Israel Is Reviewing a Proposal to Install a “Moderate Muslim” Puppet Regime in Gaza
Abdullah Azzam Mosque is reduced to rubble by an Israeli strike in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, on July 17, 2024. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty.
The plan, which Israeli officials have called “brilliant,” calls for re-educating Palestinians, destroying UNRWA, and razing refugee camps
by YANIV COGAN
On Thursday, the Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly to thwart any effort to establish an independent Palestinian state and, in effect, doubled down on Israel’s longstanding project of confining Palestinians in increasingly isolated and uninhabitable ghettos. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he opposes any ceasefire with Hamas that does not allow for him to continue his military campaign in Gaza and has worked to sabotage a negotiated end to the war.
At the same time, the Israeli government has been entertaining dystopian and fundamentally unrealistic “post-war” plans for governing Gaza—either through occupation, or, as one influential paper suggests, installing a “moderate Muslim” puppet regime.
Israeli security officials praised the recent academic paper recommending the elimination of democracy in Gaza and the rebuilding of Gazan society into a “moderate Muslim entity” in the mold of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. In the plan are several ideas for entirely remaking Gazan society, including razing refugee camps, banning “every existing” schoolbook, and establishing total control of the media. The proposal also calls for the elimination of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and shutting down the social and humanitarian programs run by Hamas and replacing them with an alternative Israeli-controlled structure.
“We, at the [Israeli] National Security Council, have read [this] excellent document,” its director Tzachi Hanegbi told i24 News in a recent interview, “and at the end of the day we, the decision makers, will have to take into account this analysis, because it’s a brilliant analysis.”
While some prominent Israeli political leaders and government officials have advocated a more extreme plan for Gaza that would entail a permanent military occupation or even the removal of the entire Palestinian population, the academics’ proposal opens a window into the range of options being contemplated at the highest levels of power in Israel. As Israeli officials conduct intellectual war games for a future in Gaza, Palestinians remain trapped in a hellscape of constant bombardment, military occupation, starvation, and threats of annihilation.
According to the four Israeli academics who authored the paper, which is titled “From a Murderous Regime to a Moderate Society,” it has had significant influence in the halls of power. “It was very well received. We know it was well read and circulated. Very senior people got it more than once with a recommendation of reading and discussing it,” Israeli professor Netta Barak-Corren said on a recent podcast hosted by Dan Senor, the former spokesperson for the U.S.’s military occupation regime in Iraq.
The “day after” plan for Gaza received praise from the prominent American neoconservative who was a key player in Iraq in 2003, when the Bush administration imposed a sweeping agenda to forcibly erase the Ba’ath Party ideology from Iraqi society. “The entire effort, I think it’s extraordinary,” said Senor on his podcast. “I know a number of Israeli officials who feel that way as well. It’s certainly having an impact, and making the rounds.” Senor was a senior advisor to L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraqi occupation in its early stages and implemented a regime that was disastrous for Iraqis and helped spark a decade-long insurgency against American forces.
The paper was distributed to senior officials in Israel’s national security establishment, including staff at the National Security Council, the upper echelons of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Shin Bet intelligence agency starting in February 2024. It was also presented to the five members of the War Cabinet—the decision-making body which, up until its recent disbandment, had the final say over Israel’s policies in Gaza.
Israeli news outlets did not report on it until June, however, noting that the 28-page document hadn’t been released to the public. Danny Orbach, one of the paper’s authors and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained in a Facebook post that they kept it private because of “specific operational recommendations” in the original. Drop Site News obtained a copy shortly after that—which, at 32 pages, appears to be an edited or updated version—and the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University recently posted the 32-page version, as well.
The paper, which you can access in full here, aggregates lessons from four different historical regime change operations—Japan and Germany after the Second World War, and Iraq and Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasions—and outlines recommendations for Israel’s current efforts to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.
The social order before October 7, the authors claim, facilitated the emergence of a “socio-political structure which ... directly benefited Hamas.” Its breakdown, due to “the movement of many residents into ad-hoc safe zones.... the destruction of houses, public buildings and infrastructure.... the death of tens of thousands of the residents of the Strip, a significant portion of them terrorists, but alongside them more than a few civilians.... the humanitarian hardship and hunger” has created a “spectrum of possibilities,” which Israel must navigate carefully to ensure its desired outcome.
