By Dr. David Wurmser

The United States and Israel disagree about who will rule Gaza in the “day after” scenario. The United States seeks to install a refurbished Palestinian Authority and proceed happily toward a two-state solution. Israel’s “day after” plan is unclear and may not yet even have crystallized. It is difficult, thus, to comment on Israel’s approach, but one thing is certain: the plan to rehabilitate the Palestinian Authority as a government will fail.  And neither for the commonly understood reasons of its unpopularity and incompetence born of corruption nor for its inability to rise above its terror pedigree. It is because the very idea of the Palestinian Authority as a solution to the Hamas challenge is based on concepts divorced from a Middle Eastern context.

To understand the problem with our approach, we must begin with our bafflement over why deterrence failed and Hamas even started this war.  Moreover, why does Hamas still think it is winning? Why did it invite its own destruction and why does it not see it as its own destruction?

One of the greatest barriers Westerners have in understanding the region is our deep appreciation for structures and words as institutions.  In the West, institutions have a life of their own, and the possessors of office – a tangible concept in the West – are merely trustees.  A leader or office-holder is only a steward of a trust whose job is to protect the interests of the trust. It is not about him; he will be judged entirely on whether he strengthened or damaged the stature and well-being of the institution during his stewardship. As Westerners we place great faith in the solidity of structures and words as institutions.

But such solidity does not exist in the Middle East. Institutions are extensions of personal relationships. They lack a life of their own. Even on issues of succession in government, arrangements perish with the ruler.  When the founding prophet of Islam, Muhammad, died, the tribes met in Mecca to name a replacement, whom they did – Abu Bakr in 632 AD.  And yet, despite the “office” of leader’s having passed to Abu Bakr, he was promptly confronted with challenges, even war, by many of those who ostensibly supported him. The pledged unity of the various factions and tribes to Muhammad and the community of Islam melted away.

In the Western mind, this could be understood as treachery. Promises and pledges are institutions and have a life of their own. Violating them betrayed the institution and the sanctity of words.  But in the Middle East, such institutions and pledges are intensely personal and are meaningless in a structural or verbal sense.  While Abu Bakr may have acquired something akin to our concept of “office holder,” as well as might have expected to enjoy adherence to the world of pledges given by the followers of Islam, in fact, his ascent only marked the beginning of negotiations – even violently executed ones – to redefine, rebalance  and validate in a specific personal relationship to Abu Bakr the institution (alliance, unified community) as well as the promises and pledges that had been already agreed upon before with Muhammad. The cycle restarted.

Because of this, in the Middle East institutions have heft only in as much as they are extensions of a powerful person, clan or tribe, or reflect that power’s relationship with other powerful forces. Structures and pledges as institutions, thus, pass through endless rounds of redefinition, reconstitution and even collapse.

So, what does this have to do with the American “day after” proposal, let alone how does it explain to us why Hamas does not believe it is losing? In the Middle East, since nothing is institutionalized with solidity, strategy is not about establishing structures, mile markers, way-stations or anchors. It is instead about affecting realities from cycle to cycle. Those Western instruments transcend the current and acquire a permanence as a building block in an accruing structure.  But in the region, states and institutions are temporary arrangements. They reflect the momentary power of operating forces, personal or factional power. They are neither ends in themselves nor endowed with any concept of solidity as understood in the West.

So, Hamas does not, nor ever will, care about building Gaza.  To the West, Gaza is an entity or even an institution of a proto-state and thus Hamas loses any authenticity, following or right to rule because of its deep betrayal – self-destruction — of its charge. But that is not how Hamas sees it.  Hamas views Gaza as a mere stepping stone on a path to take over the world, as even its leadership has bluntly said in recent weeks. Neither does Hamas care about the Palestinian Authority for the same reasons.

The only importance of these statelets or institutions is if they are reshaped through each round to reflect Hamas’ refined relationship to the Islamic world. Hamas does not have a “contract” with the people who are subject to its power; it has a commitment to the Islamic community on the terms with which it personally negotiates them.  Since no Caliph or sitting “leader” of the Islamic world exists, that personal relationship is defined in terms of its popular currency (essentially tribally defined leadership by manifesting the sense of power needed for a tribe to survive) as well as in advancing the ideals of Islam (doctrinally-defined leadership within the Muslim community).  In this sense, both Gaza and the Palestinian Authority are meaningless. And since the structure is meaningless, so too is their destruction equally meaningless. And because the structures and their destruction are meaningless, victory and defeat of Hamas cannot be defined in terms of those concepts.

