Increasingly, the U.S. is pressuring Jerusalem to formulate a postwar plan for the Gaza Strip. From Washington or Brussels, the most obvious solution would be to return the territory to the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), ruled by the aging Mahmoud Abbas. Hussain Abdul-Hussain explains why this would be impossible:

Extremists are likely to pose a persistent threat in postwar Gaza; Abbas’s PA has shown that is something it cannot handle. It has allowed large pockets of the West Bank to become strongholds of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups. In July, Abbas visited Jenin for the first time in twenty years, after Israel had operated against militants’ strongholds. Abbas’s senior officials were booed and chased out. In the West Bank, Nablus too has become notoriously lawless, allowing for the rise of a new radical militia, the Lion’s Den.

But if not Abbas, then who? Every possibility seems either far-fetched or likely to be disastrous. Abdul-Hussain makes a proposal that could be one of the least-bad options, namely allowing an Arab League force to police the Strip:

Should the Arab League try [to maintain order] in Gaza, the command should be put in the hands of the United Arab Emirates, whose military is among the most capable in the region. The Arab force can help develop and stand up a local security force that can win Israeli trust. The UAE has been the most trustworthy peace partner of Israel among all six Arab nations that have normalized relations with the Jewish state since 1979.What the UAE needs for such an endeavor in Gaza is global and regional cover. Enter Washington and Riyadh, two capitals that can impress on the PA to bestow whatever legitimacy it still has on the new Gazan local government and security force.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”