Indeed it was. The audience listened politely as Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s Middle East adviser, gave his country’s view on Israel’s war in Gaza, now in its seventh week. But the coffee break banter that followed was devastating. . than once, Mr. McGurk said that Gaza would only receive a “huge wave of humanitarian aid” once Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, released the roughly 240 Israeli and foreign hostages it kidnapped on Oct. 7.
The humanitarian crisis affecting Gaza’s 2.2 million residents is serious. Food, clean water and medicine are scarce and patients are dying in hospitals without fuel. The southern half of the enclave is bursting at the seams and has swollen to twice its pre-war population after an influx of displaced Palestinians, while the north is likely to be uninhabitable for years.
But the US envoy to the region appeared unmoved. “The responsibility here lies with Hamas. This is the way,” he said. The idea that aid to Gaza’s citizens was conditional on a hostage agreement did not sit well with the heavily Arab audience. “They’ve taken the entire population hostage,” said one participant (the White House later said McGurk’s comments had been “grossly misinterpreted.”
That wasn’t the only point of contention. After two days of talking to officials about the plan for post-war Gaza, the inescapable conclusion is that there is no plan. The devastated enclave will need external assistance to provide security, reconstruction and basic services. But no one – not Israel, not America, not the Arab states or the Palestinian leaders – wants to take responsibility for it.
America hopes that Arab states will contribute troops to a post-war peacekeeping force, a proposal also supported by some Israeli officials. But the idea has not found much support among the Arabs themselves. Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian Foreign Minister, seemed to rule this out entirely at the conference. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “No Arab troops will go to Gaza. None. We will not be seen as the enemy.”
The reluctance is understandable. Arab officials do not want to clean up Israel’s mess and help the country police their fellow Arabs. But they also do not want Israel to reoccupy the enclave, and they admit, at least in private conversations, that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is currently too weak to resume full control of Gaza. If none of these options are realistic or desirable, it is not clear what is.
In the longer term, Mr. McGurk said a “revitalized Palestinian Authority” should resume control (it ruled Gaza until Hamas seized power in 2007). However, that would require two unlikely developments. First, it would require a serious Israeli effort. to achieve a two-state solution: Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, says he will not return to Gaza without a two-state solution. But Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has spent his entire career trying to sabotage that two-state solution (and he is, and I’m not keen on the PA returning to Gaza).
Second, there is a serious attempt to achieve the “revitalized” PA that Mr. McGurk spoke of. Mr. Abbas, who is 88 years old, was elected in 2005 for a four-year term. He is still in power and has held his position longer than most Gazans. “He is still alive. He is a sclerotic and disinterested leader; both he and his aides, some of whom are also his possible successors, are widely seen as corrupt. No one can explain how his government could be rejuvenated.”
Even before the war, the wealthy Gulf states were tired of checkbook diplomacy. They will likely be reluctant to finance reconstruction in Gaza, which will cost billions of dollars. “They have rebuilt Gaza several times,” says a Western diplomat in the region. “Unless it is part of a serious peace process, they will not pay.”
Then there is Hamas itself. Its leaders, and many of its fighters, appear to have fled to southern Gaza, a region where Israel has not yet sent ground troops. For now, they appear to have enough food and fuel to stay in the web of tunnels under Gaza. Civilians suffer under the Israeli siege. Their rulers are not. “They are not under any pressure at all,” says an adviser to Israel’s National Security Council. “On the contrary, it helps Hamas because they use it to build international pressure for a ceasefire.”
Moussa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas official, said in a television interview last month that Hamas is not responsible for protecting civilians in Gaza. The tunnels under the strip, he said, are only there to protect Hamas; the UN and Israel must protect civilians. Other Hamas leaders have blasted the UN for failing to send enough food and medicine. They brought misery to Gaza by carrying out their massacre in Israel last month, but want someone else to deal with the consequences.
For almost twenty years, Gaza has been a problem without a solution. Israel and Egypt were content to leave the country under a blockade after Hamas took power. Despite his occasional praise for Palestinian unity, Mr. Abbas had no desire to return to Gaza, and Hamas was happy to maintain its grip on an impoverished enclave. Everyone tried to maintain the status quo.
That status quo was broken on the morning of October 7. The problem has become much bigger and the solutions are far-fetched. Optimists hope that the Gaza war will provide an opportunity to finally resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it is more likely that it will end with Gaza as yet another failed state of the Middle East, broken but never rebuilt.
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From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
