And then what?
A friend wrote me yesterday asking that key question: With Israel likely going in with a ground war, what happens in the aftermath?
What I wrote back was, I don’t know. No one knows. It is unimaginable that Israel doesn’t have plans for the aftermath, but given what it’s trying to accomplish, more can go wrong than right.
The two things we do know are these. First, that some of the heart of Gaza City has been flattened. From hospitals to communications towers to schools to mosques, much of the city’s infrastructure has been destroyed. It is possible, maybe even probable, that when and if Gaza’s citizens return to the rubble, they will be even more radicalized than before. And still living within the range of a rocket targeting Tel Aviv.
Second, upwards of a million of them are on the move from the densely populated northern part of the Gaza Strip to the scarcely populated southern part. In leaflets dropped by aircraft over Gaza, Israel made it clear that this is their only means of escape from what’s coming. “Civilians of Gaza City,” the leaflets read, “evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families and distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields.”
According to reports from the ground, it has been a frenzied exodus. Those with cars and trucks tied mattresses to their roofs and crammed in as many human beings as the vehicles could carry. Some were getting out of harm’s way on donkey carts. Some without anyone to help them fled on foot.
But to where?
The demarcation line past which they were told to go is about ten miles south of Gaza City, halfway down the Gaza Strip. I’ve been there. It is rough farmland, with only a handful of small population centers and certainly no infrastructure to support maybe a million refugees from Gaza City. The biggest concentration of people in the south is a minor city named Khan Yunis, which itself hosts a teeming camp of Palestinian refugees, dating back to the creation of Israel 75 years ago. Places like this are pitifully poor. They have little to offer to escapees streaming south who come with little more than the clothes on their backs.
But they can’t go farther. There is no place to go. With American urging, Israel is talking about a safe corridor for humanitarian supplies from nations in the region— food, water, fuel, medicine— to get into Gaza through the southern border crossing controlled by Egypt called Rafah. But even if that happens— which Israel says it won’t allow until the hostages in the hands of Hamas are released— there will be no safe corridor for Palestinians who want to get out. From the standpoint of its security, that’s a line that Israel is not willing to cross. Some Hamas terrorists would be sure to join the exodus to Egypt, and live to fight another day.
But it’s also a line that Arab states, although they talk the talk in support of the Palestinians, don’t want to cross.
According to the United Nations, Egypt already is flooded with nine million refugees from the wars in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen. In the small nation of Jordan, there are an estimated three million refugees, which is a third of the entire country’s population. In Lebanon, a million-and-a-half Syrians, escaping their own brutal war, have taken refuge.
Understandably, millions of stateless and homeless exiles are a drag on their resources.
But there’s another reason why the Palestinians’ Arab brothers talk the talk more than they walk the walk. They don’t want a radicalized population infiltrating their rigidly policed societies. Having covered “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, I draw a parallel. The terrorists on the Catholic side in Northern Ireland, living under the thumb of the British, wanted unification with the Republic of Ireland to the south. But whenever I crossed the border into the strife-free Irish Republic, government officials told me they wanted no part of the violent firebrands from the north.
It is the same today in Gaza. If Palestinians were to be given entry to Egypt, they would find themselves in the Sinai. Egypt already has been battling Islamic terrorists in that vast, empty, lawless no-man’s land of a desert. The last thing it wants is more.
That’s why Egypt will let humanitarian aid in, but no people out. President el-Sisi said Thursday, “Of course we sympathize. But be careful, while we sympathize, we must always be using our minds in order to reach peace and safety in a manner that doesn’t cost us much.” Gazans, he said, must “stay steadfast and remain on their land.”
So to the question, what happens after the ground war in Gaza? In all likelihood, no one leaves. And unless Hamas capitulates to the Israeli threat to block humanitarian aid, some don’t survive. Then when the shooting stops, governance is tricky. If Israel does annihilate Hamas, the conspicuous candidate to run Gaza is the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. But with an elderly and ineffectual president who has canceled every election since 2006 and outlived his welcome, the P.A.has proved to be impotent. If there’s an alternative, it’s not obvious.
For the immediate future, the United States is talking with both the United Nations and the International Red Cross about creating “safe zones” in the southern half of the Gaza Strip, encampments that Israel would promise not to attack. Meanwhile, maybe the Israelis can crush Hamas without exponentially raising the civilian death toll, but that is an almost impossibly tall order, especially with the hostages Hamas holds.
In the longer term, it’s likely that however harsh the Israelis have been toward the Palestinians in Gaza, it can only be tougher in the aftermath of this war. If Israel wants to not just diminish but destroy the terrorist threat, it has no choice but to go in with all guns blazing. But if it succeeds, it still will face hostility across every border, including the West Bank. Eight more Palestinians died in clashes there yesterday.
And then what? No one knows. As Israeli peace activist Dahlia Scheindlin wrote yesterday, “This is hell, and the days ahead will be worse.”
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, very well-reasoned. Sadly, i agree with your analysis completely. Thank you.
There doesn't seem to be any hope of a viable ending to this war, especially with the other Arab countries protesting in enormous numbers. Without a huge influx of food and water to the refugees from Egypt, the death toll will be catastrophic. They can't eat dust.