The Gaza war has set off a number of acrimonious and polarized debates. One of the most consequential ones for policymaking in the Middle East and internationally has focused on the fate and governance of Gaza and its population.
Earlier discussions tended to be based on a “day after,” in which fighting would stop, Israel would withdraw, humanitarian conditions would improve, displaced families would return, and local governance structures would be devised or repaired. But key actors—Palestinian, Israeli, regional, and global—have staked out very different, often antagonistic positions on critical questions.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program has asked a group of experts to present how the issues look from various perspectives. We invited them to focus not simply on what they think are ideal answers but on what answers they think are emerging or likely to emerge.
In this first group of short essays, we present analyses of likely Israeli responses. In the following weeks, we will continue to publish pieces tackling Palestinian, regional, and international responses.
—Amr Hamzawy and Nathan J. Brown
Where Do We Go From Here?
By Arie M. Dubnov
Of all forms of human error, prophecy is the most avoidable. As a historian, I typically refrain from peering beyond the annals of the past into the intricate tapestry of the present and the alarming unknowns of the future. Yet, while taking the risk of being gratuitously wrong, I can see three major vectors or possible courses of action for Israel in the post–October 7 era.
A first conceivable scenario would be “more of the same”: continuation of a war in the Gaza Strip, albeit at a diminished intensity, dragging on for an extended period. This trajectory appears to align with the current Israeli government’s preferences, helping it solidify its grip on power. A clear hint was given at the onset of the war when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Israeli public, calling for preparedness for a second War of Independence, the first of which lasted for more than a year. Military experts envision an extended phase during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdraw their ground troops from the strip, engage in a series of brief raids or weeklong campaigns, and retreat each time back into Israeli territory. In this scenario, the level of bloodshed may diminish compared to the past months, the Israeli economy can endure the protracted war effort, and global attention may shift to other arenas.
But this scenario carries deep risks. The conflict’s duration might surpass this time frame and turn into a protracted war of attrition, resembling the eighteen-year Israeli presence in the security strip in southern Lebanon or the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan. And this could raise the possibility of other disasters. Indeed, the specter of genocidal atrocities and ethnic cleansing looms. The substantial arming of Israeli civilians, including many West Bank settlers, could result in forced expulsions of Palestinians and an increased pace of land expropriation in the West Bank’s Area C and beyond. This aligns well with the alt-right’s so-called Decisive Plan. While everyone’s attention would remain fixated on Gaza, where the primary efforts of the regular army would continue to be concentrated, local settlement guards or militias functioning as irregular or semiregular units, akin to paramilitaries, could turn the West Bank into hell on Earth.
Historical precedents abound: paramilitary groups of this kind take orders from local commanders or charismatic political figures and are loyal only to them, not directly beholden to the central authority. Such partisan groups operate independently, with minimal external scrutiny, and are more likely to commit war crimes and target civilian populations. In parallel, the ongoing physical devastation in Gaza and the dismantling of all civil infrastructure will be exacerbated by the encouragement of refugee immigration and resettlement—a move likely to be rationalized as a humanitarian endeavor.
A second and even more frightening scenario is the spillover into a regional war. Raising concerns about a potential escalation of the conflict into a larger Middle Eastern war is understandable, given the numerous current flashpoints in the area. These include the Israel-Lebanon border, a current site of low-intensity war, and the Red Sea, where a wave of missile and drone strikes by the Houthi rebels on commercial ships has caused major interruptions to world trade. Recent bombings by the Islamic State in Iran, the killing of an Iran-backed militia leader in Iraq, and constant instability in Syria add to the concern. Such deterioration could begin following a flare-up on the Israel-Hezbollah front, a Houthi maritime blockade in the Red Sea that would increase shipping costs globally and could push other countries that are heavily reliant on the Suez Canal to intervene, or the failure of diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tension in the region.
