Gaza and the 'Day After'

Netanyahu's aimless war has killed tens of thousands, he shouldn't be allowed to kill Palestinian self-determination

It’s Gaza, 2035.

Skyscrapers cut complex shapes on the horizon, peering out onto the Mediterranean Sea. The rebuilt city was designed from scratch in a modern and dynamic Arabesque, and now it stands testament to a population reborn.

The territory is with border-crossings to its neighbor, and its cities are dotted with bomb shelters — but they are hardly needed. The duly-elected government of the Gaza Strip has long since rejected terrorism and endorsed peace. An electric vehicle manufacturing plant produces cars and batteries in the north, and an upgraded railway carries the goods to ports in the south, full of ships destined for Europe.

This jewel of modernity is a global effort: Israel’s financial support, American supply chains, Emirati infrastructure, Saudi direct investment, Jordanian diplomacy, Egyptian security guarantees.

Not only is this Gaza a hub of commerce, culture, and civilization, it has deep ties to a broader network of mega-projects and metropolises — a link in an unbroken chain of like-minded but culturally, linguistically, and religiously-distinct states across the Levant and Arab Peninsula.

This state is all a dream. Today, the real people of Gaza live in hell, and this heaven is drawn up by their Cerberus. This Gaza of 2035 exists only on an Israeli powerpoint presentation, one used to justify their continued intransigence and ongoing war.

They call it: Plan for the transformation of Gaza.

But it is no plan. It is a fantasy, one conjured up by imagining impossible answers to the wrong questions: What if the Palestinians did what we told them to do? What if the Palestinians gave up their dreams for independence?

To illustrate this Chat-GPT reality, Israel used Chat-GPT to render images of this future Gaza.

To release such a plan as the pummelling of civilians in Gaza continues, as the International Criminal Court considers arrest warrants for the architects of this misery, and as the Netanyahu government continues to fight efforts to help bring self-governance back to Palestine, is a grotesque stunt.

But this week, on a very hopeful Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to lay out what real self-determination might look for Gaza and Palestine more broadly, how Israel has frustrated that path at every turn, and how we could yet see a lasting peace.

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This dispatch, I will say off the bat, is not about the medium-or-long term logistics of how Gaza can, should, or could be rebuilt. That is going to be a tough, complicated process.

If you want a good starting point on that discussion, one that steps carefully around the “blurry” politics of Israel’s bizarre, tone deaf, unreasonable, propagandistic proposal, you should read through

Adam Tooze

’s effort to parse through it.

Instead, I want this dispatch to break down what, exactly, has gone so wrong for so long in the halls of power in Palestine — and Israel. And how there are some very solid and realistic decisions that could be made, today, to remedy those issues. In the process, I’m hoping to dispel some fog that makes this issue feel intractable.

The crux of it is this: A ceasefire deal needs to happen now, and it has to contemplate real Palestinian self-governance returning as soon as humanly possible. And this real democracy, in Gaza in particular, cannot be designed by America or Israel. If done properly, it could root out both the corruption and extremism that has defined Palestinian politics for decades.

This all builds on a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy in February, gaming out how the various players are contemplating the ‘day after’ in Gaza. It also picks up where I’ve left off previously — with the premise that Hamas’ terrorism is neither effective nor moral, (Dispatch #74) and that Israel’s war will bring neither security nor peace. (Dispatch #76)

To that end, most of what I’m breaking down here comes via two people who know much more about this topic than I do: Vladimir Pran, a senior elections specialist with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems who has worked extensively in Gaza; and Zaha Hassan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who previously represented Palestine in international negotiations. I spoke to both for my Foreign Policy piece.

Before we get there, let’s run quickly through some necessary background on how the Palestinians govern themselves.

[background] Palestine technically has two distinct, yet related, governments. One, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the other, the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PLO has been the vehicle for Palestinian self-determination for much of the past century. It is governed by a representative, but non-democratic, legislative body and executive council. It is transnational, including Palestinian political parties and organizations from Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere; but it is dominated by Fatah, the main party in the West Bank (and formerly Gaza.)

