Tell Me How This Ends

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries.

Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them.

But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will govern Gaza after Hamas?

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

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To understand how Israel might better approach the day after, I spoke with veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington. I asked them to imagine a plausible endgame for Gaza. What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

There’s a counterfactual history of Gaza that contains a vision for a way forward. In late 2008, at the very end of his time in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his plans to leave his post, to head into the political wilderness. At that moment of transition, Hamas, which had only recently won control of Gaza, launched a fusillade of rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

Olmert considered his options. His preferred course of action was regime change, a military campaign that would have eliminated Hamas’s leadership once and for all. But his defense minister and the military’s chief of staff rejected the plan, and let the press know of their opposition. “They already started to leak that Olmert wants to carry on the war in order to prolong, to cancel, his formal retirement and carry on,” Olmert told me. Worried that overruling the objections would look self-serving, he backed away from his plans.

Instead of ejecting Hamas from power, the Israelis bombed Gaza for 22 days, what the military referred to as Operation Cast Lead. But in the course of considering regime change in Gaza, Olmert began to discuss what might come next. “I started to talk with the Americans and the Europeans to bring to Gaza, at the end of the military operation of Israel, an international force to be a caretaker for a period of a few months. To clean it up completely, to stabilize it, and to prepare it for the incoming of the Palestinian Authority security forces.”

In some ways, this vision is more plausible today than when Olmert first imagined it in 2008. Israel has spent the past decade deepening its relations with Arab states in the Gulf, which have been unnerved by Iran’s rise and eager to collaborate with Israel’s tech sector. These countries share Israel’s abiding animosity toward the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement of which Hamas is a part, and consider it a profound threat to their own regimes.

Under the aegis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, the veteran diplomat, has co-written a proposal to have the U.S. enlist the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan to serve as Gaza’s temporary stewards, bankrolling its reconstruction and providing a security force that supplies a semblance of order. According to Ross, the goal is to turn Gaza “into a place where development and modernization is the aim, not resistance.”

It sounds fanciful, but Brian Katulis, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, who possesses a large network of contacts in governments across the region, described to me a pitch that the Israelis might use to effectively induce their participation: “‘Look, we’re gonna go after these extremists who are a threat to you. But at the end of all of this, there will be some form of a very qualified two-state solution for the Palestinians. We want you to get behind it.’ And you’d paint a vision of the Middle East that wasn’t naive and Pollyannaish, but something that matches up with where they were going already, which is regional integration.”

There are practical reasons for these countries to join. Egypt, for instance, wants its own firms to win massive construction contracts. And Olmert, who has talked with officials from these countries, believes they would be happy to be seen as Gaza’s savior. “The Israeli operation will cause outrage, so that will be an excuse for them to come in, to really start to rehabilitate Gaza,” he told me.

Still, reconstructing Gaza promises to be an enormous, thankless, expensive task, given the likelihood that it will consist of large stretches of rubble and that pockets of armed Hamas fighters will remain. “There’s a risk of terrorists coming back and overthrowing civilians,” Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser during the premierships of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, told me.

The precondition of Arab states’ participation is that it would be time-limited and that it would culminate in handing over Gaza to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. The Israeli public is justifiably skeptical of the PA, hardly a bastion of effective governance—and lacking in legitimacy. When I mentioned the possibility of the PA playing a constructive role to Hulata, he joked, “Maybe when there’s a new president and reform and God comes down from heaven and there’s a messiah …” But then he conceded that there’s no viable alternative.

Whatever its many faults, the PA has a security force, some 31,000 members strong, trained and funded by the U.S. military. Israel does not fully trust the PA, but at least the country has a relationship with its leadership and some faith in its ability to perform basic functions. This force would need to double in size during Gaza’s period of Arab stewardship to have sufficient manpower to secure Gaza. “It’s a difficult task, but not an impossible one, given that the United States has overseen this type of force in the West Bank now for 15 years,” Michael Koplow, of the Israeli Policy Forum, told me.

But the viability of a plan like Ross’s depends on the execution of the war. Although Arab countries might be theoretically attracted to playing the part of Gaza’s savior, their willingness to participate might erode during a brutal war that infuriates their own publics.

And there’s a danger that Israel’s attack on Gaza will destroy the basic infrastructure of governance, complicating any postwar occupation. An Arab coalition could supply money and soldiers, but it would need to rely on Gaza’s technocratic class of civil administrators. This group has been part of the existing Hamas regime, and many are Islamists, but they aren’t gun-toting militants. Qatar, with the assent of the Israelis, has partially paid their salary. They have the competence to distribute aid, pick up trash, and run hospitals—to supply Gaza with a modicum of postwar order. These civil administrators could lend the occupying force some legitimacy in the short term.

This plan isn’t that far removed from what Gallant, the defense minister, has described as the Israeli plan—which has the army leaving Gaza at the end of the war. But Netanyahu would never be able to implement it. His government has long sought to cast aside the PA to appease the settlers and religious zealots in his coalition, who regard it as a primary obstacle to their biblical vision of Greater Israel.

The problem for Netanyahu is that the PA would never want to assume power in Gaza without substantially bolstering its position in the West Bank. It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor. Gidi Grinstein, who runs the Reut Group, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told me that Netanyahu is once again his own worst enemy. “With his policies on the one hand in the West Bank, Netanyahu is destroying policies on the other hand in Gaza.”

Given that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza—and that its current government would reject its transfer to Palestinians—the question is, does Netanyahu truly want a total victory? In the most plausible (and most familiar) scenario that I heard described, the Netanyahu government prematurely ends its invasion, under pressure from the Biden administration, to restore stability in the region and in the global economy.

Israel could leave Gaza, claiming a partial victory. It could point to evidence that it decimated Hamas leadership, dismantled bunkers, and destroyed its enemy’s arsenal. The Israelis might not achieve their stated goal of regime change, but they will have demonstrated their power and restored a measure of deterrence.

Forced to contend with the continued reality of Hamas, Israel would scramble to erect a raft of pragmatic security measures to further insulate the nation. There’s talk among Israeli officials of surrounding Gaza with a thick buffer of bulldozed territory, perhaps a mile wide. One former official suggested to me that it might be a kill zone, where any Palestinian who set foot would be shot on sight. Such insulation would be accompanied by the implementation of long-standing plans to upgrade security at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. This would include investment in state-of-the-art technology to screen vehicles headed into Gaza. Israel might demand that international inspectors, preferably Americans, oversee the inspection of incoming traffic.

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Other Israelis suggested that the campaign to destroy Hamas wouldn’t end with the ground invasion. Israel would continue to kill Hamas leadership with the dedication depicted in the movie Munich. “No matter if they are in Gaza or if they are in Alaska, okay, they have to be eliminated,” Olmert said. Zohar Polti, who ran the Ministry of Defense’s bureau of planning, described how Israeli might keep dispatching special forces into Gaza to act on intelligence to foil attacks on Israel. “That’s very similar to what we’re doing in the cities of the Palestinians, after we see that the Palestinian security services are dealing with, let’s say, a loss of control.”

But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair.

Many Israelis told me that they were haunted by a photo of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken after the end of Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. After 11 days of Israeli bombing, Sinwar emerged into the daylight, sat in a plush armchair surrounded by rubble, and posed for the camera with a defiant smile. “If you fail in this, it could well mean that what you have intended to achieve, you achieve the opposite,” Halevy told me. “You will be the one who ends up with no cohesion and no will to fight.”

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.