With the war in Gaza in a brutal stalemate, the Biden administration appears to be talking once again of the “day after.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated publicly on May 12 that Washington has “been working for many, many weeks on developing credible plans for security, for governance, for rebuilding” in Gaza.
This time, the administration is urging Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Morocco to deploy a joint Arab peacekeeping force in the territory once combat ends, with the objective of securing Gaza until a credible Palestinian security presence can be established there. Separately, Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has proposed setting up an “American, European, Arab, and Palestinian administration” to manage civilian affairs in Gaza until a new government can be formed, during which time Israel would maintain a degree of “security control.”
Both the Biden administration and Gantz portray their proposals as temporary, but they will prove open-ended so long as Palestinian independence is not the unambiguous end-goal. And yet the Biden administration remains reluctant to exert the kind of pressure needed to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to engage with even its most modest proposals. Having warned against an invasion of Rafah without an adequate plan to protect the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still there, the administration nonetheless notified Congress of its intention to transfer $1 billion in military assistance to Israel even after the ground offensive went ahead with no such plan in place. If the administration is betting on Gantz to unseat Netanyahu, then its failure to exert any meaningful pressure on the prime minister serves only to bolster his domestic standing while undercutting Gantz’s.
But this is the least of it. Without a clear vision of Palestinian statehood and a roadmap for achieving it, a supposedly transitional force deployment and interim administration in Gaza cannot be anything but permanent. Worse, the longer these arrangements are maintained without an unambiguous political horizon, the more likely that peacekeeping troops will come into direct conflict with the population they are supposed to police, if not protect. Arab troops will fare no better than non-Arab ones, regardless of their own nationality or presumed religious and cultural affinity with Palestinians.
Even the simplest conceivable peacekeeping mandate—to ensure an initial “stabilization” phase until new Palestinian governing arrangements are put in place—would present major challenges. Would the peacekeeping force be expected to disarm Hamas members and other militants, intern them, dismantle their organizations? Would it sweep the whole Gaza Strip, house to house? Or would it blindly hope that the local population will continue to welcome, even protect, the peacekeepers, even as the prospect of independence becomes ever more distant? The peacekeepers will end up inflicting yet more casualties on an already abused population—and incurring their own.
Integrating Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces into the proposed peacekeeping force for Gaza, or handing over to them after an initial stabilization phase, will not ensure a better outcome. Quite the opposite, in fact. Deploying PA forces loyal to Fatah, whether drawn from the West Bank or Gaza, raises the potential for violent score-settling with Hamas, with which there is a long and bitter rivalry. Many recall the internecine violence that both preceded and followed Hamas’ takeover of Gaza in 2007. However, the precedent was set by the killing of fourteen unarmed Hamas protestors by Fatah-staffed PA police in November 1994, barely months after the establishment of the PA and its security forces.
The risks are even higher because both Egypt and the UAE have reason to pursue agendas of their own in Gaza: they see Hamas in the same frame as the Muslim Brotherhood, with which they are at war. The UAE will surely seek to further the fortunes of its close ally, former Gaza security chief and Fatah strongman Mohammad Dahlan, who retains a following in Gaza, including among clans that have recently skirmished with Hamas.
A contested Arab or PA deployment is therefore next to certain to deepen political fragmentation and generate worsening social breakdown in Gaza—with potential repercussions among Palestinians in the West Bank. There have already been glimpses of gang and clan violence in Gaza in response to the weakening of Hamas’ police and overall security control. Under the approach advocated by the Biden administration, Gaza could evolve into a Haiti on the Mediterranean. Contestation would very likely extend as well to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which for years have witnessed a three-way struggle involving Hamas with other Islamist factions and the rival wings of Fatah loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Dahlan. The largest of these camps, Ain el-Hilweh, was rocked by clashes that left 28 dead over the summer of 2023, almost on the eve of October 7.
Placing Gaza under any foreign military control without a clear roadmap to Palestinian statehood would moreover enable Israel to deepen its colonization of the West Bank with added impunity. The Biden administration and allies such as the United Kingdom and leading European governments have shown, by commission or omission, that they would undertake only the most token activity to counter the overt role played by the Israeli government and army in aiding and abetting armed settlers—including official settler militia units and a formally-established settler brigade within the Israeli armed forces—who have contributed to the killing of nearly 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7. Further depredations in the West Bank will stoke tensions in Gaza to a boiling point, which an Arab or international peacekeeping force will presumably be expected to put down.
There cannot be a military “holding operation” in Gaza under such conditions, as the Israeli army itself is learning, let alone credible peacekeeping. The PA has sensibly opposed being drawn into policing Gaza without the assurance of a meaningful diplomatic process leading to statehood. Already, PA security forces in the West Bank are seen to play a role similar to the one of the proposed Arab or international peacekeeping force in Gaza: pacifying a population frustrated by the ever receding horizon of statehood and threatened by ever more violent settlers, armed and shielded by the Israeli army.
Arab states being asked to contribute peacekeeping troops for Gaza would be wise to insist on a direct path to Palestinian statehood as a key guarantee of their own political and security interests. Ireland, Norway, and Spain have already pointed the way by recognizing Palestine as a state with the full rights and duties of independent states. Arab states should refuse a U.S.-brokered peacekeeping role unless this approach is integral to the mandate. They would be equally well advised to insist that none of their troops will be deployed unless the United States and major European governments that promote the idea while refusing to recognize Palestinian statehood also put their boots on the ground. The Americans and Europeans must moreover provide ironclad pledges not to pull their troops out without the agreement of their Arab peacekeeping partners. This lesson remains vivid, following the precipitate withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force that deployed to Lebanon in 1982, which preceded the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.
Israel launched its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip without any idea of what it would do with the territory or the population afterwards, and is now coming to the realization that it is condemned to a protracted low-intensity conflict. An Arab or international force will fare no better: it will simply relieve Israel by taking over an untenable situation that it has no more chance of resolving than Israel has. For the Biden administration to broker a force deployment on the terms it is proposing makes it guilty of knowingly putting its allies and friends at risk. And with radical, state-sponsored Israeli settler violence in the West Bank unchecked, the entire arrangement will serve only one outcome: to dismantle Palestine completely. The United States has never been an honest broker in this conflict, but Biden will have moved it into the role of direct combatant in the decades-long fight to prevent the establishment of a Palestine.
Absent the conditions offering the Palestinians a state, the United States and allied Western states that advocate peacekeeping in Gaza while blocking Palestinian statehood must “own” their idea and take full responsibility for dealing with its consequences.
