Friday, February 14, 2025
From Ian:
Elliott Abrams: ‘Gaza Shall Be Forsaken’
Elliott Abrams: ‘Gaza Shall Be Forsaken’
Trump’s plan tacitly understands another reason Gaza has never developed into the Singapore that Shimon Peres dreamed of, and that is the condition of the society that has developed in Gaza in the past two decades of Hamas control. Economic and political development require both sound government and a culture in which the polity can advance. One look at Haiti is a reminder of that obvious point. Trump’s plan accepts that development will not happen in the current Gaza situation, where society is permeated by corruption, brutality, hatred, and terror.Seth Mandel: What If Nothing Changes At All in Gaza?
This is a simple fact about life and is not a reflection of prejudice against Palestinians. Gouverneur Morris, one of George Washington’s envoys to France, watched the revolutionaries there play at becoming the next United States of America. He wrote in July 1789, just days before the storming of the Bastille, that “they want an American Constitution, with the exception of a King instead of a President, without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support that constitution.” It is a profound point. Governments and constitutions are what Marx would have called the superstructure, but they must be built on an actual, existing society. The Constitution was not a piece of paper but the product of the free society that had been built by colonists in British America, and by their children and grandchildren.
Gaza does not have Morris’s “American citizens” either, and Trump recognizes that pouring more money into it from Qatar or UNRWA (or the United States) will only reproduce what is there now: more terrorism, more death and destruction, and more misery. So he, in effect, suggests that we rely on Zephaniah’s vision for a while—“there shall be no inhabitant”—perhaps for 10 years, while the physical Gaza is transformed. As Trump put it, “Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for years.”
Perhaps 10 years of living without Hamas in a variety of countries would transform Gazans, too. Some would stay in the places to which they moved, while others would want to go “back” to the new Gaza—but this time not as UN-certified permanent “refugees” from the naqba of 1948. This time, as people with options for a decent life who chose to live in Gaza because it offered economic opportunity and peace.
It’s fanciful, and very, very unlikely. But it’s a better, truer, understanding of what led to Gaza’s current situation and what could possibly lead out of it than decades of “peace processing” and UN resolutions, which in the end have produced terrorism, war, and misery.
Trump is treating Gaza as a physical place and its people as suffering humans, which is more than has ever been done by any Arab League resolution condemning Israel and calling it a war crime to allow Gazans to move away. “We will not allow the rights of our people… to be infringed on,” declared Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has not permitted an election in 19 years. Trump’s scheme would “undermine the core of the Palestinian national project,” said Algeria, which is true if the core of that project is endless violence aimed at destroying Israel. An Arab League statement said Trump’s proposal would “threaten the region’s stability” which is also true if, by stability, is meant the 77 years of refusal to accept Israel in peace as a Jewish state.
Gaza is, as Trump called it, a “hellhole,” and history suggests it will remain so. Not because of anything the Israelis did. They left it in 2005 with an open possibility for a better future. Not because of Donald Trump, who in his first weeks in office offered a different future and asked Arab governments to think for once about Gazans as people rather than cannon fodder in the struggle against Israel. But it is apparently still easier to dream on about the “two-state solution” and the “right of return,” and far easier to scream about Israeli crimes and Palestinian victims, than to let the Jews live in peace. Until that changes, “Gaza shall be forsaken.”
On Feb. 6, the newspaper Maariv reported that three weeks into the cease-fire the campaign was still ongoing: “The terrorist organization began executions and a widespread wave of arrests. Not only those suspected of any collaboration with Israel, but also anyone who rebels against the situation in Gaza, in any form whatsoever, including on social media, is arrested by Hamas members.” Yesterday, Hamas reportedly opened fire on a family near Khan Younis.Seth Mandel: How Netanyahu Fought To Save the Hostage Deal
Hamas does this after every war. It’s tradition.
Not that Gazans were free of that tradition during the war. But it’s a more focused campaign now that Hamas brigades aren’t afraid to operate out in the open.