The PA was created by the PLO and Israel, under the 1993 Oslo Accords, to govern the West Bank and Gaza. The PA was intended to be a proto-state that could, when the time came, become the legitimate elected government of an independent Palestine. It held legislative and presidential elections in 1996 and 2005-2006. Elections held by the PA have, generally, been considered free, fair, and well-run: But, despite promising a multi-party democracy, the Palestinian basic law makes registering new political parties notoriously difficult. As such, Fatah was functionally the only party in the ‘96 elections. Amid heavy pressure, the PA recognized Hamas as an official party in the subsequent vote — and they won the 2006 legislative election. (Hamas has generally not contested the presidential race, which continued to be dominated by Fatah and President Mahmoud Abbas.)

Fighting between Fatah, which notionally wants to continue negotiations for a permanent two-state solution; and Hamas, which sees armed struggle against Israel as its core mission, only worsened after that 2006 vote. Inter-party violence culminated in Hamas expelling Fatah from Gaza in 2007: Democracy has been, essentially, suspended in the PA ever since. While there have been local elections over this time, plans for national elections have been promised and planned, but never held. Both Hamas and Fatah have ruled their respective territories by fiat — Fatah has used the PA structures to do so, and Hamas has governed by force.

Israel has benefited from this in-fighting, and have occasionally contributed to it. With Palestinian governance in shambles, construction of new settlements in the West Bank, illegal under international law and a clear barrier to lasting peace, has continued. [/background]

With that out of the way, let’s unravel what Palestine actually wants — and why we refuse to listen.

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Dysfunction, Frustration

Nobody is better versed on the wants, wishes, and desires of the Palestinian people than the Palestinian people themselves.

Thankfully, to that end, we have the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. An independent NGO, based in Ramallah, it regularly polls Palestinians — in both the West Bank and Gaza. Given the difficulty in reaching many Gazans by phone, it has conducted polling in-person, and its work stretches back more than two decades. While it has faced pressure from an increasingly authoritarian Palestinian government, it has remained independent and respected.

Their polling offers a really useful window into the situation in Palestine that very rarely gets highlighted in the Western press — aside from the occasional headline-grabbing data point. Like, for example: “Poll shows Palestinians back Oct. 7 attack on Israel, support for Hamas rises.” Such data points are often used to begin and end the conversation about Palestinian self-governance. If they are just going to re-elect Hamas, the thinking goes, then we can’t let them have democracy.

But things are much more complicated, and interesting, than that single reference point. Their longitudinal polling shows that, over time, attitudes hardened as optimism fell.

Let’s start by rewinding to 2015.

Things were already pretty dour. The Center found that a clear majority of the Palestinian people expected things with Israel to get worse. It also found that a clear majority still wanted a long-term peace deal, and fresh elections in the PA to get there.

Amid this growing frustration, the Center found an increasing belief that violence was justified to achieve Palestinian statehood. A wave of knife attacks, often by young lone actors, killed scores of Israelis — some were soldiers and police, most were civilians. “66% of the public believe that if the current confrontations develop into an armed intifada such a development would serve Palestinian national interests in ways that negotiations could not,” the Center found. They had reason to think that: The First Intifada culminated in the signing of the Oslo Accords.

That big number was trumpeted by Benjamin Netanyahu as proof that Palestinians didn’t want negotiations. Israel responded militarily to the rash of attacks — hundreds of Palestinians were killed in the ensuing violence, both militant and civilian.

The pollster, when it conducted a joint poll of both Palestinians and Israelis, actually found a high level of support for the two-state solution on both sides — and, most critically, a willingness by opponents on both sides of the border to change their mind if key compromises could be reached. But, the poll found, distrust was endemic on both sides. Each had, wrongly, lost faith that the other side wanted to make a deal.

In one poll, the Center found that 90% of Palestinians believed Israel had fully abandoned the Oslo Accords, even as Israelis were actually more supportive of the process than Palestinians.

But statecraft is not person-to-person, it’s government-to-government. And Israelis continued to fear the Hamas government in Gaza, and Palestinians continued to distrust the increasingly right-wing governments in Israel. Palestinians, for example, told the pollster that they believed the violence committed by Israeli settlers was official state policy.

