The Total De-Hamasification Of Gaza Would Be A Bad Idea

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When the outlook for the days ahead seems so dire, it can be hard to focus on a “day-after plan.” Nonetheless, the Biden administration is working with Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to develop a long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Some Palestinian representatives are also reported to be involved in the discussions.

As with so much else emanating from the White House in relation to the conflict in Gaza, the details of the plan — or even the discussions around it — are fuzzy. But it is reportedly likely to include a timeline for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. The Washington Post says the plan “could be announced as early as the next several weeks.”

There is little reason to be optimistic that it will get very far. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior figures in his government have made it clear that a two-state solution is a non-starter: If anything, their opposition to a Palestinian state has hardened since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel.   

There’s also more than a little cognitive dissonance between conjectural conversations about peace and the very real Israeli threat to launch a ground offensive on Rafah, the southern corner of Gaza now crammed with more than a million Palestinians who have fled the destruction of their homes in the rest of the enclave.

But those who study conflict say it is never too early to start discussions about what needs doing after the guns fall silent. “A peace plan has to be on the agenda right now,” says Renad Mansour,  a research fellow at Chatham House and the Cambridge Security Initiative. “The idea that you can have an overwhelming military operation in Gaza, and then pieces of the puzzle will somehow fall into place afterward — it doesn’t work like that.”   

Any day-after plan has to reckon with a slew of difficult questions: Who will rebuild Gaza; who will pay for the reconstruction; who will investigate and adjudicate allegations of war crimes; and not least, who will tend to the physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the war.

But the question that must be answered before any of the others is who will administer the enclave when the war ends. Israel, rightly, will tolerate no role for Hamas in postwar Gaza. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Israel’s military objective is to eliminate the terrorist group, root and branch.

Nor is Israel likely to acquiesce to a Palestinian proposal for Hamas to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella grouping of factions, currently dominated by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, that represents the Palestinian people in international forums.

The Biden administration has said it would like the Palestinian Authority, to take charge, ideally with an infusion of “fresh blood” to deal with the institutionalized corruption and ineptitude that have been the hallmarks of Abbas’s government in the West Bank. But Netanyahu has indicated he sees no role for the PA in Gaza, either.

Many in the Arab world share this view, and ample evidence suggests that neither of the Palestinian protagonists wants the responsibility. “It is obvious that it cannot be Hamas [that rules Gaza], and Hamas recognizes that,” says Hesham Youssef, a former Egyptian diplomat and senior Arab League official. “Also, it can’t be PA, and the PA recognizes that.”

The most plausible custodian for postwar Gaza is a transitional authority — with the imprimatur of the United Nations and with Arab states in the lead — to provide essential services until permanent arrangements can be made. (The obvious caveat is that the Arab states will require an Israeli promise at least to work toward a Palestinian state.) Youssef believes that an 18-24 month transition might suffice, if it is tied to elections at the end of the period.

But even a transitional authority will need to reckon with Hamas’s large footprint in Gaza. Netanyahu and his allies on the Israeli far right will insist that any administration in the enclave first conduct a thoroughgoing “de-Hamasification” to eliminate any lingering influence of the terrorist group.  

This immediately puts me in mind of the de-Baathification in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein — by common consent, the most disastrous decision by the US-led transitional authority run by L. Paul Bremmer. Departing from the long-established norm, honed through the history of human conflict, of coopting elements of the defeated regime into postwar administration, Bremmer decreed that no member of the Baath Party would be allowed in his administration. The problem was that most civil servants were Baath Party members, usually because that was the only way to secure a government job.

The result of de-Baathification, as I witnessed first-hand, was months and months of chaos: Deprived of the skills and institutional memory of tens of thousands of civil servants, the transitional administration struggled to provide basic services, from education to sanitation. By the time Bremmer got wise to his mistake and allowed former government workers back into their old jobs, the authority of the US-led coalition had been comprehensively discredited.

To avoid that fate, any transitional administration in postwar Gaza will need a free hand to retain many of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who worked for the Hamas government — many of whom were card-carrying members of the group. “Israel may call them all Hamas, but the people who have been running Gaza for the past 17 years are, first and foremost, Gazans,” says Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “We need to distinguish between senior Hamas leaders and the rest: It’s not [Hamas military commander] Yahya Sinwar who maintains the electricity and sewage systems.”

Will the transitional authority be allowed to retain the prewar workforce, though? “It depends on the Israeli intentions,” says Zaid Al-Ali, a senior program manager at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. “If they want Gaza to be properly administered, they have to be intelligent about it. But if they want to make Gaza unlivable, then they will cast the net wider and say everyone [with a Hamas connection] has to go.”

The Hamas administration is far and away the largest employer in Gaza. There is no exact count of government workers in the enclave, but the payroll is thought to top 50,000 — that was the number of workers whose salaries were paid by Qatar in 2021. How many of that number have survived the Israeli military offensive is unclear, but a significant number of the estimated 29,000 Palestinians killed so far will likely have been civil servants. “You have to wonder how many will remain at the end of the war,” says Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “And from that group, many will be tempted to leave a devastated Gaza, if nothing else then for the sake of their families.”

Given the scale of the task, whoever is left responsible for Gaza’s reconstruction will need all the hands they can get. They should be allowed to get them from wherever they can.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering culture. Previously, he covered foreign affairs.

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