Hamas, of course, really does rule with an iron fist. The terrorists of Gaza also kill with reckless folly: Today, an errant rocket aimed at Israel fell inside Gaza and killed a Palestinian teen.
None of this is terribly unusual. But it’s worth pointing out that Hamas remains able to commit horrific crimes against Israeli hostages and Palestinian locals at the same time. Which means that, while Hamas may be far from its pre-war strength, the status quo in Gaza remains.
Which is another way of saying that there will be no rebuilding of Gaza in the near future. Hamas remains in control of the enclave, and its behavior is identical to the way it acted during and before the war. There is less for Hamas to break in Gaza, but it intends to break what it can find.
Considering all this, there is something almost silly about the way the discourse on the conflict has become monopolized by the subject of postwar recovery. Even if Palestinian civilians wanted to leave the enclave temporarily to allow their neighborhoods to be rebuilt, Hamas wouldn’t let them go anywhere—and Hamas certainly wouldn’t leave of its own free will.
During active conflict, Hamas is the biggest threat to Gazans: Israel creates safe zones and gives advance notice of attacks in the hot zones, and Hamas’s use of those humanitarian sectors puts civilians in the line of fire. And when there’s not active conflict, Hamas is still the biggest threat to Gazans: It just goes around executing them at will.
Any plan, therefore, that aims to improve life for Palestinians requires a realistic way to rid Gaza of Hamas. Without that, there is no “Riviera on the Med,” no two-state solution, no peace—no change at all.
If Netanyahu wanted to keep the hostage releases going, he now had a problem: The public protests against him reduced some of his leverage against Hamas, because Hamas realized it could hold onto the hostages and if anything happened to them it would be blamed on Netanyahu.
Enter Donald Trump. The president was asked about Hamas’s threat to suspend the cease-fire, and Trump made clear he had run out of patience with Hamas. In fact, his comments strongly suggested he believed the deal was already weighted in Hamas’s favor, since the hostages were being released in “drips and drabs” and Israel was pulling out of all of Gaza except a buffer zone on the border. Trump, whose envoy had negotiated the deal at the president’s direction, was telling Hamas that it had better not try to make a fool of him on the world stage.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Trump said, “if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock—I think it’s an appropriate time—I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.” Hamas wasn’t the only one who could change the terms of the deal.
In doing so, Trump was taking some of the responsibility off of Netanyahu’s shoulders—if the war was going to restart, it would do so on Trump’s terms. If Netanyahu preferred that option, he could simply do nothing and wait.
But if he wanted to keep the cease-fire deal going, he had a new problem: Trump demanded the release of all the hostages at once. That was unlikely to happen this week.
In order to simply get the existing deal back on track, Netanyahu would have to reduce Trump’s demands without undermining the president’s negotiating authority. So the Israeli government put out a series of statements with vague language to buy it time to strategize with the White House. Then Netanyahu essentially put himself as the mediator between Trump and Hamas so that any reduction in America’s demands was seen as coming from the White House, preserving Trump’s place as the senior partner in the alliance.
In the end, the sides agreed that Hamas would release three hostages as originally planned and Trump gave his blessing without removing the implicit threat of his own impatience with Hamas: “If it was up to me, I’d take a very hard stance. I can’t tell you what Israel is going to do,” Trump told reporters this afternoon. Thus Trump can play off his initial threat as simply what he would do if he were in Israel’s shoes, not what he was planning on doing as U.S. president. Netanyahu looks reasonable but not weak. Hamas is back in compliance with the deal.
Had Netanyahu truly wanted the deal to collapse this week, it would have—because Hamas was the one who suspended the deal and Netanyahu had Trump’s backing to go back to war. The only reason that didn’t happen was because Netanyahu preferred the deal to restarting the war. Hopefully that will earn him some credit with the hostage families who have been suspicious of his motives until now.
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