In the heart of Iraq’s Anbar province, a U.S. Marine captain once sat across from a man whose hands were likely stained with American blood. The sheikh, a leader of a powerful Sunni tribe, had been a sworn enemy. Yet, here they were, sipping sweet tea, not as friends, but as pragmatists staring into the same abyss: Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Americans were bleeding, and the sheikhs were losing their power to a nihilistic death cult. From this meeting of desperate interests, the Sahwa, or the “Sunni Awakening,” was born. It wasn’t about love; it was about survival. It was a calculated risk that changed the course of the war.
This Iraqi precedent holds a stark lesson for the seemingly intractable reality of Gaza. Today, in Gaza, there is no vacuum – there is only Hamas. And where no alternative exists, despair fills the streets. The imperative now is twofold: to dismantle Hamas’s control from the outside and to corrode it from within. This cannot be achieved with bombs alone, but with a competing idea. As an Arabic proverb warns, “A flood may sweep away the riverbed, but without changing the source, the water will always return.” To merely clear the rubble is to prepare the ground for Hamas’s inevitable resurgence.
Any talk of installing the current Palestinian Authority is a dangerous fantasy. The PA, in its present form, is widely seen by Palestinians as corrupt and illegitimate. To expect it to govern a hostile Gaza is to invite certain failure. Likewise, the notion that external Arab forces could impose order now is naive. Twenty years of Hamas rule have cultivated a generation steeped in a jihadist worldview that would reject them as invaders.
This is where the lesson from Iraq becomes critical. The path forward lies in a pragmatic, phased approach. The first phase requires empowering local actors who have skin in the game. The powerful clans and families in Gaza, while far from ideal, are the only available bridge. This is an interim solution, designed to break the cycle of violence and create the stability that has been absent for decades. Empowering them is like a skilled gardener grafting a new branch onto an old, gnarled tree; the work is done with the material that exists, patiently cultivating a new reality from the native soil.
The goal of this interim stage is to build the foundation for a durable, long-term resolution. It is about creating the conditions for a legitimate and functional local Gazan administration to emerge. Once this local governance is established and the threat of Hamas is neutralized, Israel can reduce its military presence. The final phase would see Israel handing over supervisory responsibilities to a coalition of moderate Arab states, such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who can help ensure long-term stability and oversee reconstruction.
But this future cannot be reached without the difficult first step. For this transitional phase to succeed, Israel must maintain absolute and unwavering freedom of security operations across the Gaza Strip. This is not a desire for occupation, but a necessary condition for success. The presence of international forces during this fragile stage would be a fatal impediment. With their restrictive mandates, they would create a shield behind which Hamas could regroup, rearm, and assassinate any emerging local leadership, strangling the alternative in its crib. Israeli security control is the temporary scaffolding necessary to protect this nascent structure until it can stand on its own.
There is no time for delay. The work to build this interim solution must begin now. It is a pragmatic path that moves from immediate security needs to eventual regional cooperation. By offering the people of Gaza a tangible alternative to Hamas – one that leads to them governing themselves under regional Arab supervision – we can finally break the cycle and offer a future free of the recurring nightmare.