It’s in this context that Palestinians grew more supportive of using violence to put the Palestinian question back on the table in Israel. (As I’ve written previously, I think we know this tactic is bound to backfire — but people around the world continue to believe this will work.)

“When asked about the most effective means of ending the Israeli occupation, the largest group (44%) chose armed struggle, 24% negotiations, and 22% popular [non-violent] resistance,” the pollster found in 2019. The support for violence mapped directly onto despair: Either a plurality or a slim majority of those in the Gaza Strip, living in refugee camps, and/or living in poverty all agreed that violence was the most effective conduit for independence.

Part of the idea behind creating the PA was to have local governance to improve the situation on the ground, and to be a faithful vehicle to advance a lasting peace. The PA was supposed to provide hope. But the fractured state only became less and less popular as it continued to fall apart.

In 2018, the Center asked Palestinians an open-ended question: Who do you blame for worsening conditions in the Gaza Strip? Nearly 40%, unsurprisingly, said Israel. But fully a quarter said PA and Abbas, and another 18% said Hamas. Palestinians increasingly saw their own governments as a barrier to progress.

In early 2020, 85% reported feeling like the government in the West Bank was corrupt, while 65% said the same of the Hamas regime in Gaza. In 2021, those feelings only deepened after the PA delayed elections again. (Those elections were delayed, it’s worth noting, in part because of Israel’s unwillingness to facilitate voting in Jerusalem.)

Through it all, 43% of Palestinians said the single greatest priority for their people should be to end the Israeli control of Palestine and to build an independent state which includes Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The next largest block, 31%, believe Palestinians should have the right to return to the towns and villages their families occupied in 1948. (A prospect that would likely require the redrawing of Israel’s borders and is, for Israel, a non-starter.)

But they named a litany of problems that made navigating those desires nearly impossible — unemployment and poverty; corruption; Israeli settlement expansion; the siege of the Gaza Strip; and the closure of the borders to Israel as key barriers.

Over this period, steadily more right-wing governments in Israel, now made up of parties beholden to extremist settlers, essentially ruled out the prospect of a two-state solution.

The Center charted this decline in hope.

So we can see clear trends: Palestinians wanted peace but saw the chances of it slipping away. With political reconciliation off the table, they began to rationalize violence. Despite faith in more symbolic institutions like the PLO, they increasingly grew to hate their leaders in both the PA and Hamas.

And then October 7 happened.

Within months, support for Hamas tripled. Nearly three-quarters of Palestinians agreed with the violence. Just a fraction said they believed that Hamas committed atrocities against civilians that day.

There are other bits of data that temper the starkness of those findings. In polls conducted between November and March, the Center found that more than 80% of Palestinians questioned had not seen the videos recorded on October 7, the horrific evidence of atrocities committed in their name. (Even those who did watch videos of the attack were disinclined to believe that Hamas killed civilians, which could be total denial or evidence that Hamas’ propaganda has been effective.)

What regular Palestinians certainly did observe were the effects of Israel’s war. By March, 80% of those polled said a family member had been killed or wounded in the war. More than half said they lacked food or water. Fully 94% of Palestinians believe Israel has committed war crimes in the war.

The takeaway: Polls have shown that Palestinians have grown increasingly frustrated — with a political system that has broken down, with politicians who seem incapable of getting things back on track, and with an Israeli government that has abandoned the peace process.

While there is, like anywhere, an extreme minority — those who want an Islamic theocracy, abolition of the state of Israel, or violence for violence’s sake — we consistently see evidence that the majority of Palestinians preferred cooperative, negotiated co-existence with Israel.

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A Lack of Choice

As Palestinians have grown disenchanted with the system designed to give them independent, the West has come up with the same solution again and again.

America, in particular, kept trying to invent ways to “revitalize” or “strengthen” the PA. In other words: To prop up Fatah’s apparatchiks to marginalize Hamas. But this has, unsurprisingly, had the opposite effect. The more Fatah’s leaders look corrupt and co-opted, the more Palestinians turn to literally the only other option: Hamas.

