Is the Endgame for the Gaza War in Sight?
What the final moves might look like.
WEEKS BEFORE THE OCTOBER 7, 2023 terrorist attack that resulted in more than 1,000 dead Israelis and some 250 people taken hostage, Hamas’s secret police, the General Security Service, gave a slideshow briefing to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and one of the masterminds of the attack. The slide deck, a presentation summarizing the recent activities of the GSS, was discovered in Gaza by the Israeli military, which passed a copy of it on to the New York Times. The upshot is that the GSS operates a lot like the Stasi, the old East German secret police, with a network of informers spying on everybody and a well-developed system of intimidation to keep people in line and quash dissent.
The Stasi comparison comes from a former Israeli intelligence official quoted by the Times. The Stasi’s specialty was psychological terror, as opposed to gory violence—but there are reasons to doubt this is true about the GSS. Ehab Fasfous, a Gazan journalist who wound up on the GSS’s enemies list apparently just for committing acts of journalism—or, as a Hamas official told him, “destabilizing the internal front”—recounts that “he took images of security forces hitting people who fought over spots in line outside a bakery.” It’s possible Hamas’s secret police would use more violence against people buying bread than against people protesting their authority, but it seems unlikely.
Fasfous also told the Times something striking: “We can’t have a life here as long as these criminals remain in control.” That statement, at once obvious and profound, could have been uttered by a senior member of the Israeli government or military and no one would have been surprised.
It’s in the best interest of both Israelis and Gazans that Hamas be destroyed.
IN THINKING ABOUT LONG-TERM STRATEGY, it can be useful to ask the question Who has time on their side? The answer is almost never clear, and it often depends on how far into the future you try to look—but it is still a clarifying exercise. In the Israel-Hamas war, the calculus looks something like this:
The best chance—the only chance—Israel and Gaza have for peace depends upon the complete destruction of Hamas. One can infer from the Arab states’ relative quiet that many of their governments agree. If Hamas were to survive the current war, even in a vastly materially diminished state, what would follow? Surely before long it would come roaring back to life with a vengeance. The aftermath might resemble what happened after the precipitant American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, or after the end of Reconstruction in the United States: the defeated side doesn’t stay down but takes on ugly new forms.
For Hamas, time is only on its side if it is allowed to survive. If it is sufficiently destroyed, then time is against it.
That is why Israel is willing to incur high costs right now. It is willing to absorb large numbers of casualties (by Israeli standards), the economic costs of a large mobilization, and the political costs of frayed relations with the Arab world, Europe, and even the United States. This isn’t just old-fashioned Israeli unilateralism—it’s also an appreciation that these costs are up-front investments that, hopefully, can lead to a peaceful, productive future without Hamas.
But the absence of Hamas cannot be achieved solely as a military objective. It is also a political objective, in the sense that after the defeat of Hamas has been completed as far as is militarily possible, someone will have to make sure that Hamas stays defeated. This is similar to the problem that the Allies faced in Germany and Japan after World War II and that the United States faced more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan: Dismantling enemies is only half the problem. The other half is finding or building something viable and sturdy to take their place—which, in the case of Gaza, presumably would entail standing up some kind of Palestinian political entity that takes upon itself the task of ensuring that Hamas stays gone and that an attack like that of October 7 occurs never again.
At this point, however, Israel has no plan for what will happen in Gaza once Hamas is destroyed. On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly castigated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for failing to come up with one. “We must dismantle Hamas’s governing capabilities in Gaza. The key to this goal is military action, and the establishment of a governing alternative in Gaza,” Gallant said in a televised statement. “In the absence of such an alternative, only two negative options remain: Hamas’s rule in Gaza or Israeli military rule in Gaza.” Neither option is feasible.
Netanyahu had better get a plan, and fast—or step aside for a new leader who can pursue a plan for what comes after the war.