The third scenario involves a change of leadership in Israel following domestic protest combined with international pressure. On the eve of October 7, the deeply divided Israeli society was in turmoil, if not on the brink of civil war. Domestic politics will neither dictate nor determine foreign and security policy. However, in the past, protests by reservists who returned from the front—such as those that Israel witnessed after the 1973 War and following the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre—have had considerable political weight. The release of about a quarter-million reservists in the coming weeks may create such a mass movement, especially as many were already active in the massive protest movement before October.
There is little room for wishful thinking here. The likelihood of a left-wing government materializing due to such protests appears scant. Far more probable is that Israelis will be drawn to a hawkish leader exemplifying strength and authority, typically a retired general with a distinguished military career, with a capacity to assume responsibility and navigate intra-Jewish divides.
Could this last scenario, should it unfold, revive hopes of a political settlement? In such a constellation, the prospect of Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti’s release from prison would not be a pipe dream, especially if accompanied by a deal to release all remaining Israeli hostages and prisoners of war captured by Hamas. A gradual restoration of the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the eyes of both center-left Israelis and Palestinians is possible as well. The challenge for all sides to the conflict would be to involve the PA in the restoration of Gaza. Palestinians will have to weigh in on this matter themselves, rather than allowing third parties to decide for them. It is doubtful that a Fatah-led Palestinian leadership will want to take responsibility in the Gaza Strip immediately—not only due to traumatic memories of its bitterly violent struggle with Hamas in June 2007 but also because it will lose its legitimacy instantly if it is seen as a puppet regime rolling back into Gaza on Israeli tanks. Therefore, UN interference is necessary, and it should take the shape of an interim, multinational peacekeeping force similar to the one that was tasked to facilitate the transition to an independent East Timor in 1999 or the NATO-led force deployed to Kosovo in the same year. In the second phase, building and empowering Palestinian security forces in the West Bank is crucial for the future of security in Gaza.
Unfortunately, the three scenarios range between bad and worse. Let us hope the lesser evil will prevail.
Arie M. Dubnov holds the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies and teaches at the Department of History at George Washington University.
Israel’s Defense Strategy and Domestic Politics in Shaping Gaza Policy
By Jonathan Rynhold
The former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan once remarked that “Israel has no foreign policy, only a defense policy with international implications.” This saying encapsulates where Israel stands today.
Israel’s key objectives in Gaza are backed by a broad consensus: removing Hamas as the governing authority and destroying its military infrastructure to the point where it is incapable of operating in anything other than small groups, thus making it incapable of carrying out more October 7–style assaults. Israel’s current transition to a less intense style of warfare based on targeted raids and special operations will not alter this objective. This phase of the war is expected to last six to nine months.
In principle, the Israeli public would also like to see the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia. But skepticism that a Palestinian state will seek to coexist peacefully with Israel is both deep and widespread. Nonetheless, many in the defense establishment argue that Israel needs to articulate a political and diplomatic horizon for Gaza and the Palestinian issue more broadly.
Indeed, it is at this point that former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s aphorism that “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics” trumps Dayan’s remark. Going forward, the makeup of Israel’s government will have a major influence on its policy toward Gaza. The current government is the most right-wing in Israel’s history, and it has a clear majority in the Knesset. However, if elections were held tomorrow, it would likely lose one-third of its seats and fall from power. Given the great public anger at the government, demonstrations are likely, and there is a reasonable chance elections will be held in the coming months. As a result, three domestic political scenarios will determine Israel’s policy direction over the coming year.
First, if the current coalition stays in power, it will not agree to any PA role in Gaza, nor will it recommit to a two-state solution. It will seek to establish and maintain full security control over Gaza, and it will try to establish and buffer zone inside Gaza along the perimeter fence.
