The New Normal in Gaza
When forces balance, a physical system can stay stable indefinitely. So can political arrangements, which resist disruptive change to a balance of interests. The status quo in areas administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA) has endured for two decades despite the best efforts, well-intentioned or malign, to impose a different vision on the inhabitants. A similar settling into stasis may make the Yellow Line of Israeli withdrawal in Gaza permanent.
The quasi-dictatorship in the PA territories (areas A and B as defined in the 1995 Oslo Accords) is a status quo no one likes. It’s especially intolerable to external players who know what’s best but also resists change from within.
Mahmoud Abbas is heading into his third decade leading the PA, having won a single election to a four-year term as president in 2006. Around 83% of PA inhabitants demand his resignation, according to recent polls, and only 16% express satisfaction with his performance. These figures have changed little in over a decade. But Abbas’s authoritarian rule is maintained by a multilayered security force of 40,000-50,000 – no one really knows the true number – in a Palestinian population of 3.2 million. That’s the highest force density in the Arab world, comparable only to Lebanon.
But the PA territories aren’t despotic nightmares like Venezuela or North Korea. Palestinians have long been among the largest recipients of foreign aid per capita. There are more hospitals relative to population than in Egypt or Jordan, and they are funded primarily by international donor support. The UN provides education, cash assistance and social services to the large fraction (at least 1/3) of the population that qualifies as “refugees” under the UN’s bizarrely expansive definition applied only Palestinians, and in all of the 19 PA cities still mislabeled “refugee camps” precisely to maintain UN support.
Moreover, as many as 1/3 of Palestinians in the PA territories work for the government – that is, for the PA, for the UN, or for one of the many aid organizations that serve Palestinians. Another third of working-age Palestinians are unemployed. More than 80% of the remainder work in low-productivity jobs such as construction, retail, and informal labor. The leaders of the PA, on the other hand, are wealthy. No one knows Abbas’s personal net worth but reports put it north of $100 million. His sons head major firms in construction, telecom, energy, and finance whose revenues come primarily from Dad’s government. Their combined worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions.
The PA, in short, is a feudal-welfare hybrid state in which no one starves, healthcare is cheap or free, most of the population works for the government or not at all, and leaders enjoy unbounded luxury. Palestinians have little to cheer but even less to lament. There is scant privation and plenty of idle time to nurse grievances, real or manufactured, against the hated Israeli. PA security forces find occasion to moonlight as terrorists but also cooperate with the IDF against threats that menace both Israel and the PA.
The Oslo aspiration of a peaceful, productive Palestinian state alongside Israel would jeopardize the bounteous benefits of perpetual refugee status and the leadership’s kleptocracy. Israel’s generous offers of statehood in 2000, 2001 and 2008 were understandably dismissed without discussion or engagement. Internal efforts at reform, led most visibly and energetically by former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, were doomed from the start.
The vast, largely foreign-funded security apparatus that keeps the PA leaders in office experiences little friction with the far vaster, also largely foreign-funded Palestinian population. All busy themselves with shared dreams of ejecting the Jews from the Muslim ummah in the Levant. The determined efforts of world leaders chasing posterity, failed political aspirants seeking Nobel solace, and courageous internal reformers all hoping to fulfill Oslo’s vision have come to naught. So have Iranian fantasies of replacing the PA with Hamas, the ayatollahs’ genocidal Islamist catspaw. The status quo rejected all of them.
In Gaza, after two years of war, the forces are both stronger and more stiffly balanced. U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, accepted by Israel and Hamas last October, calls for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw to a shallow perimeter around the Gaza Strip. The terms generally fulfill all of Israel’s war aims: eliminating Hamas’s military and governing capacity, securing the return of all hostages, ensuring that Gaza can no longer pose a security threat to Israel, and maintaining freedom of action against future threats.
Hamas plainly signed on assuming it could ultimately escape its unpleasant obligations. (One wonders who could have convinced them of that?) It’s hardly an irrational hope. Faced with intransigence and eager to end a conflict, the US has often forced concessions on the only party that will listen – Israel. Three times in Lebanon and four in Hamas-ruled Gaza, the US forcefully restrained Israel’s response to unprovoked aggression, eager to avoid damaging America’s diplomatic standing and to limit domestic political fallout. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible,” President Joe Biden told Israel’s prime minister during the 2021 Gaza conflict. A ceasefire soon followed.
Hamas undoubtedly assumed it could once again exploit this playbook, using Trump’s keenness to be seen as a peacemaker to define “disarmament” into something aspirational and meaningless. It may be a cliché but expecting Hamas to give up its weapons and genocidal ambitions is like asking a zebra to shed its stripes – it won’t happen. At the same time, as I’ve argued, Israel cannot fully eradicate Hamas yet Hamas will inevitably resurge if not fully eradicated. The current “Yellow Line” separating the 42% of Gaza still controlled by Hamas from the remaining 58%, with 85% of Gaza’s population concentrated on the Hamas side, represents a tense but manageable status quo.
Israel cannot afford a long-term pervasive occupation of Gaza. The manpower drain alone would be prohibitive, to say nothing of the financial strain, the steady drip of IDF casualties, and the further international isolation that would inevitably result. Every single day, a handful of Hamas operatives cross the Yellow Line hoping to kidnap or at least harm IDF personnel. Every single day they are killed. Hamas can never be truly disarmed because its chief weapon is its death-worshipping insanity.
For their part, Gazans elected a Hamas-led legislature in 2006, and Hamas seized full control of Gaza in 2007. Despite the disastrous results of its October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel, Hamas still retains broad public support. There has been no widespread civilian unrest throughout the present conflict – nothing like the anti-government riots we see today in Iran, which take place despite the brutal repression the demonstrators know they will face. Hamas provides order, some social services, and is viewed as far less corrupt than the PA.
If it can be maintained, therefore, the Yellow Line with its current population distribution may offer a durable status quo – at least for Israel. The IDF appears able to police it with limited troops and few casualties, Hamas can’t reorganize on Israel’s side of the line, and the terror group faces a dearth of military-age males there who can be recruited into an effective fighting force. It will proclaim as victory continued control over a rump enclave and ongoing rule over most Gazans.
The forces opposing this status quo, however, are considerable. Is it realistic to confine so much of the Gazan population in so small an area indefinitely, particularly without widespread housing construction that Hamas would use to rebuild its fortress infrastructure? More than 12% of Ukraine’s population has permanently resettled in other countries since Russia’s 2022 invasion, and according to the demography institute at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, nearly half the pre-war population may disappear by 2051. More than half of Gazans would follow suit but have no takers or even an open border through which to flee. Allowing large numbers of Gazans to cross the Yellow Line into the Israeli zone, on the other hand, would facilitate Hamas’s resurgence and guarantee renewed war.
The external forces opposing a permanent border at the Yellow Line are stronger than the professional peace processors and opportunistic world leaders promoting a Palestinian state in the PA territories. Qatar wants to rehabilitate Hamas. Turkey concurs and also seeks a foothold it can use to tie Israel down as its strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pursues neo-Ottoman ambitions in Syria. Egypt is dying to restore its smuggling revenues. And Trump sees implementation of all 20 points of his plan as a signature achievement that not even the Nobel committee can ignore.
If today’s status quo in Gaza proves to be transitory, it is far from clear how it might evolve into anything more stable absent large-scale voluntary population relocations out of Gaza. Further Israeli pullbacks, if followed by organized Hamas attacks, will inevitably draw the IDF back to the Yellow Line – and Israel should plan accordingly. Like facts, status quos that work can be stubborn things, and there is much to be said for the least disastrous option.
