Biden and Blinken need a concrete Gaza plan - The Washington Post

The Israeli public is reportedly disappointed that the Israel Defense Forces did not “finish” the job in Gaza and instead agreed to a cease-fire that maintains the status quo there. But the most hawkish prime minister in Israeli history chose not to launch a ground effort — which would have been needed to root out every Hamas fighter — as he did in the inconclusive 50-day war in 2014. It’s hard to imagine any Israeli government enduring years of bloody war with substantial losses and international condemnation to “complete the job.” The notion that there is a military solution to Gaza is magical thinking.

That said, the Biden administration has not yet spelled out how it will rebuild Gaza without re-empowering Hamas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried his best during an interview on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you want rebuilding. You say you want reconstruction. The president said he wants to do that without restocking Hamas, rebuilding Gaza without restocking Hamas. How do you do that? They’re in charge in Gaza.

BLINKEN: Look, we've worked in the past and we can continue to work with trusted, independent parties that can help do the reconstruction and the development, not some quasi-government authority. And the fact of the matter is Hamas has brought nothing but ruin to the Palestinian people. Its gross mismanagement of Gaza while it has been in charge, and, of course, these indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians which have elicited the response that they did because Israel has a right to defend itself.

So I think what’s the real challenge here is to help the Palestinians and particularly to help moderate Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority deliver better results for their people. And, of course, Israel has a profound role to play in that too.

Stephanopoulos asked the $64,000 question, but did not get a definitive response.

During comments last week, President Biden suggested the Palestinian Authority could oversee the effort. That’s an obvious nonstarter: The authority does not control Gaza, and it’s also more corrupt, less effective and less respected (by all sides) than ever before. Indeed, the authority’s cancellation of elections and generally decrepit condition were major reasons Hamas sought to demonstrate that it is the only viable protector of Palestinians.

Moreover, how can the international community invest billions in Gaza while it remains under the thumb of Hamas? If Hamas is left in power with war-fighting capacity, in the not-so-distant future it certainly will build more rockets, fire them indiscriminately and prompt a furious Israeli response that will destroy whatever was built. (This, of course, does not happen on the West Bank because the Palestinian Authority, for all its faults, does not fire thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians.)

This problem, by the way, is one that progressives highly critical of Israel’s actions have not really wrestled with. Hamas is a brutal terrorist regime that desires an endless war and the total elimination of Israel. If Hamas were motivated by concern for the Palestinian people, would it have launched rockets into Jerusalem, where East Jerusalem Arabs were as likely to be killed as Jewish residents?

Figuring out how to restore some hope for a decent life for Gaza residents without further entrenching Hamas (hence guaranteeing future wars) will not be easy. But the alternatives — a forever war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza as Israel pursues a nonexistent military solution, or the cycle of rockets-war-rebuild-rockets — are intolerable.

One viable solution would be to make aid to Gaza dependent on Hamas’s demilitarization. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, veteran Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross urges that international aid be “conditioned on a verifiable withdrawal of all remaining rockets and their production capacity.” He adds, “Let Hamas explain before the international community and Palestinians why its rockets are more important than the people of Gaza.” Then some consortium of international nongovernmental organizations and Arab regimes (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia) can pursue a rebuilding process.

Meanwhile, making investments in the West Bank, where Hamas is not in charge, might help restore some credibility to the Palestinian Authority. Ross suggests leveraging the new Israeli relationships with Arab states that signed the Abraham Accords and says the White House should “propose a menu of normalizing options and responses.” For instance, “Saudi Arabia opens a commercial trade office in Tel Aviv and Israel stops settlement building to the east of the security barrier or on 92% of the West Bank,” he writes. “This would not produce two states but would preserve it as an option — and its possibility would be used to require and broker a parallel move toward Israel by the Palestinian Authority.”

In short, there are no easy fixes. But we do need concrete solutions to the intolerable violence stemming from a terrorist group’s occupation of Gaza, and from the delusion that Israel can solve its security problem with force.

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Biden and Blinken need a concrete Gaza plan - The Washington Post
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