Gaza Governance

Israel is presented with impossible choices in Gaza and the world seems fine with it

The chaotic events in northern Gaza on Wednesday bring attention to the difficult matter of governance in a post-Hamas Gaza. The unanswered question, which has become urgent is: “Who should control Gaza after the war, and how can interim governance be established until the first question is answered?” If we look for a similar case, the one that jumps out for me is Afghanistan.

The United States was attacked on Sept 11, 2001 by Al Qaeda, a terrorist movement based in Afghanistan, with the complicity of the existing Afghan government. In response, the US determined, and the international community concurred (by passing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1368 of September 12, 2001), that the United States had a right to respond in its own defense. The laws of war say that when a country is subject to an unprovoked attack by a foreign state, the country that has been attacked has the right to respond with force.

Furthermore, the remedy that the United States exacted from the Afghan regime was the same remedy Israel seeks to extract in Gaza. To be clear, that remedy is the removal of the offending regime from power, and the replacement of that regime with a new one, which will not repeat the crime that provoked the invasion. The period of transition in such a war is necessarily chaotic, but the goal, at least is clear.

In Afghanistan the US made an alliance with existing armed resistance groups and enabled them, using air support and special forces to drive the Taliban out of the capital and then from the remaining provinces. By November 2001, NATO allied Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul. Pashtun allies of the NATO forces cleared the Taliban from most other regions of the country. An assembly of Afghan notables was convened in December 2001 under the auspices of the invaders, resulting in the Bonn agreement and an interim government in 2002. By 2003 the US led forces declared an end to major combat. A constitution for the new Afghan regime was approved in 2004. Traditional Afghan tribal assemblies, the Loya Jirga were used at various stages to establish the legitimacy of the new regime.

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Comparing Gaza to Afghanistan

In Gaza, the provocation that led to the present Israeli invasion was similar in its callous targeting of civilians, and its ruthless methods, to that of 9/11. Israel’s right to intervene in Gaza in response is as firmly founded in international law as was the American intervention in Afghanistan, though today’s security counsel would never vote that way. The remedy Israel seeks is similar to the one America sought: the elimination of the existing regime and the installation of a new regime unlikely to resume Hamas’ policy of permanent war as long as Israel exists.

Acknowledging that the long term outcome in Afghanistan was not the one we would hope for in Gaza, it is still worth looking at what happened in Afghanistan as a model. This will help us to think about Israel’s options for achieving its goal of a post-Hamas Gaza that will no longer be dedicated to wiping Israel off the map.

Before addressing that, the problem that Israel faces right now is that of interim governance. Before the establishment of the interim government in Afghanistan, traditional tribal law helped to fill the power vacuum and ensure that order was maintained. In Gaza, the majority of the people have the status of refugees and depend on international relief for their sustenance. Commercial activity has been curtailed for many years due to Israeli measures aimed at preventing Hamas from acquiring advanced weapons. In practice this meant that Hamas, which controlled the smuggling network, had a stranglehold on the economy.

Nineteen years of totalitarian rule by Hamas eliminated any local opposition. In seizing power in 2007, Hamas famously threw members of the legitimate Palestinian Authority regime off the roofs of buildings. There have been regular public executions of people accused of opposing Hamas rule.

The international aid groups that distribute aid in Gaza were heavily influenced by Hamas, and Hamas used its influence to ensure that people loyal to the regime were employed by UNRWA and other international aid groups. Anyone unwilling to cooperate with the Hamas regime would be deprived of opportunities or punished directly.

This has left Gaza without an organized opposition or powerful non-partisan individuals, to help Israel establish a new non-criminal regime there. In recent weeks Israeli officials have talked about establishing local governance in Gaza using people who have no ties to Hamas. In this Guardian article, an unnamed Israeli official is quoted saying that they “are waiting for the right people to step up to the plate”. The article also quotes Hamas as saying they are sure the plan will fail.

Israelis are also said, in the article dated February 22, to be planning a pilot project for this plan to get locals to manage the distribution of aid in the Zeitoun area of Gaza. Israel reported after the tragedy last Wednesday, that aid had been successfully delivered to Gaza city for the previous four nights without incident. Given that the trouble that led to many deaths on Wednesday occurred close to Zeitoun, perhaps Hamas organized the disruption in order to attack the local Palestinians who had been cooperating with Israel and helping to distribute aid.

Image: Palestinians rush Gaza Aid Convoy on Thursday — Photo by Reuters

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Practical Constraints Add to Israeli Challenges in Gaza

If so, Hamas still has the power to undermine Israeli efforts to establish interim governance. Israel is under pressure to get something in place because the Palestinians remaining in northern Gaza are in dire need of help. Hamas’ power before the invasion, depended in part on controlling all benefits flowing to the population of Gaza. Hamas will therefore do anything they can to thwart the Israeli efforts to build a local authority that is not controlled by Hamas. This is more important to Hamas than preventing people in northern Gaza from starving.

One might ask why Israel has pulled its troops out of Gaza City if Hamas still has the power to cause this kind of disruption. To understand this we must recognize that Israel is under pressures that the Americans did not have to contend with in Afghanistan in 2001.