It also will try to get Arab states to back a technocratic Arab-Palestinian administration in Gaza but will not make significant diplomatic concessions to achieve this. Under domestic pressure to re-establish settlements in Gaza and facing American opposition to these settlements, Netanyahu will likely reluctantly accept the U.S. position while expecting U.S. cooperation with his preferences on Gaza’s governance—a move that balances internal demands with U.S. concerns. If that fails, the Israeli government will likely seek to muddle through with a focus on deterrence and containing military threats. Netanyahu prefers to maintain the status quo in the West Bank, but he is reluctant to move against the most extreme settlers whose violent attacks on Palestinians increase the likelihood of widespread violence breaking out for the first time since the Second Intifada.
The second scenario would involve a centrist government led by former defense minister Benny Gantz, with a broad coalition that would exclude the far right and Netanyahu, and probably exclude Netanyahu’s Likud party as well. Such a government would agree to a month (or perhaps two) pause in the fighting in order to bring home as many hostages as possible. However, it is unlikely such a government would agree to a full ceasefire until its key objectives in Gaza were met.
The centrist government would be willing to embrace the broad principles of U.S. President Joe Biden’s “day after” plan for Gaza, both because it did not want Israel to control Gaza long-term and because such a plan will help move forward the normalization process with Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, the centrist government would likely be tempered by the conviction that any progress in Gaza for Palestinians, as much as for Israelis, depends on first bringing Hamas down. It would also set stringent conditions for supporting the control of Gaza by a “revitalized” PA. Such conditions are likely to include ending PA payments to the families of prisoners in Israeli jails. It would also seek an extended period whereby security control of Gaza would be shared by Israel and the PA, similar to the way Area B operates in the West Bank. Finally, while the centrist government would be able to provide a political horizon for Palestinian statehood, its ability in the short run to make major concessions would be heavily circumscribed by the Israeli public’s utter lack of faith that Israelis can live safely alongside a Palestinian state.
The third scenario is a center-right coalition led by Gantz, excluding Netanyahu. In this scenario, the center of gravity within the coalition is more to the right than in the second scenario and less to the right than in the first (the current government). Gantz’s National Unity alliance includes former members of Likud led by Gideon Saar, who are likely to split from the National Unity party before any election. Given the hawkishness of the public, the Saar group would probably take a significant chuck of the thirty-five to forty seats that the polls currently predict for National Unity.
The policy of such a government is the most difficult to predict. It would likely put more emphasis on a buffer zone than a centrist government would, but it would probably be more flexible on the size of the buffer than the current government is. It would seek to rein in extremist settlers in the West Bank and maintain security cooperation with the PA there. Its policy toward the U.S. day-after plan is difficult to predict: a majority likely would be willing to cooperate, but the minority could be big enough to bring the government down. In such a scenario, the position of the ultra-Orthodox could be critical. Gantz has wooed them, and their main agenda is domestic and sectoral. In addition, some of their key leaders in the Knesset tend to have pragmatic views on foreign policy in private. On the other hand, they have been in close alliance with the Israeli right for more than thirty years.
Jonathan Rynhold is a professor in the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University and a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. His research focuses on U.S.-Israeli relations and on Israeli and American attitudes and policy toward Palestinians.
Israel Prefers to Reconstruct Its Failed Strategy
By Menachem Klein
Among the numerous effects of the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel has found its strategic direction upended. Since Hamas won 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections and took control of the Gaza Strip by arms in 2007, Israel’s policy toward the strip has had four principles. Now, the decay or collapse of those principles have left Israel’s leaders debating between a pair of nonviable options going forward.
For its first principle post-2007, Israel closed Gaza’s borders to discipline Hamas while keeping it in power and maintaining the political division with the West Bank regime. This move allowed foreign funding to help Hamas hold onto power, while periodic military strikes curbed its reach and forced it to abide by the Israeli order. This principle failed to push Gaza Strip residents to revolt against Hamas, but it also failed to tame the regime.
Second, Israel replaced conflict resolution with conflict management. It worked to maintain the political divide of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank—not in order to advance a peace agreement with Ramallah but to prevent it. Hamas transformed politically, and in 2021 it reached an agreement with Fatah on general elections and integrating into the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Israel was uninterested in undermining its de facto annexation of the West Bank, in which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is perceived as Israel’s subcontractor.