Thus, strategy for Hamas is not a plan progressing along a roadmap to seize meaningless structures. It is instead a relentless journey to navigate its personal relationships with the Muslim world as part of a deeper negotiation through endless cycles of building, leveraging and destroying temporal structures – often defined around cycles of interaction with the enemy – just like Abu Bakr had to do. And while Hamas never loses focus on the rest of the Islamic community as the only relationship that matters, its stature is established in part, as have many other Muslim rulers through the ages, through the language of its interactions with the enemy.

So, the destruction of Hamas, as we would define it, might end this immediate cycle of combat in the specific area of Gaza. And yet, the construction of new structures and pledges of fidelity to that structure will not lead to the sort of material advance that we expect.  It will not bring us progress along an arc toward a permanent resolution. Namely even if fantasies were realized in a functional Palestinian Authority, it will deliver a permanent victory over neither Hamas nor the underlying idea of it, let alone the sort of politics animating it. No “Palestinian Authority,” not even the concept of it — derived as it is from Western concepts of institutions — will ever serve as an obstacle to Hamas’ strategy derived as it is from Middle Eastern imagery. 

Both Israel and the West are in a long civilizational war with Hamas or its successor – perhaps even a perpetual war – and there will be a successor.  And since Islamic civilizations will not disappear, and since the West and Israel also have regional relationships – many of which are both amicable and vital – within that civilization, we must begin to think of strategic aims in those terms.  Namely strategy is about muddling and navigating perpetual rounds of interaction in which the West and Israel negotiate and renegotiate their stature based on personal connection (amical or inimical alike) and power in relationship to the other forces in the neighborhood. 

As hard as it is for us – a difficulty of which I am painfully aware given that I was trained in classic Western concepts of strategy — we cannot think of strategic goals in traditional terms. Strategy in the region is not the consequence of a crisply defined plan within the framework of a bounded episode that culminates in agreements (or even a final victory) that codify and govern a new, permanent reality around which institutions or pledges acquire solidity. It is a never-ending journey. 

And since Israel’s very history is itself a tale of muddling through a never-ending journey of threat and challenge — and a long history of constant change where empires rose and fell, and institutions all came and went — and because in Judaism great issues are examined and debated, but never fully resolved, in Talmudic fashion, Israel may be culturally more adaptable to navigating properly through the region than the West more broadly.

Still, under regional civilizational concepts, our employing terms like “Palestinian state,” “Palestinian Authority,” “two-states,” and “solving the Palestinian problem” only drive home how alien we are to that part of the world, and how naïve and clueless we appear to its inhabitants – and thus our failure is baked into the very DNA of our concept.  And perhaps the gap between the United States and Israel regarding the “day after” emerges from the subtle realization at which Israel may be arriving, if even without being aware of it, as it moves from the very Western “Oslo” seek-a-structural-solution paradigm to a paradigm that emanates from Israel’s contemplating and reverting into its own Jewish history.

In the end, to defeat Hamas not only as a faction, but as an idea, both Israel and the West need to learn how to speak in the political and strategic language of the region’s culture.

By Dr. David Wurmser

A US plan, spearheaded by the diplomatic efforts of the US, and led by Amos Hochstein (who negotiated the Lebanon Maritime Agreement) and the French government, is emerging to diffuse tension along Israel’s northern border.  The US and France appear to propose a plan with three elements. Hizballah withdraws its forces northward.  Israel concedes all the disputed areas along the border. And finally, the area between Israel and Hizballah will be filled by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). 

Hizballah has been in violation of UNSCR 1701 — the resolution that terminated the 2006 Second Lebanon War — since its signing. Resolution 1701 called for the “full implementation of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), that require the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state.”  Moreover, the resolution said all foreign forces are prohibited, such as IRGC, Hamas or other Palestinian factions, or Iraqi militias. Israel left in 2006, so it has been in compliance ever since. Also, the area south of the Litani River will be policed by the LAF and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). In many ways, the US proposal only asks of Hizballah to implement one part of UNSCRs 1701 and completely ignores 1559 and 1680. This itself constitutes a major victory for Hizballah since it validates the annulment of the critical obligations of all three resolutions that render Hizballah an illegal militia altogether — all in order to ask of Hizballah to abide by one part of 1701 which it violated as Israel withdrew from the area under 1701.

