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As Israel rains bombs on northern Gaza and bans a UN humanitarian agency that is a lifeline for millions of Palestinians, a plethora of so-called ‘day after’ plans are circulating in the absence of a ceasefire that has never materialized despite more than a year of ‘negotiations.’ Most of these plans have emanated from think tanks in Washington DC and Israel where the debate is most active. Notably absent from this debate are the people affected by the plans being promoted by the think tanks: the Palestinians.
Among the proposals that has gained the most political traction in Washington and Tel Aviv, which has now been adopted by the United Arab Emirates, is a proposal for an international authority to govern Gaza, with security to be managed by a coalition of foreign and Arab troops and reconstruction to be funded by Gulf money, with the United States in the lead and Israel holding ultimate veto power. The Palestinian Authority would be sidelined and brought in at a later stage, when it is deemed to have been reformed, but the details of these expected ‘reforms’ remain unclear, and no path is provided to Palestinian statehood. Palestinians are asked to play an obedient auxiliary role to international authorities – with an enormous amount of power granted to the two nations that hold the greatest responsibility for Gaza’s destruction: Israel and the US. What is being proposed for Gaza is a version 2.0 of the failed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that paved the way for the quagmire in post-invasion Iraq. The plan looks like one occupation replacing another, with Israel again in the driver’s seat, with no attention paid to addressing the root causes of the conflict, ending the occupation, and initiating a path to Palestinian self-determination.
Furthermore, this dominant plan ignores international law and the International Court of Justice which determined that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank is illegal under international law. The judgment was followed by a General Assembly resolution in September, demanding Israel leave the occupied territories within a year.
The Palestinian Authority’s own plan outlined by Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustufa in an article in The Washington Post in September is being ignored. With surveys suggesting the PA lacks credibility among Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, there remain doubts as to whether the PA’s plan would gain any traction, and whether its leadership would even be accepted in Gaza. And with US bombs being used to kill Palestinians daily there is little doubt that any US imposition will be accepted by the people in Gaza.
What is badly needed is a new inclusive intra Palestinian dialogue that includes the members from Palestine’s vibrant civil society, including women, youth, and members of the diaspora, rather than limited to the traditional factions. This national dialogue should take stock of the recent extraordinary developments and produce a new strategy, a new unified leadership and a new national consensus government that is backed by all factions including Hamas. Palestinians need to be given the space to decide how to govern themselves free from outside interference.
After 43,000 deaths, and counting, a relentless bombing campaign in northern Gaza, the looming threat of starvation, and heads of UN agencies describing the situation as ‘apocalyptic,’ the question remains whether there even will be a ‘day after’ – sadly it seems unlikely for now. Israel states its military goal is to eliminate Hamas, and while its military wing has been significantly weakened, the civilian toll has been enormous. We have learned from previous conflicts in the Middle East and around the world, that those hit hardest by war and conflict run the risk of being further radicalized if the root causes of their pain and disenfranchisement are not addressed. The atrocities committed against innocent civilians in Gaza will likely create a new generation of youth who could be more militant than Hamas. The way ‘the day after’ is handled will not only have implications for Israel and Palestine, but the region that has been brought to the brink of war, with Lebanon being the most recent casualty.
The world has become accustomed to ghastly scenes of broken buildings and the dusty, bomb-pummeled bodies of children and civilians carried by desperate relief workers and family members. As someone who served the United Nations for 25 years in many conflicts around the world there are no other words to describe what we are seeing than horrifying and obscene. Instead of fantasizing about ‘the day after,’ greater energy and effort needs to be focused on how to bring about a ceasefire. This is what is urgently needed.
The US elections and a mirage of a year of Washington-led diplomatic initiatives and meetings in the region are distracting from the fact that an end to the war in Gaza is far from sight and that it has expanded into a regional conflict with multiple fronts in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. It’s time to rethink what can be done differently to end this war and what effective role the Global South and the UN General Assembly can play. However, when the end of the conflict eventually nears, Palestinians need to finally be at the helm of their own future.
In this edition of Diplomacy Now, we feature stories by Palestinian authors on the current situation, the enormous challenges that Gaza faced before the war, and the proposals thus far that have been set forward.
As with every edition the views expressed by these authors are not all necessarily our own. However, ICDI remains committed to the ethos and philosophy that open debate, dialogue, diplomacy, and mediation, rather than armed conflict and war, offer the way forward to resolving any conflict.
Thank you for reading Diplomacy Now and we welcome your feedback at diplomacynow@dialogueinitiatives.org.
Jamal Benomar
Chair of ICDI
Palestinian human rights lawyer and political analyst Zaha Hassan takes us through ‘the day after’ proposals in Gaza arguing that they must to move beyond the old modus operandi of “bomb, build and repeat.” She illustrates how the UAE plan and others are at odds with international law and norms.
“What is transpiring in secret discussions in Washington and in other foreign capitals far from Palestine stands in stark contrast to the monumental July 2024 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice which found Israel’s presence in the occupied territories to be illegal and perpetuating a situation of apartheid,” she writes. “Though not legally binding, the World Court’s decision is a statement of law made at the request of the member states of the UN General Assembly who have also now resolved in Resolution ES-10/24 to give Israel one year to withdraw its troops and dismantle existing settlements.”
