America and the “day after” plan

Experts with experience in Palestine conflict history have discussed the end game situation in the Israel - Gaza war in various media.

Direction to the Endgame

Matt Galloway on the CBC program, the Current, discussed the Israel-Hamas conflict and its deadly impact on civilians inside Gaza on Nov. 2, 2023  with Rami Khouri, a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut; and Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

Rami Khouri observes that the situation has been disastrous. He focuses on the Palestinian territories, Middle East geopolitics and American foreign policy in the region.

But, you know, part of it is the Palestinian leadership's fault, and part of it is by design of Israel to divide and conquer the Palestinians. And they've worked that very well, including by helping entrench Hamas in the Gaza Strip. I mean, this is the plan from Netanyahu as well. I mean, it's been leaked and reported in the Israeli press that he found Hamas's governance of Gaza Strip useful to him and useful to the Israelis.

none of Israel's partners, not only do they not hold Israel accountable for its actions, its illegal actions like settlement building and all these things which have made two states impossible, impossible, but they're shielding those actions in the international fora, preventing any kind of pressure to mount on Israel to to come to terms. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't face that pressure, it has no incentive to pull back. Because, again, you have 750,000 settlers now in the occupied West Bank. If you're going to pull those people back in a country in which you have voting rights and those people vote as well, it's pretty much impossible. They're not going to move those back. You know, Israel, its politicians need the incentive to take those kind of actions, and they have no incentive whatsoever to take those kind of actions because, you know, the Western backers of Israel, you know, America, it's driven by its domestic politics when it comes to this issue is not a foreign policy issue in the United States. It is a domestic policy issue. And that severely limits what how the U.S. can operate vis a vis the Israelis. And so it makes peace extremely difficult. (The Current With Matt Galloway | Live Radio, n.d.)

Omar Rahman comments that we are seeing a more accentuated variety of the kind of pain and anguish and anger that we have felt for most of our lives.

I was born in 1948 when this conflict reached its peak. And so we've seen this before. The actions by all concerned parties have seen Hamas attack Israel before. But the incredible unanimity and vehemence of the Western support for Israel to keep going with this attack and killing and killing. But the Western support is really something new and troubling. We're seeing a genocide live on TV. Starving populations and the West mostly, including Canada, has been saying, well, it's not time for a cease fire.

Clearly, attacking civilians is not acceptable, whoever does it. But the Israelis have killed far more civilians than Hamas has killed, as you know. So if people are going to discuss this issue honestly, they have to apply the same criteria to both sides. So the aim is to find the solution that allows the Jewish majority state of Israel and a Palestinian state next to it to live side by side with equal sovereignty and equal rights. The Americans give lip service to it. The Canadians used to be very good at supporting refugee rights. The Canadians were the gavel holders for the refugee issue after the Madrid peace conference. The Europeans have all become much more hard liner. The fundamental idea that Israelis and Palestinians are human beings with the same rights under law and under God is not accepted by Israel. And until it's accepted, there's going to be conflict. And if there's conflict, there's going to be all kinds of terrible things happening. (The Current With Matt Galloway | Live Radio, n.d.)

CBC News on the The National, October 31, 2023, reported on a leaked document that outlines a plan of Israel for Gaza.

Bernie Sanders offers an opinion in the Guardian that there cannot be a return to the status quo that existed in Gaza before the war.

An immediate humanitarian response is vitally important, but it is equally important for Israel to have a political strategy. It cannot bomb its way to a long-term solution. Such a strategy must include, as minimum first steps: a clear promise that Palestinians displaced in the fighting will have the absolute right to safely return to their homes; a commitment to broader peace talks to advance a two-state solution in the wake of this war; an abandonment of Israeli efforts to carve up and annex the West Bank; and a commitment to work with the international community to build genuine Palestinian governing capacity.

