Bad Options, part 1

It is well beyond time to start talking about the “day after” in Gaza, what reality must look like on the ground to ensure another one does not simply start again next month or next year. If we care about ending this, first we must understand which options *must* be off the table.

The first and hopefully the least controversial is the status quo ante. This reality, which has prevailed since the 2005 Disengagement and 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza, has been an unmitigated economic, humanitarian, political, and security disaster for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Israel’s blockade of Gaza, ostensibly to weaken Hamas and manage the threat it poses to Israel, has kept an already impoverished and isolated Palestinian population at the edge of humanitarian catastrophe, while Hamas has enriched itself by controlling the internal flow of international aid.

Severe limits on “dual use” technology imports (concrete, not yellowcake), which Hamas might use for military purposes, have led to them expropriating what little comes in to build smuggling/attack tunnels, tearing up sanitation pipes to built rockets, and other such military innovations.

Violence has erupted between Israel and Hamas almost annually, with rocket barrages of ever expanding range met with bombing and limited ground operations, resulting in untold damage to Gaza’s fragile civilian infrastructure, thousands of civilian deaths, and constant terror on both sides.

The open sore of the Gaza status quo is a political boon to all the worst, most extreme actors in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli radical right-wingers point to Hamas’s constant violence to justify why the only response must be more isolation, more punishment, and more violence. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other armed competitors in the Strip enjoy a ready constituency of aggrieved and frankly oppressed Palestinians to whom their calls of “resistance” appear legitimate no matter the human cost.

Almost no one in their right mind would openly advocate a return to this status quo. However, it is also the most likely outcome because, relatively speaking, it is easy. Without more bold, forceful measures to create a new paradigm, we are guaranteed to go back to where we started.

Next thread, bad option number two. Please bear with me while I get this next one together. Being in the middle of a war is not ideal for writing, or living for that matter.

This post (with minor edits including a paragraph accidentitally dropped from the original) was originally published to Facebook and Bluesky on my personal accounts on 16 October 2023.