405 - Fixing Gaza is Impossible Without a Viable West Bank

Settler Violence Kills, Hamas Still is a Threat

Trump will now command an international stabilization force for Gaza authorized by the UN Security Council earlier this week. It would in theory protect civilians, remove armaments from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, establish and nurture a non-Hamas police force, and provide security and a measure of good governance as the Gaza Strip undergoes massive reconstruction.

Israel’s army would withdraw from its half of the Gaza Strip once the new stabilization operation is up and running and has established control of the battered territory. At least that is the fanciful concept that the Security Council, drawing on U.S. prepared drafts, adopted.

Equally fancifully, the Security Council resolution envisages the rebuilding of Gaza finally paving a “credible” road leading to “Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” The rebuilding would be financed by a to-be-established World Bank trust fund specifically for the reconstruction of the Strip.

Trump, who once wanted to turn Gaza into a resort strip with branded hotels scattered along the Mediterranean littoral, with Gazans somehow being banished and moved away, thinks his being in charge of the stabilization force (with Azerbaijan and Indonesia possible early suppliers of peace-enforcement detachments) will give the effort momentum and direction and himself many accolades.

Hamas is skeptical. It has not agreed to pull its last operatives out from tunnels and other hiding places. It does not and cannot trust the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Hamas wants to persist. But neither Israel nor the United States cares to give either Hamas or the Islamic State breathing room. Hence there will still be clashes between Hamas and Israel. The stabilization force, depending of its intrinsic firepower, very likely will end up fighting tooth and nail against Hamas. And stabilization may become a chimera.

Reconstruction of Gaza would be much more likely, and much more scalable, if there were a viable Palestine to which the new Gaza could be a part. But Israel has systematically been reducing Palestine to a collection of only partly governed and only marginally safe and secure towns and villages.

Israel, by condoning the invasion of the West Bank (aka Palestine) first by settlers and now by vigilante bomb throwers (with IDF connivance), has compromised not only the safety of the 3 million inhabitants of the West Bank but the very viability of the whole concept of a Palestinian state. And there can be no satisfactory reconstruction of Gaza without a West Bank to which it can be attached nominally and spiritually. The picture is not at all pretty or promising.

At the end of the 1973 war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, Israel for the first time in the modern era controlled the Golan Heights (taken from Syria), East Jerusalem (taken from Jordan), and Gaza (taken from Egypt). What was left was the new Palestinian (pseudo-) state, half of what could have been a two-state solution.

Trump’s stabilization of Gaza, if it happens successfully, could lead in time to a revival of a two-state answer. But there are too many imponderables. Most of all the extreme right wing cabinet ministers who control Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s fate, and therefore his actions in Gaza and the West Bank, definitely do not want Gaza or Palestine to stabilize or succeed. They want to erase both, giving new room for a settler return to Gaza and a settler inundation of the West Bank.

Already, Jewish zealots are daily molesting residents of the West Bank. They systematically firebomb villages and olive groves (it is harvesting time for olives), drive West Bankers out of their residences and towns, and kill and wound those who try to stand in their way. In October, a masked Israeli settler was filmed by an American photographer as he clubbed a 53-year-old Palestinian woman unconscious. A few days later, photographers showed settlers and IDF soldiers assaulting a 65-year-old Palestinian man. In an olive grove confrontation, a 77-year-old Palestinian school principal suffered a broken jaw and a fractured cheekbone. At total of 260 attacks against Palestinians took place in October alone. Furthermore, in the two years since the Hamas outrages of 2023, Israelis have killed more than 1,000 adults and children in the West Bank. About 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes and farms, many forced into already crowded cities like Ramallah and Jenin. (Palestinians killed an Israeli settler yesterday.)

Much of this violence is purposeful, not random. It is part of a new crusade on the part of Israelis to expand their settlements in the West Bank and to make life so difficult for rural Palestinians that they migrate out of the West Bank, possibly to Jordan. (Or to South Africa, as a bizarre airlift accomplished Monday.)

Netanyahu and his co-conspirators Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givr are determined formally somehow to annex the West Bank to Israel to preclude any Palestinian state. Smotrich and Ben-Givr, at least, even want to bring Jewish settlers back into Gaza.

That is why Trump’s UN-backed exercise may accomplish little or nothing. Israel and Netanyahu have very different objectives than the UN, and ultimately the new stabilization force may be unable to relax the IDF’s grip on its half of Gaza or gain control in the other half from Hamas. Moreover, even if Gaza is miraculously reconstructed and resurrected as a viable polity, it will not and cannot under present circumstances have a viable West Bank with which to connect.

Only a new and reformulated American administration could bring Netanyahu and his cronies to see the folly of their design. The present team from Washington has different motives. Establishing a Palestinian state that includes Gaza is not among them. Nor is reining in the settlers and ending settler violence against Arabs in the West Bank.