Israel, for its part, was quietly working to prop up Hamas to undermine Fatah, making the whole thing even worse.

This has been the tension at the heart of Palestinian politics since 2006. The Americans want Fatah to assume more control, and the Palestinian people don’t want that. The Palestinian people want more political options, but Fatah refuses. Israel wants Palestine divided, and that means tolerating Hamas. Hamas maintains legitimacy by attacking Israel, which prompts retaliation from Israel.

Not much has changed post-October 7.

Old names are coming up again, like Salam Fayyad, who had previously been installed as caretake prime minister with the backing of George W. Bush; or Hussein al-Sheikh, installed by Abbas as Secretary General of the PLO. Both men are deeply unpopular — Hamas has labelled the former “spokesman of the occupation.” No amount of foreign aid money will convince the Palestinian people that these hand-picked rulers are working in their best interest.

The need to find a new leader for Fatah is increasing. Mahmoud Abbas, now 88, has not identified any clear succession plan: His death or retirement could provoke a leadership vacuum.

Hamas’ involvement in the PA also remains unresolved. “How do you even define the new political reality in Palestine where one of the key stakeholders, one of the strongest political parties…is unacceptable?” Pran told me.

Israel has seemingly recognized this complicated reality, but has not bothered to offer a plan for it — Netanyahu has oscillated between ignoring the question, releasing absurd powerpoint presentations, and proposing some kind of undemocratic administration of Israeli-approved technocrats. Regardless, he wants to keep the status quo: A divided PA.

So this is a predictable system that keeps producing the same results, to varying degrees of severity. To change the results, we need to change the variables.

For the past decade, the Center has consistently asked Palestinians who they want running the PA — who, in essence, should be responsible for both delivering services, guaranteeing security, and pursuing independence.

And Palestinians have consistently offered the same name, of a man hated by both Israel and Fatah: Marwan Barghouti.

From 2014 to 2024, he is the only name that consistently outpolls Hamas' leadership. When asked an open-ended question — who do you want to be president of the PA? — without prompting and above all other options, 22% said Barghouti. That number rises to 35% if Abbas weren’t in the picture. He would, according to these polls, beat both Fatah and Hamas in head-to-head contests.

Barghouti, often referred to as Palestine’s Nelson Mandela, is a fascinating figure. He’s been a champion for peace, an anti-corruption crusader within the PA, and a militant. He had been a fervent supporter of the Oslo Accords, but endorsed more violent tactics after the Camp David negotiations fell apart in 2000. Israel tried to kill him in 2002, but he survived. He was ultimately arrested and convicted for his role in leading Tanzim, Fatah’s paramilitary force which carried out suicide bombings against Israeli soldiers during the Second Intifada.

But there are two problems. One is that Barghouti has a complicated relationship with Fatah, which he previously quit. The second problem is that Barghouti has been in an Israeli prison for two decades. From there, he has remained active in PA politics, trying to wrest control from the old guard of Fatah. But he has been unable to properly re-enter PA politics.

He’s a rare Palestinian figure who can find friends in both Hamas and Israel. As ex-Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon told Haaretz earlier this year: "[Barghouti] is the only one who can lead a united and legitimate Palestinian leadership toward a path of mutually agreed separation from Israel."

During ceasefire negotiations in Cairo, Barghouti’s name has been on the table. There are signs that Israel is, for the first time in decades, open to releasing the political leader. (In a sign of just how effective Barghouti could be, Abbas’ people have lobbied against his release.)

But despite those rumors, he’s still sitting in a cell.

Just releasing Barghouti won’t be enough. The PA needs new election laws which deconstruct Fatah and Hamas’ stranglehold on the political system. Permitting new parties could kill two birds with one stone — give Palestinians a credible alternative to Fatah’s corruption and Hamas’ extremism. Barghouti is likely to come out on top of that heap.

The Western narrative around this post-war ‘day after’ tends to describe a particular sequence of events: Ceasefire, transitional government, reconstruction, long-term governance. Nowhere does it contemplate elections.

“Elections are a must,” Dana El Kurd, author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, wrote to me in February.

