Israel’s operation to defeat Hamas will certainly succeed, but a military operation by itself will not produce lasting results. Without a political strategy to ensure peace and security, it will only add to the body count and perpetuate the cycle of bitterness and violence.
The Israeli Defense Forces are implementing a sound plan for rooting out the military wing of Hamas, albeit with an over-reliance on firepower and far too permissive rules of engagement.
They split Gaza in two and encircled Gaza City. They are now engaging in the difficult task of clearing buildings and Hamas’s elaborate network of tunnels.
That will take time, perhaps weeks, but the operation will succeed. Then what?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided a partial answer. After insisting he had no interest in occupying Gaza, he announced on Nov. 7 that “Israel will for an indefinite period have security responsibility” in the enclave.
How that “responsibility” will be exercised remains unclear, although it will certainly require some degree of occupation. But who will govern Gaza, providing the services people need to live normal lives? And who will pay for and oversee the massive rebuilding project that will certainly be necessary?
Without a comprehensive post-conflict stability plan, the Israelis will discover what Britain did in Northern Ireland; putting troops into a contested urban area is much easier than getting them out. The first British army units deployed to Belfast and Londonderry in 1969. The last ones left in 2007.
Prior to Oct. 7, the Netanyahu government had a strategy for dealing with Palestinians: Maintain the siege of Gaza while aggressively expanding West Bank settlements and making peace with individual Arab states while ignoring the Palestinian Authority.
The current crisis reveals the bankruptcy of that strategy. The 2.2 million residents of Gaza will not remain in desperate poverty without fighting back. Demolition of Palestinian homes and settler vigilantism will continue to inspire resistance in the West Bank.
The Hamas terrorist attacks were horrific and inexcusable, but they had a strategic logic. The Qassim Brigades launched them to reignite conflict and draw attention to the plight of Palestinians, which the world seemed to be ignoring.
They achieved that goal but also demonstrated that Hamas is an impediment to peace that needs to be removed. Israel cannot negotiate with a group that denies its right to exist.
Palestinians face the same question as Israelis: What next? The world has been made painfully aware of their situation but has no sympathy for Hamas’s incessant reliance on terrorism.
The Palestinian Authority will probably emerge from the current war in a stronger position and might participate in governing Gaza, Netanyahu’s objections notwithstanding. As moderates who recognize Israel, they are the only Palestinian group that can negotiate with it in good faith.
Even in this emotionally charged crisis, peacemakers advocating for diplomacy instead of war have emerged.
Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli justice minister, and Hiba Husseini, a former legal adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the peace process are collaborating to restart negotiations.
Beilin called the chances of negotiating peace “paradoxically bigger than just a month ago.” He said Israelis now understand better that “by not solving the Palestinian state and by talking about peace, so-called normalization with other Arab countries, you are not solving the Palestinian problem.”
Husseini agrees. “What’s the other option, really,” she asks. “More and more human pain and suffering, prolonged war?”
“What is the alternative to peace?” may be the most important question for Palestinians and Israelis.
The butcher bill for this war is already high and the fighting is far from over. The Israelis have lost at least 1,200 people, the Palestinians more than 11,000. Many of the dead on both sides are innocent children. The terrorists hold approximately 240 hostages. Countless Hamas fighters have died along with 44 Israel soldiers.
Without a resolution to the 75-year conflict, they will all have died in vain.
In addition to the suffering and death it has caused, the war has increased the danger and stress imposed on Jews and Muslims around the world.
Two Americans have been killed in related violence: a six-year-old Palestinian boy stabbed to death in Plainfield, Ill., and a Jewish man who died of injuries suffered in a confrontation with pro-Palestinian demonstrators near Westlake, Calif.
Synagogues and mosques across the country have increased security. Until the conflict ends, Islamophobia and antisemitism will remain high.
Reaching a settlement will be incredibly challenging. Removing impediments to peace is the first step.
Hamas is, of course, one of them, but it will be destroyed by the operation in Gaza.
The current Israeli government is another. When he embraced the far right, Netanyahu turned his back on the peace process. The investigation into the intelligence and security failures of Oct. 7 may end his government and his political career.
The settler community in the West Bank is also an impediment to peace. It includes some of the most militant Zionists, who harass, threaten and sometimes murder Palestinians with virtual impunity and often with the complicity of the army. Since Oct. 7, soldiers and settler vigilantes have killed 185 Palestinians, some of them in cold blood.
The United States has a role to play in the peace process as it did with the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Agreement.
The Biden administration has gotten Israel to agree to four-hour daily “humanitarian pauses,” which have not been long enough to get sufficient aid into Gaza but may have allowed as many as 100,000 people to flee the fighting.
The agreement does, however, reveal that Washington has considerable leverage over Jerusalem. Making continued U.S. aid to Palestinians and Israelis contingent upon agreeing to negotiate could restart the peace process.
Negotiating a lasting settlement will be extraordinarily difficult, but the alternative is perpetual war.
“We’ll be fighting their sons in four or five years,” Yaakov Peri, a former head of Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) warned.
Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of “Violent Extremists: Understanding the Domestic and International Terrorist Threat.”
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