The Day After in Gaza
What if emergency nation-building is not the answer?
Gallant, a career IDF man who clashed with Netanyahu over the latter’s proposed judicial reforms last summer, was clearly speaking for elements of the Israeli security establishment. The Times of Israel reported earlier this week, for instance, that IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi “tore into” Netanyahu over the weekend “for failing to develop and announce a so-called ‘day-after’ strategy,” and that Netanyahu had fought with Shin Bet head Ronen Bar after Bar revealed that he had been holding “strategic deliberations” with Gallant.
So we have reached that stage in the war, where the military looks at the prospect of a prolonged insurgency and insists that the politicians must solve the problem. It is a demand for what I call “emergency nation-building.”
Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and every one of the nearly 80,000 State Department employees are very upset (some have already resigned) that Israel isn’t following the nation building playbook.
And after I had drafted this post but before it was scheduled to go up, we have the Benny Gantz announcement. As the Jerusalem Post reports,
Gantz listed six objectives that Netanyahu must adopt or face his withdrawal from government:
Return the hostages.
Demolish Hamas and demilitarize the Gaza Strip.
Provide an “American-European-Arab-Palestinian” governing alternative in the Strip that “is not Hamas and not [Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud] Abbas.”
Return the residents of the North by September 1 and rehabilitate the western Negev.
Promote normalization with Saudi Arabia as part of a general move that includes “a treaty with the free world and the Arab world against Iran.”
Adopt an outline for creating a standardized Israeli national service in which all Israelis will “serve the country and contribute to the highest national effort.”
For most Israelis, points 1, 2, 4, and 5 are not controversial as goals, but neither Gantz nor anyone else has a strategy that guarantees their achievement.
Point 6 presumably refers to the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from serving in the military. You or I could come up with a compromise that reasonable people could agree on, but I’m not sure that Israelis can.
Point (3) is a demand for emergency nation-building in Gaza. It aligns Gantz with the Biden Administration, which may be helpful to him (and to Biden). But if Gantz actually believes that it can work, then he and I are on different planets.
Try to think of an example where the United States succeeded in using nation-building to overcome a guerilla war or insurgency. I can only think of failures where we walked away: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on.
In this case, emergency nation-building means propping up some sort of Arab regime to govern Gaza. At this point, the nation-builders do not much care who is in charge of this regime. It could include Arab states. As some in the “international community” (but not Gantz) envision it, the regime could include the Palestinian Authority, which is nominally in charge of the West Bank. It could be under the auspices of the UN. It could even include Hamas.
Unless Hamas and other militant groups are included in the ruling coalition, they will wage an insurgency. Knowing this, I doubt that the Arab states will agree to participate without someone else bearing the military burden. That would mean a contingent of U.S. and/or European troops. But it seems unlikely that a Western politician who sent troops on such a mission would last very long in office.
It seems to me that one can rule out an emergency nation-building exercise as a solution for “the day after.” If we were not able to nation-build successfully in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, it is a safe bet that no one will succeed in Gaza.
Like the Israeli military today, the American military in Iraq wanted policy makers to solve the nation-building problem. I remember when an American general pleaded for “social scientists” to help design a democratic government in Iraq. I was appalled. I wrote an essay suggesting that if North, Weingast, and Wallis were correct, then the only solution for Iraq was a limited-access order. I suggested dividing up rights to Iraq’s oil among Sunni militants, Shia militants, and Kurdish militants. The hope would be that each faction would have a stake in the settlement, so that violence would die down. Instead, we basically let Iran take over.
My guess is that on “the day after,” Israel is destined to rule Gaza. Israel cannot just walk away, the way the U.S. did in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Can Israel completely smother a Gaza insurgency? That would require the sort of repressive measures that a Russia or a China can carry out. But the “international community” will not tolerate from Israel what it will tolerate from Russia or China.
By the same token, the problem of “the day after” may never arise. “The day after” assumes that the war comes to a clean ending. In my opinion, that requires Hamas and its militant allies to surrender or be completely defeated. The United States and the “international community” do not seem to desire such an ending. At times, they have said they want Hamas out of the picture. On the other hand, they wanted an immaculate removal, with hardly any casualties. And on the third hand, they suggest that there would be a “deal” with Hamas if not for the obstinacy of the Netanyahu government.
I have no insight into how Israelis are feeling. When they get fed up with conditions as they are today, what will they attempt? One option would be a brutal dictatorship over the Gazans—running Gaza in the style of Hamas. Another option would be to go along with the Biden Administration and pin their hopes on emergency nation-building.
The Israelis may not be ready to select either option. It could be that for the foreseeable future they will put up with fighting a war under conditions set by the “international community.” A war without winning.
Without a day after.
substacks referenced above: @
I can't help but contrast demands on Israel with demands on Ukraine.
Blinken recently stated that Ukraine will not hold elections until it reclaims all of its territory, which more or less means it won't hold elections again ever. It is not only not required to negotiate, but actively discouraged.
Regarding point 3 from Gantz, Netanyahu has mentioned similar ideas in several interviews: cooperation between Arab states and Americans, along with a temporary security presence of the IDF during the transition period.
There seems to be, if not a consensus, then at least an understanding among a significant portion of the Israeli political class that something like this should happen. However, when reading Israeli media and analyses from different Israeli analysts, many avoid calling it nation-building. This is because a) they do not believe in a Palestinian state, and b) for purely pragmatic reasons, it is better to focus on practical governance tasks – such as building infrastructure in Gaza, fixing potholes, registering births, and issuing construction permits. A lot of governance consists of mundane, technocratic, non-ideological tasks, and Israelis prefer to focus on these. Starting with nation-building introduces controversial issues that create significant divisions within Israeli society and even larger gaps between Israelis and Palestinians, which could derail the entire process.
As for Gantz, he is a typical opposition politician (even if he is technically part of the government). This means he is not making decisions or facing trade-offs. He is in a position to make promises to all constituencies, even if those promises contradict each other. He can go around saying what listeners want to hear.
I am not Israeli, but I have professionally covered European-style parliamentary coalition politics for a couple of decades. In this sense, Israeli politics is much more like politics in Europe. Americans, with their more winner-takes-all system, sometimes struggle to understand parliamentary politics in Israel. Israeli politicians, who have grown up in a parliamentary coalition system, often have "plans" that should be taken as broad directional guidelines rather than literal proposals because they know that in reality, there will be compromises, trade-offs, and no plan survives reality.