“If the PA is brought in to govern for instance,” El Kurd wrote. “It has to be on a temporary basis, with a clear deadline for reconstruction and holding elections (not just in Gaza, across the Palestinian territories and further the diaspora).”

It has to be done with an eye to reforming the whole democratic system, she adds. “The PLO being revitalized is also a must.” There have been talks for years about a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas — while such a cooperation is likely untenable under the auspicious of the PA, it is probably more feasible through the PLO. Critically, membership in the PLO requires a recognition of Israel’s right to exist: Hamas, as strange as it seems, has consistently expressed its willingness to do so, in exchange for its entry into the PLO. It may sound naive to think that such a process could moderate Hamas: But that is exactly what happened to Fatah and the PLO, which once carried out horrific attacks against Israeli civilians and which have, today, renounced terrorism.

This is all delicate. But the solutions are known, and there’s good reason to think they will be effective. Israel won’t like them, but we need to stop pretending like Israel has a veto on these matters. Palestinians, for too long, have been deprived of good options. If we can convince Israel to provide a pathway to ending the naval blockade, re-opening border-crossings, and eventually ending the occupation¹, there is good reason to think that Palestinians will make the right choices.

The takeaway: Politics in Palestine have been woefully broken for some time, and Western intervention has contributed to the dysfunction. It’s time for a total rethink of how the world encourages democracy in Palestine, which falls more in line with what Palestinians themselves want. That will require making its institutions more pluralistic, and pushing Israel to take some confidence-building steps.

If done right, it could reduce violence and help bring security to Israel.

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A Need for Change

Things are very bad right now. As I write this, the Israeli offensive on Rafah is getting worse. Horrific strikes on refugee camps and aid convoys have left Gaza’s most vulnerable even more desperate than they were last week. Israel, driven by grief and vengeance, has supported Netanyahu’s dangerous war of self-preservation.

This war will end one day, hopefully tomorrow. That’s why it is more crucial than ever to figure out what comes next. Whatever that looks like, it should absolutely be informed by Israel’s very real safety concerns. But it also has to chart a course for Palestinian statehood.

To get there, it is critical that Western politicians apply maximum pressure on Israel to stop this war, cutting off military aid, imposing sanctions, and supporting international criminal proceedings if necessary. And we should apply pressure on our politicians if they refuse. Unfortunately, that may not be enough. Israel seems willing to become a pariah in order to achieve its short-term military objectives.

To that end, imagining a day after in Palestine will also require imagining a day after in Israel. As two-thirds of Israelis know, Netanyahu must go. Unfortunately, his opposition have signalled their desire to continue, mostly, the same policies vis-a-vis Gaza.

His war cabinet is now teetering on the brink of collapse — in large part because he refuses to adopt a day-after plan — and his government may follow. This is an extraordinary opportunity to replace Israel’s extremist-stained government with one that actually wants peace, not expansion. While the West shouldn’t be meddling in that vote, it can make its desires known. The media, too, can do a better job of covering disagreements over policy amongst the parties.

It’s reason to be depressed, for sure. But we have to accept that Netanyahu, an ideologue beholden to zealots, is the worst possible option. Even if the alternatives — ex-IDF boss Benny Gantz or opportunist Yair Lapid — don’t appear much different, they would, in a hypothetical coalition made up of anti-war politicians and Arab-Israelis, have considerably more space to manoeuvre towards peace.

In both Israel and Palestine, new politicians can make all the difference. To get them, both sides of the border need fresh elections.

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That’s it for this week.

As always, thanks for reading — and subscribing.

I’m in the Toronto Star this week with a piece on how Justin Trudeau’s plans to ban three controversial police tactics all came to naught. I’m also in WIRED, breaking down the critical role that Youtube plays for the Russian opposition.

We’re coming up to the 100th edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless, which is pretty crazy. It will probably coincide with 10,000 subscribers to the newsletter, which is wild.

1. This word provokes some disagreement. While Gaza was not, prior to the war, militarily occupied, as it had been in the past and as it is today, we can say that the state of Palestine is more broadly occupied, politically, by Israel.