The United States, which provides $3.8bn a year in military aid to Israel, should make it clear that these are the conditions of our solidarity. Just as we want Israel to be a vibrant democracy, safe from terrorist attacks, we also want justice and dignity for the Palestinian people. That’s not going to happen with Hamas running the Gaza Strip. It is also not going to happen with continued Israeli domination of Palestinian life. (Sanders, 2023)

An article in the Middle East and Africa section of the Economist about Hamas and Israel suggests that Israel’s prime minister is ill-equipped for war and peace. Inside Israel a political battle is raging over the conduct of the war, its aftermath and who makes decisions. At its heart is Binyamin Netanyahu, the dominant figure in Israeli politics for over two decades, who may now be the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

he has become a symbol of implacable hostility to a two-state solution at a time when Israeli commitment to it in some form is essential as part of any “day after” plan. That is so as to maintain American support and to sustain the Abraham accords, which established diplomatic links with a group of Arab states. In the absence of clear government direction the Israeli defence establishment is doing all the planning. Its preferred solution is to see the PA ultimately return to Gaza, which it controlled until Hamas’s coup in 2007. The Palestinian leadership is clear that any return to Gaza would require Israeli assurances on reviving a moribund diplomatic process towards a two-state solution. (Bibi Netanyahu Is the Wrong Man in the Wrong Place, 2023)

The political process to move toward a “day-after” where the vicious war is paused and the challenges of the new governments in Gaza and Israel to maintain peace are supported by Arab neighbours and the United States and its allies in NATO and the EU.

References

Bibi Netanyahu is the wrong man in the wrong place. (2023, October 31). The Economist. Retrieved November 4, 2023, from https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/10/31/bibi-netanyahu-is-the-wrong-man-in-the-wrong-place 

CBC News (Executive Producer). (2023). The National [TV series]. https://youtu.be/Wf_CCuDNsPw?si=CkrYZN1iV_rK4ckg&t=471 

The Current with Matt Galloway | Live Radio. (n.d.). CBC. Retrieved November 4, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current 

Sanders, B. (2023, November 2). Gaza needs a humanitarian pause. Then we need a vision of where we go from here | Bernie Sanders. The Guardian. Retrieved November 4, 2023, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/01/gaza-humanitarian-pause-bernie-sanders?CMP=twt_b-usopinion_c-us 

Moving Away from NATO Governments

A question about the policy of Israel that leads to the endgame in the war in Gaza concerns how much Israel may be moving away from the scenario that the NATO countries, especially the United States, envision for the area even as they endorse financial and military aid to the country.

Endgame in the Israel Gaza War

Samia Nakhoul, Matt Spetalnick and Alexander Cornwell reporting for Reuters noted that some of U.S. President Joe Biden's aides are concerned that while Israel may craft an effective plan to inflict lasting damage to Hamas, it has yet to formulate an exit strategy.

Trips to Israel by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this past week had stressed the need to focus on the post-war plan for Gaza, the source added.

Arab officials are also alarmed that Israel hasn't set out a clear plan for the future of the enclave, ruled by Hamas since 2006 and home to 2.3 million people.

"Israel doesn't have an endgame for Gaza. Their strategy is to drop thousands of bombs, destroy everything and go in, but then what? They have no exit strategy for the day after," said one regional security source.

An Israeli invasion has yet to start, but Gaza authorities say 3,500 Palestinians have already been killed by the aerial bombardment, around a third of them children - a larger death toll than in any previous conflict between Hamas and Israel. (Nakhoul et al., 2023)

Biden, on a visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israelis that justice needed to be served to Hamas, though he cautioned that after the 9/11 attacks on New York, the U.S. had made mistakes.

The "vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas", he said. "Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people." (Nakhoul et al., 2023)

Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Biden's visit would have given him a chance to press Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to think through issues such as the proportional use of force and the longer-term plans for Gaza before any invasion.

Miller, a former U.S. Middle East negotiator, expressed deep skepticism about the potential for establishing a post-Hamas government to rule Gaza.