Second, the three UNSCRs — to ensure that Israel had indeed withdrawn from all Lebanese territory and thus deny Hizballah’s anticipated claim of being a Lebanese nationalist resistance to continued Israeli occupation — established a mechanism to demarcate the border and validate the “blue line” which had been set in 2000. Such a demarcation was completed shortly thereafter and the border runs along that line.  Moreover, careful examination of UN demarcation maps since World War I established that the village of Ghajar had been part of Syrian Golan, and thus, part now of the Israeli Golan Heights, not Lebanon. In short, there actually is no real disputed territory because of either un-demarcated or unclear borders. They are disputed only because Hizballah raised spurious claims. 

And yet, under the plan proposed by the US and France, Hizballah is rewarded — and its resistance validated and continued existence as an armed militia legitimized — by a full Israeli withdrawal in all of the areas (Kfar Shouba, Sheba Farms and Ghajar) in addition to other disputed parcels. Essentially by conceding these lands as Lebanese retroactively sanctioned Hizballah’s existence because ostensibly the US and France (and Israel, if it agrees) will now have admitted that Israel continued to occupy Lebanese territory. In other words, Israel becomes the party responsible for Hizballah’s failure to disarm as required by UNSCRs 1559, 1680 and 1701, because Hizballah was a Lebanese faction conducting resistance against occupation of Lebanese land.

The US and France have also proposed under this agreement that the LAF secures the border and the buffer zone south of the Litani River.  Indeed, UNSCR 1701 had called for that, but it has long been proven to be an entirely dysfunctional fiction as a sovereign force. It cannot in any way cross Hizballah, and to believe it can going forward is simply delusional. The historical record only shows it has functioned until now as cover and human shield for Hizballah presence despite the vast sums of money, equipment and training that have been given to LAF by the US (an aid activity which is coming under increased scrutiny in the US Congress). The LAF has simply  for decades been controlled fully by or cowered into subservience to Hizballah.

So why is the US doing this? 

The US is in fact determined not only to avoid escalation on the Lebanese border, but also to avoid any Israel escalation against Iranian proxies anywhere.  For example, the US has warned Israel to stop attacking Yemen since “it could provoke Iran,” wherein a very odd situation now exists whereby American warships and international sea lines of communication (SLOCs) are attacked, and only Israel appears to be responding  to the attacks on the US warship and SLOCs.

This is part of a broader attempt by the US to burrow more deeply into the paradigm it nurtured prior to October 7 regarding Iran. At its core, it is an attempt to appease Iran by handing it major strategic victories. The paradigm itself allows the US to still seek through some combination of pressure and incentives to harness Iran, validate its “moderates,” and reach a regional understanding that can stabilize the Middle East. Essentially, it highlights that the US continues to operate toward Tehran under the Robert Malley doctrine, under which the United States still believes that there are moderates in structures of power in Iran who, with proper modulation of US policy — specifically that showing understanding and restraint rather than backing Iran against the wall, which is what “hardliners” would want — will have their fortunes so vastly improved that their common interest with the United States can be cultivated and a common understanding reached to stabilize not only Iran’s nuclear program, but its policies to such an extent that Iran becomes a partner for regional stability.

Israeli indulgence of these diplomatic discussions might be an attempt to set the stage for a war rather than reflect a genuine belief that this would lead to anything — especially were Israel to stand firm in rejecting the strategically devastating concessions demanded of it to secure Hizballah partial compliance with UNSCRs to which it already is obliged to comply.

Moreover, Hizballah likely will not accept it either. While it would be an Israeli humiliation for it to be accepted, that Hizballah withdraws voluntarily under Israeli threat would be yet another point of humiliation for Hizballah too. Neither Iran nor Hizballah care about these little pieces of land nor do they build too much on the idea that Israel’s humiliation by yielding them outweighs their humiliation of the last seven weeks of restrained intervention, two meager speeches of Nasrallah, and withdrawal operationally from territories south of the Litani without a fight. They are already ridiculed regionally.

Iran right now needs the area south of the Litani more than ever to shift the remains of Hamas over there to continue the war.  In short, they can in no way accept a buffer zone that will take a year or two to infiltrate and establish a Hamas presence and Hizballah reasserted presence. And they need to end this war right up against Israeli lines to get in the last shots to signal that they continue fighting the resistance.

The US and France are pushing for an agreement to avoid escalation on Israel’s northern border which must be understood in effect as part of a larger effort to appease  Iran on substance and strategy while giving Israel hollow tactical scraps.  It is a deal Israel must refuse.