Bringing Peace to Gaza (I)

I pray every day for the safe return of the hostages, for peace in Gaza, and throughout the Land. I pray that all civilians – Israelis and Palestinians alike – can start the long-overdue process of recovery and healing after so much tragic death and destruction.

Negotiations in Doha have been flagged as particularly critical, even though Hamas apparently will not be represented.

To bring peace to Gaza, the objectives of a ceasefire deal must surely aim not only for short-term goals – an end to the fighting and the release of the hostages – but also a longer-term framework that prevents the repeat of this deadly violence.

Only then can people return to their homes and rebuild their livelihoods with confidence in their future security. And only then will investors fund the huge sums required for the reconstruction of Gaza.

If Hamas regenerates its military capability, then we can lose hope for long-term peace. Their promise to repeat October 7th ‘again and again’ would before long imperil the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, G-d forbid.

The key point here is that Hamas’ regenerative capacity is astonishingly fast.

This risk of Hamas’ regeneration must not be ignored, whatever our sincere and anguished emotions about the hostages and their families. We must be clear on what Hamas is and how it works.

Hamas does not have interest in the wellbeing of Gaza’s civilian population. In fact, where Israel went badly wrong in the run-up to the October 7th atrocities – PM Netanyahu’s famous ‘conceptzia’ – was to believe it did.

In fact, since the October 7th atrocities, Hamas boasts that its actions – pretending to care more about governance than conflict – were aimed all along at deceiving Israel to lower its guard.

Rather, as Jerusalem Post analyst, Seth Frantzman, has well-articulated, Hamas is more like a mafia than an army or a government.

It this mafia-like structure that gives Hamas its rapid regenerative capacity, and it rests on three pillars:

Firstly, Hamas has a high-speed low-cost model for manufacturing weapons and digging tunnels at scale. This model depends on its capacity to extort money, seize goods, smuggle components and exploit forced labour. One estimate (Doha Institute) suggests exploitation of approximately 20,000 Palestinians and 10,000 Egyptians. Many tunnel diggers are children. Sadly many have perished.

Secondly, Hamas is highly decentralised and distributed. Every neighbourhood, and almost every building has Hamas enforcers, its own armoury, and subterranean tunnels. Even the white tents distributed to refugees in their camps have been used as cover for mass tunnel digging.

And thirdly, for all its brutal enforcement practices, Hamas draws legitimacy and mobilises consent through Islamist and Palestinian nationalist ideology and the discourse of ‘resistance’. Even after everything that has happened, the latest authoritative Palestinian poll of public sentiment, conducted between late May and early June, shows that “satisfaction with Hamas’ performance during the war stands at 75%” while “91% do not think Hamas committed atrocities on October 7th” and “61% say they prefer to have Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip after the war”.

To understand what can stop Hamas’ rapid regenerative capacity, we can look closely at Israel’s four negotiating ‘red lines’ which have not been developed by accident:

• Hamas needs materials hence the importance on the future of the Philadelphi corridor. Previous experience shows that thousands of impoverished Gazans, many of them children, will be bribed and coerced into round-the-clock action to restore destroyed smuggling routes within days, while previous reports suggest many tunnels still remain intact. With smuggling routes restored, weapons and components can be brought in and arms manufacturing can resume.

It is important to ask hard questions – when Israel’s security officials say electronic surveillance and underground barriers can stop the tunnels, to what extent might they be again being complacent and placing too much trust in technology? And is their assessment purely reflective of security considerations, or does it implicitly accept higher risks of future war in the hope of freeing the hostages? It is important to know.

• Hamas needs to replenish its people, hence the importance on checking that civilian returnees are not Hamas operatives in disguise.
• Hamas needs new leadership, hence the importance of Palestinian prisoner release selection.
• And Hamas needs to keep Israel at arms length, hence the importance around triggers for a potential – and hopefully not required – resumption of conflict.

Again, whatever our emotions, these four red lines are crucial for saving the lives of Palestinians and Israelis, and making sure the nightmare of devastating war in Gaza will not be repeated ‘again and again’.

And yet, while these red lines surely make sense, Israel’s strategy is tragically flawed.

Contrary to the intent of Israel’s ‘carrots and sticks’ approach, Hamas’ popularity remains high – even after the death and destruction which Gaza has experienced, even though Hamas’ initiation of hostilities is not in dispute, and even though before these hostilities Gazans had benefitted from more permits to work in Israel and eased controls.

This is the third pillar which drives Hamas’ astonishingly fast regenerative capacity. Even after everything that has happened, Hamas’ actions to restore its governance, its tunnels and its arms manufacturing facilities will take place within a permissive environment.

More broadly, the discourse of ‘resistance’ will remain the dominant paradigm until and unless something replaces it.

While apparent US pressure for compromise on Israel’s red lines is understandable but short-sighted, the Americans are right on two counts – there needs to be a political horizon, and regional integration plays a role.

In part II, I will build on a previous blogpost introducing the thought process towards a new kind of political horizon, a regional integration-centered peace framework.

But whereas the US approach sees regional integration as an incentive for Israeli acceptance of the Oslo ‘classic two-state solution’, I will argue that opportunities for regional integration may be more effectively leveraged to provide the contours of a new and better peace framework altogether.