Third, Israel has worked to shrink the Arab-Israeli conflict by signing normalization agreements with Arab countries, thus distancing them from the Palestinians. And lastly, Israel has built an expensive security wall over and underground, with electronic monitors and remote-control shooting systems.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 seriously challenged all four principles. In response, Israel has seemingly abandoned its security wall and returned to older methods, more like those it uses in the West Bank. Hamas’s attack happened when normalization had almost reached its peak: an agreement with Saudi Arabia. Most likely, after the war, Israel will try to remake the deal by paying lip service to the Saudi Arab Peace Initiative and Palestinian independence. This goes hand in hand with the conflict management principle.
Israel’s war aims to dismantle the first principle of containing and taming Hamas’s control of Gaza, without agreeing on who will replace the regime. Members of the cabinet are deeply divided in their views and political interests. According to the security establishment headed by Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, once Hamas no longer rules Gaza, Israel will find local agents unaffiliated with Hamas who will run the strip’s civil affairs. This process will take place in coordination with a multinational task force that will fund and manage Gaza’s reconstruction. Israel will keep military control at the border and retain the ability to cross into Gaza for security operations. This plan is similar to that of the United States. Both seek to create in the Gaza Strip the same order that prevails in the West Bank. The United States, however, wants to install in Gaza an undefined “revitalized” PA that will be Israel’s future partner in a two-state solution. By contrast, Israel wants to keep the two areas separated administratively by different subcontractors under its own supreme regime.
Netanyahu’s political interest is with the radical national-religious parties. Both strongly oppose Gallant and the security establishment proposal—yet for different motives. Netanyahu’s opposition stems from his personal position: he fears Gallant wants to succeed him. The opposition of the Jewish supremacist parties is ideological: they are campaigning for expelling most Gaza Strip Palestinians, completing its physical destruction, and repopulating the newly built area with Jewish settlers. They see Gaza Strip as a model for what they later want to be implemented in the West Bank.
Both the security establishment’s plan and the national-religious parties’ plan are unachievable. The latter is blocked because Egypt and the United States reject it, while the former is stalled because Hamas is unlikely to be deprived of its ability to undertake or threaten hostile actions against Israel. After its governmentlike capabilities have been destroyed, Hamas will likely manage a transition to guerrilla war against Israel.
Blindly and amnesiac, Israel seems destined to re-experience its 1983–2000 South Lebanon bloodshed, under worse conditions. Unless a different path is imposed from outside, the dysfunctional and mistrusted government, together with the failed security establishment, will find itself trying to regain the trust of a traumatized society by using force on any front and any way available. Once the war in Gaza stops, the unholy partnership between Netanyahu and the national-religious parties will keep the West Bank front active, while a deeply divided society manages a volatile sociopolitical struggle over accountability for the failures of October 7.
Menachem Klein is professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University. He was an adviser to the Israeli delegation in negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 2000 and is one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative.
The Rise and Postwar Threat of Political Judaism
By Gershon Shafir
Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the world became accustomed to the term “political Islam,” referring to the movement seeking to use political means to advance religious law and ideas, ultimately narrowing religion to ideology. But a parallel phenomenon has risen alongside it: political Judaism.
Politically marginalized religious Zionism arrived after the 1967 war and the conquest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), the biblical lands of Jewish antiquity. The doctrine of “the three oaths,” which required Jews to keep their heads down in the diaspora and exercise caution in their relationships with other nations, could be set aside as obsolete under renewed Jewish sovereignty. The debate over the future of the OPT presented a historic opportunity for religious Zionists to overthrow their dependent status and politicize Judaism, much like secular Zionism had nationalized Judaism several generations earlier.
Rabbis of religious Zionism turned away from pluralism and disputation, which are characteristic of Jewish religious law (halakha), by elevating the commandment to settle the land of Israel. By turning the halakhic tradition into a political ideology, religious Zionism transformed into political Judaism.
