the US secretary of state’s aims was to lift some of the fog over what happens to Gaza in the war’s aftermath, but he is meeting resistance both from Israel and Arab states.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Saturday at a press conference alongside Blinken: “What happens next? How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know what kind of Gaza will be left after this war is done? Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we going to be talking about a whole population reduced to refugees? Simply, we do not know – we do not have all the variables to even start thinking about that.”
The tentative US proposal is for a reformed Palestinian Authority, dominated by the secularist Fatah, which administers the West Bank, to come back to Gaza. But this is rejected by Israel’s right.
For instance, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, in a weekend interview on Israel’s Channel 12, rejected US advice to leave Gaza once the war ends. He said: “The day after, the most important thing is that there will be no Hamas in Gaza, and there will be operational control by the Israel Defence Forces for years.” He added: “It’s not like we’re going to destroy Hamas and another body will come along.”
Equally, Prof Jacob Nagel, a former national security adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has insisted Israel cannot risk relinquishing security control of Gaza. “No matter which entity will take responsibility for Gaza’s civil affairs, Israel will be the full security authority. The entirety of the Gaza Strip, especially Gaza City, will be demilitarised and will not contain tunnels, weapons or the ability to produce weapons.
“All goods that enter Gaza will be completely monitored by Israel, and Israeli security forces will be able to enter Gaza anytime, anywhere, to ensure the removal of any potential threat to Israel.”
Even though Hamas and Fatah have different stances on Israel’s future – Hamas advocates Israel’s destruction – Israel sees little distinction between the two groups, pointing to statements made by Fatah political bureau members welcoming the 7 October attacks by Hamas that has left 1,400 Israelis dead.
Fatah was pushed out of Gaza by Hamas in 2007 in a bloody battle after losing legislative elections in 2006. Israel unilaterally left Gaza in 2005.
Blinken told a US Senate hearing last week that it would “make the most sense” for an “effective and revitalised Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza”. But he added: “If we cannot do that, there are other temporary arrangements that may include a number of other countries in the region. It may include international agencies that help provide security and governance.”
At a briefing on Saturday a senior White House official showed the US determination to make the Palestinian Authority its partner for peace, saying that steps must be taken to increase its authority, including ending Israel’s withholding of funding for it. “Hamas is the enemy of the Palestinian Authority – that is our opinion,” the official said.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, ruled out going into Gaza to replace Hamas without a comprehensive agreement that includes the West Bank and the birth of a Palestinian state.
Fatah fears that if it took over Gaza without a clear political horizon it would be seen as complicit in Israeli and US violence, once again being seen as Israel’s security sub-contractor.
Brian Katulis, from the Middle East Institute, has suggested that some of the exercises for constructing a “day after” regional security partnership to go into Gaza “sound like fantasy land because currently Arab states simply do not see eye to eye with America due to its support for the way the war is being conducted”.
The eventual realistic options available to the international community for the future governance of Gaza will depend in part on how Israeli politics responds to its trauma. Polls have shown personal support for Netanyahu draining away, with the main split over whether he should resign immediately or later. A poll by the Lazar Institute for the Israeli daily Maariv this week found support for Benny Gantz, the former army chief co-opted into an emergency war cabinet, on 49%, and Netanyahu on 27%.
If Israeli politics did go through a step-change, some of the options for an interim multinational force in Gaza become more feasible.
The respected former Egyptian ambassador Abderahman Salaheldin for instance has proposed a multinational force could enter Gaza to collect all weapons held by all Palestinian factions there. “The mission of this force will be for a transitional period of two years until a Palestinian police force from the Gaza Strip is formed, trained and equipped to assume the tasks of maintaining security,” he said. That mission may try to have the authority of a UN security council resolution, but that would require UN unanimity.
But Israel, with its hostility to the United Nations, would oppose any UN-led peacekeeping force, leaving a more realistic option of an ad hoc multinational force. This could either have an Arab component or something similar to the Multinational Force and Observers peacekeeping body that supervises the implementation of the security provisions of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. None of the 13 participating nations in MFO are from the region.
Arab states may be willing again to pay for the cost of Gaza’s reconstruction, but not go as far as to put troops on the ground to police radicalised and shattered Palestinians.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has suggested expanding the role of the existing anti-Islamic State coalition, but that has so far found few takers.
In parallel with setting up an interim administration in Gaza, the US is once again cranking up talk of a long-term solution based around two states living side by side.
Spain has offered to hold a successor to the Madrid conference of 1991 that led to the Oslo accords. The Arab League wants a decisive role. The UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia will not raise the billions required to rebuild Gaza yet again unless there is serious commitment to a political settlement.
All this assumes that the US can meet its objective of Israel destroying Hamas at a morally and diplomatically acceptable price.
Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a former US state department official with long Middle East experience, told a Middle East Institute seminar last week that Israel may yet find this military solution elusive. “The tough questions are getting louder now. What does success look like? Although we have the phrase eradicating Hamas, most of us do not believe that is possible.”