First the war is a significant burden on the Israeli economy in a way that the Afghan war simply wasn’t for the Americans. The cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of reservists on active duty is enormous, even as the economy suffers from the absence of so many young productive workers from their jobs. Israel does not have the luxury of maintaining a full mobilization for two or more years.

Secondly, Israel is under pressure from the US administration not to reoccupy Gaza, and to turn the present war into an opportunity for progress toward a Palestinian state and a comprehensive peace settlement. This means that Israel’s plans for post-war Gaza are under constant scrutiny, lest they undermine this goal, which is important politically for the Biden administration. As it happens, Israel’s current government has no wish to resume the governance of Gaza, but there are factions within the governing coalition who do want that. This muddies the waters and may be making it harder for Israel to come up with a coherent policy.

Thirdly, there is a deeply entrenched and growing lobby in the west which views anything Israel does as inherently illegitimate. Thus when Hamas puts out a false story about Israelis massacring Palestinians, there is an army of journalists, politicians and academics who immediately amplify these claims, undermining public support in the United States, Canada and other friendly countries, for Israel’s efforts to achieve its war aims. In particular, there is a faction within President Biden’s party which wants to end the traditional American support for Israel and is trying to mobilize public opinion to that end regardless of the rights and wrongs of the present conflict.

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What about the PA?

There is an alternative to building local governance from scratch in Gaza, which is the restoration of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the role from which it was violently ousted by Hamas in 2007. This is similar to what the United States did in Afghanistan, by allying with Afghan factions that were already fighting with the Taliban.

In a saner world, the PA would be willing to resume its role as the recognized authority in Gaza, but under its present leadership, the PA has been too cowardly to do anything which would challenge Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that any resumption of a PA role in Gaza would have to be by consensus with all factions, which meant that Hamas has had a veto on any such development.

The PA refused to cooperate when Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2006. This helped to create the power vacuum that allowed Hamas to seize power there in 2007. It has indicated that it will not agree to take on governance in Gaza after Israel has defeated Hamas, except as part of a comprehensive solution leading to a Palestinian State. Such a solution has eluded all parties for thirty years now, which means that we can’t count on the PA under its present leadership to step up.

While the PA officially opposes the use of force to settle the conflict with Israel and quietly cooperates with Israel when it serves its interests, it does a lot to enable and encourage the use of force against Israel by other Palestinians. It has never criticized Hamas violence against Israel, no matter how extreme. This continues to be the case since October 7. Moreover it provides large financial payments to Palestinians who are imprisoned by Israel for acts of violence and to the families of those who die committing violent acts against Israel. This makes the present leadership of the PA unacceptable to the present Israeli government as well.

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Imagining Other Possibilities for Governance

While the Biden administration is aware of Israel’s distrust of the PA it continues to talk up the prospect of a revitalized PA for its own political reasons. The details of what that would look like are not being discussed by them publicly. Those details are obviously of existential importance to Israel. We don’t know how much, if anything, the administration is sharing with the Israeli government.

The Israeli coalition includes factions that oppose any path that would lead to a Palestinian state. At this moment, the idea of empowering any conceivable Palestinian regime on Israel’s borders is deeply alarming to me and, I believe to most members of the Israeli public. October 7 has left a deep mark. It’s not clear whether the rest of the world recognizes this.

Another possibility for postwar governance would be some sort of partnership of the regimes with which Israel has peace agreements. The government of the UAE has shown that it can run a dynamic economy which produces a high quality of life for its people. If Gaza were to live under that sort of governance, it could only be good for the people who live there, and a period of peace and reconciliation would obviously help to build Israeli support for an eventual peace deal.

The scenario of constructive peaceful governance was the opportunity proffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the Palestinians, when he made the decision to pull out of Gaza in 2006. If the Palestinians had focused then on building their own state in the territory Israel evacuated, and devoted the resources that went into building up the military infrastructure in Gaza to the creation of a better life for the people there, we would be living in a very different world.

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A Bleak Outlook for Gazans

In the world we inhabit, none of the existing Palestinian leadership has any credibility as a peace partner for Israel. Before Israel can even begin to imagine a permanent settlement that would involve a Palestinian state, they will have to see a dramatic shift in Palestinian leadership. Such a leadership would have to be willing to accept territorial compromise and an end to the claim of a Palestinian right of return.

Over the past 25 years, the existing leadership has done everything it could to make such concessions impossible. Any Palestinian leader who stepped forward to do this would be accused of treason, not just by Palestinians, but by the huge claque of Hamas apologists and terrorist enablers presently trying to prevent Israel from achieving its legitimate war aims.

This presents a difficulty not just for Israel, but for any conceivable post-war Gaza regime. Unlike the US and NATO in Afghanistan, Israel doesn’t benefit from a global consensus on the justice of what they are doing. Putting all this together, the prospects of a post-war outcome that is good for the people of Gaza seems vanishingly small.

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Further Reading

For further reading on governance in Gaza you can read this survey of Israeli opinion from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Some of the information in this article about Afghan governance came from this 2017 report to the US Congress.

This report examines what went wrong in building local governance in Afghanistan.

Late breaking: An article just published in the New York Times confirms that the convoy on Thursday was one of a series that Israel had organized in coordination with local Palestinian business people.

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