What the Horrible Hostage Release Videos Say about an Important Israeli Failure

Israel has likely already failed to dislodge Hamas from Gaza

Part of the routine Israelis have become conditioned to over the past few weeks, are the ugly and deeply upsetting propoganda ceremonies that Hamas is putting the hostages through before they are released. However, these ceremonies are also signaling something much more strategic - Hamas still controls Gaza and Israel has likely failed in one of its most important war objectives of removing Hamas from power.

Why do I say this? To understand the dynamics of the war you have to return to the basics of insurgency and counterinsurgency 101, and lessons the United States has learned time and again in places like Vietnam and Iraq. If you are going to replace a terrorist organization or insurgent force who controls a territory with an alternative, you have to first clear it out but then also immediately establish an alternative security force or police and build out legitimate local governance that can replace it. If you don’t do these things quickly, the fighters you defeated just go underground and eventually come back and reestablish their authority. Unless what we are seeing on TV with these ceremonies is an incredibly impressive manipulation of smoke and mirrors, what it seems to be showing is that Hamas is still clearly in charge of Gaza and despite Israeli military operations has returned to key areas.

There are two basic ways to fight an insurgency. The first is what the U.S. did in Iraq in the early years 2003-2006 and in the key years of Vietnam. You go in to areas and search and destroy. You kill a lot of terrorists/insurgents using overwhelming firepower. You make a big deal of the huge body counts of terrorists killed. Then you leave and the bad guys come back, and you have to clear the area all over again. Sound familiar? It’s what Israel has done in Gaza. It doesn’t work.

What is the alternative? From the beginning develop a plan where you clear, hold, and build. You have to defeat the insurgents and clear them out, but then you have a security force ready to go that can replace them and provide basic policing along with local governance structures that can start to provide basic services. This is what the United States did quite successfully during the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. provided key military support, but worked from the beginning with Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq and the Kurds in Syria to have them both out in the lead, but more importantly quickly take over these areas and provide basic security. Then we helped them start to build local governance structures and provided surges in humanitarian and development assistance. This was a complicated and hard process and Northeast Syria and Western Iraq are from panaceas. ISIS remains a persistent problem in those areas, but it is not in charge.

From early on in the war, the United States tried to get Israel to move towards the second model of a sustainable counterinsurgency strategy. What could such a model have looked like? First, you would need a force seen as legitimate by the people of Gaza to come in and hold territory from which Hamas had been cleared. For obvious reasons this couldn’t be the IDF. The best alternative was probably an Egyptian-led Arab force with an international mandate through the Arab League and/or a UN Security Council Resolution (though not a UN peacekeeping force, which the Israelis would never accept). Would Egypt ever be willing to do this? Maybe. Out of all the outside players, they know Gaza best and they have real interests in trying to bring back some level of stability. But they would also fear ever being stuck holding full responsibility for Gaza. So to ever get Egyptian and other Arab players to agree, you would have to have a clear plan and commitment that their role temporary and would ultimately be handed off to a local Palestinian force. And so you would have to train Palestinian Security Forces - something we actually have been quite successful and adept at doing in the West Bank with the Palestinian Authority (It is one of the very few programs that has been successful in this conflict over the past 20 years). Over time, those forces would take primary responsibility for Gaza’s security.

Of course, the PA wasn’t going to take security responsibility for Gaza without also having a role in governance. So, you would have to set up some kind of transitional authority in Gaza that the PA would have a role in with international support and local Gazans as well to begin providing services. Over time, you would have a mechanism for merging governance in Gaza and the West Bank. And of course you’d have to complement all of this with a huge surge of humanitarian aid and development assistance.

All of this would have been incredibly complicated. You’d have to have Arab States willing to go in. The PA, which is just struggling to control the West Bank, would have to undertake major reforms, and play a significant role in Gaza. Hamas would have to consent to this because it would assume it can survive and lick its wounds and maintain influence even if it gave up governance. And Israel would have to agree under the assumption that over time that the alternatives to Hamas with U.S., Arab, and international support could out-govern and out-security Hamas and marginalize it in Gaza. It would have been incredibly messy. You may have gotten something like northeast Syria, ISIS (or in this case Hamas) underground and still causing persistent problems, but not in charge. Or Iraq, where militias and politicians loyal to Iran wield a lot of influence but are also checked by alternative more nationalist players. In the worst case scenario, which was quite likely, this would have failed and you’d have Hamas in charge. But that looks like the outcome anyway.

So, why didn’t Israel at least try this approach? The Israeli security establishment and professionals understood the importance of developing a security and governance plan, as did over time key members of the war cabinet including Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz, and Gadi Eisenkot. It was one of their fundamental disagreements with Netanyahu, who blocked it again and again. Why? Because the only realistic long-term “hold force” was the Palestinian Security Forces, and that would have required eventual reunification of Gaza and the West Bank, which could create conditions for an eventual two-state solution. Such a strategy was anathema to Netanyahu and even more so to his key partners - Smotrich and Ben Gvir. So rather than supporting a real plan for displacing Hamas with an alternative, he stalled.

Netanyahu offered plans such as full Israeli control of Gaza in perpetuity, which as we’re seeing now was never going to get the hostages out. At one point, he made the specious argument publicly that we couldn’t plan for the day after until the war was over. That’s ridiculous. The “Day After” doesn’t happen everywhere all at once, as was demonstrated during the counter-ISIS campaign. It happens area-by-area. There needed to be plans to establish security in areas of Gaza that Israel was clearing in November 2023 that were part of a “Day After” strategy. Then there was the effort to work with local “tribes/fmailies” in Gaza, which quickly ended with a number of them being killed by Hamas (Again for anyone who has studied even the basics of counterinsurgency this was utterly predictable). There was also the chutzpah of Netanyahu creating a major gap with the Biden Administration over his claims that the Rafah operation had to happen immediately and was key to winning the war, when in reality it was an entirely tactical question, and he refused to engage on the real strategic question of how you replace Hamas with a credible alternative.

And so we stand here today. Israel has had significant successes in setting back Hezbollah in Lebanon, causing major damage to Iranian defenses and defending from Iranian missiles, and Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown. Israel has also succeeded in reducing Hamas’s ability to conduct another October 7th like attack, though that was accomplished very early in the war. Ultimately though, Israel will almost certainly fail to displace Hamas from Gaza, and it should therefore have just been much more willing to end the war earlier, get the hostages out, and avoid much of the suffering in Gaza. Now, a final deal to end the war will almost certainly result in Hamas controlling Gaza - even if everyone claims otherwise.

In the meantime, Netanyahu is latching on to President Trump’s fantasies of displacing 2 million Palestinians from Gaza - an approach that is not “out of the box,” but instead has been favored by the Israeli far right and the likes of Meir Kahne going back to 1967. That plan is entirely unworkable since no one else in the world will support it. And God forbid, if Israel were to move ahead with it over Palestinian objections, it would turn itself into an international pariah.

The one hope is that some of the ideas that I’ve laid out above could potentially be picked up by a future Israeli government, and it is still probably the only viable pathway I’ve seen towards an alternative to Hamas in Gaza. But it will be much harder to do anything then if the U.S. and Israel had started working on these ideas together more than a year ago and begun looking for ways to create a real alternative to Hamas at the same time that it was cleared out of specific areas.