Even Israel’s nonreligious leaders welcomed political Judaism. The labor settlement movement, and later the Likud party, needed a new and radical justification for continued territorial expansion from pre-1948 colonization in the less-inhabited Palestinian lowlands into the densely populated, mountainous parts of Palestine. Political Judaism alone could provide that justification.
For example, Rabbi Elisha Aviner, faithfully representing the broad consensus of religious Zionism, turned to Maimonides, revered as the most influential and prolific medieval Jewish halakhic author, for his codification of the biblical commandments of the conquest of Canaan. They expected Arabs under Jewish sovereignty to “accept of Israeli lordship, total surrender, namely reconciliation to Israeli sovereignty over all of the Land of Israel,” recognize Israel’s God-given right to Palestine, and relinquish expressions of their national identity and aspiration not only in their behavior but also in their consciousness.
According to Rabbi Meir Kahane—an outlier for his anti-Palestinian vigilante violence but close to the mainstream in his halakhic opinions—the options these interpretations left Palestinians were threefold: to leave the land, to fight, or to make peace. There is little need to explain the lot of those who “chose” to leave. Kahane dedicated only three words to the fate of those who fight back, equating the response to the biblical injunction “to be killed.” The portion in life of those who “make peace” is “tribute and servitude.”
If the 1967 war politicized and mobilized a large segment of the religious Zionist public, the harsh setback of the 1973 war radicalized them. The Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) embarked on a campaign of unauthorized settlements, and after Likud rose to power in 1977, it was able to carry its colonization mission to fruition. A second setback—Ariel Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from Gaza and abandonment of four West Bank settlements—ignited a second phase of radicalization within religious Zionism. A new vanguard emerged: the ultranationalist and ultrareligious Hardali movement that combined militant colonization and anti-Palestinian violence with orthodoxy that is neither quiet nor inward-turning. The Hardalim are further distinguished by their vehement rejection of liberalism and the Western values of separation of powers, judicial review, minority rights, and tolerance of diversity.
The formation of Netanyahu’s right-wing government following the November 2022 elections was a dream come true for Hardalim. Netanyahu, under indictment, cobbled together the coalition that would allow him to push through a judicial coup and undermine his trials. His willing partners were the two orthodox parties and the two wings of political Judaism, which he helped assemble into a single, powerful religious Zionist ticket.
One of the coalition coleaders is Bezalel Smotrich, who put forth his own “decisive plan” that is similar in all important details with Kahane’s tripartite vision. This plan has been referred to as “transfer, apartheid, and genocide” by Tomer Persico, a scholar of contemporary Judaism. The other coleader is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a student of Kahane and a participant in and defense attorney for the Lehava vigilante organization that operates against Palestinian citizens in Israel. Smotrich became minister of finance, while Ben-Gvir was appointed minister of national security—making the criminally guilty vigilante into the minister in charge of the police. The new government embarked on the expansion of the stalled colonization of the West Bank, including Area C, while Ben-Gvir formed the Ben Eliyahu Commission, which recommended establishing a National Guard to police Arab-Palestinian citizens.
Hamas’s invasion and brutal massacre on October 7, which shook the Israeli public to the core and undermined the Israeli deterrence doctrine, had a different effect on the leaders of political Judaism. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir do not seem to feel that their messianic hopes were dashed. The pair does not believe that they let down the Israeli public, nor do they feel defeated or disillusioned because they view warfare as the most powerful tool for the entrenchment of occupation and ethnic cleansing. In the internal Israeli debate, political Judaism favors continued warfare at the expense of the hostages in Gaza and advocates for the recolonization of Gaza. It promises to act as a veto group for any and all proposals to shift from military to diplomatic resolutions of the current war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The settler militias of political Judaism have terrorized and uprooted Palestinians communities in the OPT. The prospect of turning their aggression on their Jewish opponents in the coming political showdown cannot be ruled out.
Gershon Shafir is a professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He authored A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict.