Why Israel Struggles to Plan for the Day after the War

April 19 2024

Yesterday, a Qatari newspaper reported that Washington has agreed to an IDF operation against the Hamas stronghold of Rafah in exchange for Israel’s abstention from retaliation against Iran. Such reports must always be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, but regardless of the truth of this one, the war in Gaza will come to an end somehow, and Israel will then have to determine how the Strip should be administered afterward. Robert Silverman takes a look at this most difficult problem, and the domestic political considerations that make it even thornier:

The current governing coalition wouldn’t be able to agree on any postwar plan whereby Israel relinquishes even partial control, so the issue is left off of cabinet agendas. Key members of the cabinet, especially Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, want Israel to remain in Gaza permanently, as do elements within Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party.

Given the ability of this issue to split the governing coalition wide open, dissolve the government, and lead to elections in the midst of a war, Netanyahu has decided not to bring it before the cabinet. . . . This highlights a general weakness of parliamentary systems like Israel’s.

Moreover, writes Silverman, the Israeli national-security bureaucracy is averse to the kind of the planning necessary for resolving Gaza’s fate. He suggests what an acceptable postwar approach might look like:

The Palestinians have a legitimate interest in a political future independent of Israel. Israel has a legitimate interest in the security conditions of a hostile Gazan neighbor located less than 40 miles from its largest city. The workable solution is for Israel to negotiate with the U.S. over the conditions of its transfer of authority in Gaza to a U.S.-led multinational body, a transfer in which it keeps sufficient ability to intervene in Gaza when needed to protect its security and in which it provides assurances of a Palestinian political horizon, also subject to governance conditions.

Read more at Jerusalem Strategic Tribune

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Gaza Strip, Gaza War 2023, Israeli Security

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023