In December 2023, one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Harel Chorev of Tel Aviv University, appeared on the official IDF podcast, Ma’arachot, to discuss the question, “Can Hamas be eliminated?” He emphasized that Israel’s destruction of Gaza was an essential component of the efforts to marginalize Hamas: “Once you make it clear that [Hamas] not only did not win, but that it has brought about a horrific catastrophe upon itself, and also upon its people ... and when this ends with Hamas’s metaphorical and non-metaphorical corpse laying on the floor, robbed and finished off, this will have a very positive echo.”
Chorev’s framing of the destruction of Gaza and the immense human suffering it is causing as achievements of the IDF is consistent with recent comments from IDF field commanders like Brigadier General Yair Palai, who oversees thousands of Golani Brigade soldiers in Gaza. “When the residents of Gaza come back here, someday, they will not believe what Hamas did to them and their homes,” Palai said in an interview published by Israel Hayom. “It’s all [Hamas’s] responsibility. It destroyed their lives, their possessions.”
The strategic mentality reflected in these comments long predates the current Gaza war. More than a decade prior to the October 7 attacks, Dan Schueftan, a former lecturer at the IDF’s National Security College, the equivalent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, explained: “Ground invasions should be carried out, perhaps under the banner of ‘harming enemy forces,’ but their real significance is the devastation they leave behind them. I don’t mind that as a pretext we claim that there is some military objective, because that’s required by all these International Law people, so we can bring in some lawyer to explain how to do it, but the main thing is that [we understand] very clearly [the real purpose].”
Blaming Hamas for Israel’s destruction of Gaza is essential to the plan to replace it.
The fourth co-author of “From a Murderous Regime to a Moderate Society,” Nathaniel Palmer of Bar-Ilan University, also articulated his view that the damage the war brings upon the Palestinian population as a whole is a benefit. “Who should [be made to] feel defeated? Hamas or the ordinary Palestinian? My position is quite clear and it is that based on the lessons from the historical record, it is the ordinary Palestinian[s who] should feel defeated,” Palmer said in an interview with Yediot Aharonot. The regime change proposal itself notes: “It’s important that among the Palestinian public, too, there will be widespread understanding that Hamas has been defeated.”
The post-“total defeat” rehabilitation plan envisioned in the paper seems increasingly irrelevant. Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades and its allies from other armed factions in Gaza have demonstrated a significant capacity to sustain a guerrilla war against the Israeli assault. At the same time, the Israeli military and political leadership remains committed to the implementation of a genocidal policy that would render Gaza permanently uninhabitable. And reviewing the plan’s details offers important insight into some of the concrete ambitions of Israeli policy planners, undermining claims that the assault on Gaza is a targeted operation focused solely on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Among its recommendations, the paper calls for:
Razing refugee camps and replacing them with “orderly” Israeli-built housing
The camps themselves, the paper notes, make up a significant portion of Hamas’s social base. “We recommend destroying the infrastructure of the refugee camps to the ground, and building orderly neighborhoods in their stead, which will ensure appropriate living conditions, and into which Gazan families will return,” it concludes. But the authors state this supposed rebuilding process, which is both technically impossible and politically unlikely, will have to wait until after a “total defeat” is inflicted on Hamas: “the historical record shows that until a total defeat [has been achieved]—there is no point in initiating attempts to carry out ... restoration of systems.”
Imposing a censorship regime on the education system, media broadcasts, and youth movements
The plan calls for the removal of “particularly extremist educators,” as well as an immediate ban on “every existing school book” and suggests replacing them with alternative textbooks based on the curricula used in UAE and Saudi Arabia. In February, around the time the paper was first distributed, the former head of the Mossad and Israel’s National Security Council, Yossi Cohen, stated: “The Emiratis did an amazing job with their school books. There were multiple examples [changes they've made], saying Israel is with us, an ally, an important ally. If only there was a [Palestinian] leader of the caliber of Mohammed bin Zayed, who is a giant.”