The Endgame in Gaza – The American Conservative

The world is a big, complicated thing, almost unfathomably old and full of surprises. There’s only so much you can expect from frail human agency in such a wild place.

So that’s why we need to speak, realistically, about what’s going to happen in Israel–Palestine. American popular opinion may be souring on Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip; there may be real horror afoot there. But what happens has little to do with American popular opinion, or humanitarian concerns, or justice. Israel is going to annex Gaza. It is going to herd the Gaza Palestinians into the “humanitarian city” at Rafah. It will, more slowly, finish the work of annexing the West Bank. There is no interest in the two-state solution in Israel, and little more in Washington, and I somehow doubt that France is going to send troops to back their diplomatic posturing. It would take direct American intervention to prevent these things, and the American people have little will for intervening on the ground, let alone “for Hamas,” which is how such a move would be perceived. Nor would such a move be prudent. We need fewer Americans in the Middle East, not more.

There are simply no plausible alternatives. Palestinian refugee populations have been enormously destabilizing to their host countries, and there’s no appetite in the region for them to be relocated. Egypt is desperately poor and run by a fragile junta; they have no interest in taking a large, disruptive Palestinian population. Jordan already has almost more Palestinian refugees than it can handle. The Gulf States? No room, no inclination. The pipe dream of relocating the Palestinians to Libya is so removed from reality that it boggles the mind: Libya is not a country, but an arena for a long-running civil war, and such a relocation would depend on American sealift capacity—logistically difficult and politically unimaginable. And then, once they’re there, what next? Libya barely has the infrastructure to serve its current inhabitants. Starving outside Tripoli is not appreciably better than starving outside Gaza City. It is staggering that allegedly functional adults outside of care homes could float such a preposterous fantasy with a straight face.

So it’s going to happen, will we, nil we. What are we going to do about it is the relevant question. It’s not going to be popular with the rest of the neighborhood. If we would like to salvage what we can of our diplomatic leverage—and, realistically, we must start relying on diplomacy more and strength less in the Middle East if we want to make even a bare gesture toward contesting the Indo-Pacific—it’s necessary to put daylight between U.S. and Israeli policy. Ending military aid is the no-brainer first step. Israel is quite capable of fulfilling its war aims in Gaza without the carousel of corporate welfare for American defense contractors. Recognizing the Palestinian state would not change facts on the ground, but would be a handy piece of paper to hide behind when dealing with other regional actors. Similarly, insisting on humanitarian conditions would be worthwhile PR, although American leverage to enforce them will be minimal. Telling Mike Johnson to stop visiting illegal West Bank settlements might be in order, too. (Indeed, the executive branch could stand to be a little more jealous of its constitutional monopoly on foreign relations—why do congressmen get to freelance in sensitive diplomatic zones from Jerusalem to Taipei?) Israel would remain vastly superior to its neighbors in force of arms, but the U.S. would no longer have to deal with the constant diplomatic difficulty of being seen as the underwriter of Israeli aggression while trying to broker its own retrenchment from the region. 

There are a variety of ugly things happening all over the world all the time. The difference between those episodes and Israel–Palestine is that the Burmese “democratic” government (or whatever remnant of it is still hiding from the junta) does not expect the U.S. to support its program of making the Rohingya a thing of the past, and the U.S. is not constantly pulled by a perverse magnetism and 20 years of bad policy into every squabble in Southeast Asia. (Not anymore, anyhow.) The American soul, nursed on decades of the ideology of “the good superpower,” is sick at the idea that nothing can be done to stop brutality, especially somewhere that has so obsessed our national consciousness for so long. But it is time to grow up.

The U.S. can’t make Israel do anything in particular. But it can separate Israeli policy from American policy. Washing our hands and walking away is, grimly, the best plausible way forward for American national interests. This part of the world has little to do with us, and moral horror is not the basis for sound policy. What will happen will happen. It is our job now to make sure it’s not a problem for America.