When Israeli papers this week published details of a government “concept paper” suggesting that the 2.3 million Gaza population should be evicted from the territory into Egypt’s Sinai peninsula to live there as refugees, the response was outrage. It would appear, its critics say, that Israel’s long-term intentions are not just the eradication of Hamas, but the wiping of Gaza itself off the map. Little wonder that, fearing precisely such intentions, a reprise of Israel’s 1948 forced mass exile of Palestinians, Egypt has refused to let more than a trickle of foreign nationals and aid lorries across Gaza’s southern border at Rafah.
The document, characterised by prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu as merely hypothetical, also suggests the EU could help finance the resettlement of Gaza refugees, with countries like Greece and Spain hosting some of them. That the EU could collude in such a mass illegal resettlement is inconceivable.
As tanks roll in to Gaza City and the terrible Palestinian death toll reaches over 9,000, even Israel’s closest allies, privately and publicly counselling proportionality in its use of its overwhelming force, are asking what its intentions are beyond the annihilation of Hamas? On which a resounding silence from Netanyahu.
It is not an academic question, nor intended to deflect from the brutality of the massacre by Hamas on October 7th, but intimately linked to the sustainability of that inevitable, however costly, military victory over Hamas, and to the imperative of preventing a regional conflagration that could yet draw in the US and Iran.
“There has to be a vision of what comes next,” Joe Biden rightly insisted last week. “In our view, it has to be a two-state solution.” This weekend his secretary of state Antony Blinken returns to Israel to ask precisely such questions.
The war has already spread beyond the confines of Gaza. At least 125 Palestinians have also been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and by armed settlers in the weeks since October 7th. On the Lebanese border there are continuous exchanges of rockets with Hezbollah and the evacuation of border communities.
Although Hezbollah is reportedly opposed to massive escalation, which could bring down huge Israeli retaliation, its leadership has already warned of red lines being crossed by the Israelis. And Iran’s willingness to leave fighting to regional proxies would be severely tested by either another massacre in Gaza or an attack on Lebanon.
Arab countries are certain to push for the Palestinian issue, specifically the two-state solution, to be addressed as a condition of playing a role in restraining regional actors and rebuilding postwar Gaza. But, as Blinken will tell Israel, it too will have to begin to frame a future beyond the war, a future in which Palestinians have a place.