Dana El Kurd is a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington and a leading expert on Palestinian politics. When we talked about the scale of suffering in Gaza, the pain in her voice was palpable. “There’s not even words I can put to it,” she told me.
Despite this, she managed to have some empathy for Israelis — and warn that their current approach isn’t going to make anything better for them. Based on everything she knows about the internal political dynamics of Palestine, continued mass killing will only empower its violent radicals in the long run.
“I totally understand the shock of the October 7 moment, and what it might have meant to Israelis who thought they were immune,” she tells me. But making [Gaza] uninhabitable...is not going to resolve the conflict.”
Israel could do this by committing to a version of the American proposal for the PA to take over Gaza, reorienting its strategy around laying the groundwork for PA entry. The PA has its flaws — it is both demonstrably
corrupt and
authoritarian — but it is at least credibly committed to peace. And there is no real alternative: An international occupation of Gaza is
extremely unlikely, and an indefinite Israeli occupation would be
a disaster for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
“The big thing is that something needs to replace Hamas in Gaza, and I think the Biden administration pushing the PA is appropriate,” Byman says. “God help us all, but this is the best we got.”
An alternative option is Israel abandoning its current hope for regime change in Gaza, instead seeking an indefinite ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for full release of the remaining Israeli hostages. This outcome would almost certainly leave Hamas in power. But it would stop a war that’s currently helping no one, allow for a flood of humanitarian aid to help Gazan civilians, and accomplish what
a majority of Israelis now see as the primary war aim, bringing the hostages home.
These approaches have their problems, but both are much better than the status quo. Yet Netanyahu has ruled them out, believing that his right flank would abandon him were he to take either option. This means one of two things has to happen: Netanyahu needs to be forced to hold elections or somehow pressured into changing policy.