"I could paint you a picture more appropriate to a galaxy far, far away and not on planet Earth on how you could combine the U.N., the Palestinian Authority, the Saudis, the Egyptians, led by the U.S. marshalling the Europeans, to basically convert Gaza from an open-air prison to something much better," he said.

In the meantime, calls for the creation of humanitarian corridors within Gaza and escape routes for Palestinian civilians have drawn a strong reaction from Arab neighbors.

They fear an Israeli invasion will spark a new permanent mass wave of displacement, a replay of the 1948 Israeli war of independence and 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Millions of Palestinians who were forced to flee then have remained stranded as refugees in the countries that hosted them.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land into the Sinai peninsula bordering Gaza, adding that any such move would turn the area into a base for attacks against Israel. He said Egyptians in their millions would protest against any such move. (Nakhoul et al., 2023)

Evan Dyer of CBC News reports that the Israeli leader and Hamas are deadly enemies — and allies in opposing a 2-state solution. President Joe Biden spoke about what the U.S. wants to see after the war.

"When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next," he said. "And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution." (Dyer, 2023)

Dyer comments that neither Hamas nor Netanyahu share that vision.

As Netanyahu has pointed out, Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist and lays claim to all of the land "from the river to the sea."

And just twelve days before the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly, holding a map of what he called "The New Middle East" that showed all of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, as parts of an enlarged Israel, with no Palestinian state in sight. (Dyer, 2023)

A report by Amy Teibel of The Associated Press was published by CTV News identifying an Israeli ministry 'concept paper' that proposes transferring Gaza civilians to Egypt's Sinai, with Canada as a possible final destination.

An Israeli government ministry has drafted a wartime proposal to transfer the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million people to Egypt's Sinai peninsula, drawing condemnation from the Palestinians and worsening tensions with Cairo. In its report, the Intelligence Ministry -- a junior ministry that conducts research but does not set policy -- offered three alternatives "to effect a significant change in the civilian reality in the Gaza Strip in light of the Hamas crimes that led to the Sword of Iron war." The document's authors deem this alternative to be the most desirable for Israel's security. (Teibel, 2023)

Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said the paper threatened to damage relations with a key partner.

"If this paper is true, this is a grave mistake. It might cause a strategic rift between Israel and Egypt," said Guzansky, who said he has consulted for the ministry in the past. "I see it either as ignorance or someone who wants to negatively affect Israel-Egypt relations, which are very important at this stage."

Egypt is a valuable partner that cooperates behind the scenes with Israel, he said. If it is seen as overtly assisting an Israeli plan like this, especially involving the Palestinians, it could be "devastating to its stability."

Egypt would not necessarily be the Palestinian refugees' last stop. The document speaks about Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supporting the plan either financially, or by taking in uprooted residents of Gaza as refugees and in the long term as citizens.

Canada's "lenient" immigration practices also make it a potential resettlement target. (Teibel, 2023)

The NATO countries who are supplying financial and military aid to Israel need to be active in Overcoming the Failed Tunes of the Netanyahu relationship with Gaza and carefully Assessing the Piper’s tune for signs of collective punishment and possible removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

References

Dyer, E. (2023, October 28). How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel. CBC. Retrieved November 1, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/netanyahu-israel-gaza-hamas-1.7010035 

Nakhoul, S., Spetalnick, M., & Cornwell, A. (2023, October 19). What is Israel's endgame in Gaza invasion? Reuters. Retrieved November 1, 2023, from https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-endgame-no-sign-post-war-plan-gaza-2023-10-18/ 

Teibel, A. (2023, October 30). Israeli paper proposes transferring Gazans to Egypt's Sinai. CTV News. Retrieved November 1, 2023, from https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/israeli-ministry-concept-paper-proposes-transferring-gaza-civilians-to-egypt-s-sinai-with-canada-as-a-possible-final-destination-1.6623901