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30-10-2023
JERUSALEM/ GAZA CITY: Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to “change the Middle East.” Joe Biden has said there’s “no going back.” But as Israeli forces escalate their attacks on the Gaza Strip and issue fresh, urgent warnings to Palestinians to get out of the way, where is the war going, and what comes next?
After the horrors of 7 October, Israeli officials keep saying that they intend to uproot Hamas from the Gaza Strip, militarily and politically but beyond the application of relentless, overwhelming military might, it’s not clear how this unprecedented ambition will be achieved.
“You cannot promote such a historic move without a plan about the day after,” says Dr. Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Centre.
Dr Milshtein, a former head of the Department for Palestinian Affairs in Israeli Military Intelligence, fears that planning has barely begun.
“You need to do it right now,” he says.
Western diplomats say they’re conducting intense discussions with Israel about the future, but that so far nothing is clear.
“There absolutely isn’t a fixed plan,” one told me. “You can sketch out a few ideas on paper, but making them real is going to take weeks, months of diplomacy.”
Military plans exist, ranging from degrading Hamas’s military capability to taking over large parts of the Gaza Strip but those with long experience of dealing with previous crises say that’s about as far as the planning goes.
“I don’t think that there is a viable, workable solution for Gaza the day after we evacuate our forces,” says Haim Tomer, a former senior officer with Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad.
Israelis are all-but unanimous: Hamas must be defeated. The massacres of 7 October were simply too appalling. The organization cannot ever again be allowed to rule over Gaza but Hamas, Dr Milshtein says, is an idea, not something Israel can simply erase.
“It’s not like Berlin in 1945, when you stuck a flag over the Reichstag and that was that.”
A better parallel, he says, is Iraq in 2003, where US-led forces attempted to remove all traces of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “De-Baathification”, as it was called, was a disaster. It left hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civil servants and members of the armed forces out of work, sowing the seeds for a devastating insurgency.
American veterans of that conflict are in Israel, talking to the Israeli military about their experiences in places like Falluja and Mosul. “I do hope they explain to the Israelis that they made some huge mistakes in Iraq,” Dr Milshtein says. (Int’l News Desk)