What do Palestinians want? Hassan asks.
“They do not want a return to the pre-October 7 status quo in which Palestinians have their future subject to an Israeli veto,” she writes.
“Any attempt to sublimate Palestinian self-determination to Israel following its deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and other war crimes including possible genocide would only lead back to the conditions that set the stage for October 7,” Hassan argues.
Palestinian economist Mohammed Samhouri argues that ‘day after’ plans fail to examine the causes of the war in Gaza.
“Absent from the discussion, however, are critical questions like: what led to this war in Gaza? What went wrong on the policy front? and, more importantly, whether this man-made tragedy could have been avoided,” writes Samhouri.
“Gaza teaches us four hard lessons: (1) leaving Gaza to rot in poverty and hopelessness while Israel grows and prospers is a bad policy. Consider this: a trendy Tel Aviv is only 45 miles north of the Gaza ghetto. This is politically unsustainable,” he writes.
“Technical solutions sans a conducive political setting are inadequate to address conflict-induced socioeconomic challenges. Alone, these solutions are ineffective and do not constitute an efficient use of time and resources; (3) managing Gaza in silo, outside its wider Israeli-Palestinian context, doesn’t work, and, over time, makes things far worse and more complicated; and (4) what happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza, and has serious regional reverberations (think Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran).”
“A post-war plan for a ruined Gaza should benefit from, and be guided by, these painfully-learned lessons,” he continues.
Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC) Eugene Chen outlines the role that the UN could play in Gaza’s future.
“At the moment, the prospects for the deployment of a new peacekeeping operation in the occupied Palestinian territories are dim. It would require the consent of the parties, a crucial ingredient that is currently lacking,” Chen wrote earlier this year. “Confidence on the part of the current government of Israel in the UN is at a nadir, and Hamas announced last week that it rejects any foreign military presence on Palestinian land. Moreover, unless the government of Israel supports the deployment of a peacekeeping operation, it is unlikely that the Security Council would be able to avoid a US veto to establish such an operation.”
In the aftermath of Israel’s declaration of the UN Secretary General as person non-grata and the attacks on UNFIL in Lebanon, Chen suggests the UN is unlikely to play any role in the ‘day after’ in Gaza.
“It is highly unlikely that a UN peace operation of any type would be accepted by the current government of Israel. Under such circumstances, any multilateral arrangement that could be deployed for “the day after” would most likely be undertaken at least initially through a bilateral arrangement or through an ad hoc coalition of key countries rather than as a UN peace operation.
Oxford scholar and member of the Cambridge Initiative on Peace Settlements Jeffrey Liu provides an outline of all of the plans grouping them into Security-forward plans, that put an emphasis on Israeli security and preventing attacks like the October 7 attack occurring again; Reconstruction-forward Plans, and Humanitarian-forward plans.
Security-forward plans have largely been set forth by the Israeli government and Israeli think tanks.
“Netanyahu’s plan demands the complete demilitarization of Gaza, total freedom of operation for the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the area, and a new civil administration composed of Gazan locals,” Liu writes.”The plan distrusts the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the UNRWA, refusing to collaborate with either and calling for the dismantling of the latter. It also predicates the reconstruction of Gaza on the deradicalization of Gazans. The plan makes no concrete commitments to the long term political status of Palestine or Gaza.
In contrast, “reconstruction-forward plans differ from the security-forward plans insofar as the primary objective is the creation of a functional and sovereign Palestinian state in the aftermath of the conflict,” Liu writes. However, “The status of Hamas in these plans range from exclusion as with security-forward plans to tentative inclusion in future governance as a concession for peace. The paradigmatic reconstruction-forward plan is the PA plan.”
Finally he turns to the humanitarian plans, “that deal with alleviating the ongoing humanitarian crisis.”
Palestinian UN correspondent and academic Abdelhamid Siyam outlines the political proposals suggested by power-broking states such as Israel, the United States, the UAE and the Palestinian Authority.
Siyam does a deep dive into the UAE plan that excludes Hamas from power and hands it over to a Palestinian Authority that would be overseen by Israel and the United States, with security handed over to an international mission largely made up of Arab troops and reconstruction being led by Saudi Arabia, the US and Gulf States.
“This plan was rejected outright by the PA, as it reduces its role to a toothless entity operating under Israel and possibly the UAE and US,” Siyam writes. ”I personally believe the UAE is playing a dangerous role attempting to market a bad plan for Palestinians under an Arab banner, though the ideas were generated by Israel and the US.”
Veteran UN human rights and political affairs expert Dr Bertrand Ramcharan, who has served in many UN roles, including as acting High Commissioner for Human Rights, provides a second installment on his piece on the Summit of the Future, analyzing in greater detail into the “elements of hope, scattershot diplomacy, and potentially actionable items.” He makes recommendations as to how it could strengthen its commitments to human rights.
Nelson Mandela
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