After the Gaza War

Today on TAP: A wider regional conflict or a renewed peace process?

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What happens after Israel invades Gaza? And is there any prospect of the aftermath leading back toward a durable peace process?

The Netanyahu government has no idea what it will do after the invasion. It does not want a long-term occupation of Gaza. The government hopes to limit a humanitarian disaster by allowing civilians to leave northern Gaza, and to wipe out Hamas as a military force. Both of these goals are wishful, and somewhat inconsistent.

Biden, after several days of expressing unconditional solidarity with Israel, finally said publicly that he expects Israel to abide by “the rules of war.” Speaking in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Biden added, “There’s standards that democratic institutions and countries go by. And so I’m confident that there’s going to be an ability for the innocents in Gaza to be able to have access to medicine and food and water.”

Biden also said flatly, “There needs to be a path to a Palestinian state.” If this is what Biden is saying privately, backed by the promise of more—or the threat of less—military aid, that’s progress.

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If the Israeli army’s military incursion is limited and it can claim to have severely damaged Hamas’s capacity to strike Israel, what then? For events to break toward peace, three things need to happen.

In Gaza, there needs to be a stabilization and normalization process, with a great deal of international aid for relief and rebuilding. There also needs to be a major international initiative to guarantee the security of both Gaza and of Israel, including limits on Hamas and on Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Inside Israel, Netanyahu has to be ousted. As soon as the immediate war subsides, the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations will continue. The broad Israeli public, which had massively turned against Netanyahu even before the Hamas massacre, is now doubly enraged at Netanyahu for failing to keep the country safe.

Netanyahu’s assault on the judiciary has been shelved for now, as a condition of opposition leaders joining his war Cabinet. By the time things normalize, he could be on trial.

Several Israeli friends point out that this turn of events means that the peace party—the center-left and the left—is on the verge of its greatest resurgence in decades, but only if the military situation does not lead to all-out regional war. Here, Biden as a source of restraint becomes even more essential.

And finally, there needs to be a restoration of a true peace process, both for its own sake and to damp down violence. This also requires Netanyahu’s ouster. The convergence of a pro-peace government in Jerusalem and relative stabilization in Gaza, as well as constraints on settler provocations, just might jump-start it.

Is this scenario likely? No. Is it possible? Yes. All of the alternatives are too horrific to contemplate.

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