Many people have been wondering what Israel is going to do in Gaza once it has recovered all the hostages (dead or alive) and killed or captured all the Hamas terrorists who remain to fight as well as destroying all their tunnels and other military infrastructure?

Removing two million Gazans is not on the cards, both from a humanitarian perspective and the simple fact that, after the last fifty years of experience with Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Kuwait, no Arab country would accept them.

The solutions the Allies applied to Germany and Japan after WWII to eliminate Nazi and Bushido-Emperor Worship ideas respectively, likely wouldn’t work either. For all the rationalisations about land and nation-hood the real driver of the problems in Gaza is Islam, which combines the political, cultural and social controls of an ideology with the moral and ethical controls of a religion plus being much older than modern “isms” or even Bushido and far more widely accepted in the population. Aside from the Soviets in East Germany the Allies did not try to wipe out the Christian or Shinto religions and would have failed even if those had been held responsible for waging that war – and neither Nazism nor Bushido enabled

In any case even if the Israelis did think it was possible to de-program two million Gazans from Islam, or at least from Islamism and Islamic Jihad, it simply does not have the resources to so so, to police for two generations or more every school, hospital, mosque and local government agency in Gaza.

And they can’t rely on anybody else to do it either. No coalition of countries, not even Arab countries, would try and the UN will simply return UNRWA to act as human shields for Hamas while enabling schools to continue to teach Jew-hatred and every other institution to support Hamas.

But they’re not going to follow the Western strategy of COIN either. COIN is a military term meaning COunterINsurgency and has been a failure according to Andrew Fox, an officer in the British Army from 2005 to 2021, with three tours in Afghanistan:

In the “global war on terror,” Western tactics were to seize a chunk of territory and clear it of enemies through military force. The plan was then to hold the territory through forward operating bases (FOBs) and try to conduct alternative governance in those areas while providing security.

The system of FOBs meant that our enemies, embedded in the local civilian population, always knew where we were and what routes we were likely to use. They could mortar, rocket and IED us at will. It was a recipe for endless violence and huge numbers of casualties.

That, and the map below, is from a fascinating article in the NY Post by Fox where he claims that the Israelis are going to be pragmatic and utlitarian in their approach, accepting not only that Gazans will remain Muslim but supportive of Hamas, which means Hamas will re-generate.

But while Hamas can’t be destroyed it can be defeated, meaning that it won’t be combat capable and able to achieve another October 7-style attack. They’ll do that by destroying the infrastructure it has now, tunnels and weapons, and then putting a cordon around the place.

In other words, the IDF aims to replace Hamas 3.0 — the version that fought three wars against Israel and then launched the brutal Oct. 7 surprise attacks — with Hamas 1.0, which took over the Gaza Strip from Fatah in June 2007.

They’ll still strike into Gaza occasionally, but it will be based on intelligence about Hamas massing, whether in numbers or resources (tunnelling equipment, weapons) or both – and of course they’ll get hammered by pro-Hamas propaganda around the world every time. And there’s one Hamas guy in particular who needs to be killed asap: its military chief Yahya Sinwar, who has casually and bluntly said that Palestinian casualties are “necessary sacrifices., and more of them mean that Hamas will “have the Israelis right where we want them.” These are the people and the strategy being enabled by the likes of John Minto and his concerns about Palestinian lives.

So, it’s not a perfect answer, but that’s war and humans for you: the perfect is the enemy of the good. If it stops another October 7 then it will be good enough.