Steven A. Cook
Foreign Policy / January 1, 2025
[fragment]
For me, the issue to watch in 2025 is what happens in Gaza. That might sound strange. After all, Gaza was the issue that dominated global politics for the last third of 2023 and almost all of 2024—until the dramatic fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Yet, 2025 is going to be the year when the battle for Gaza actually begins. It seems likely that sometime soon, Israeli military operations will come to an end. In the last few months, the Israel Defense Forces have been walloping the northern part of Gaza, where Hamas fighters remain but are now low on food and other supplies. For the first time since its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the Hamas leadership recently signalled that it is willing to accept a cease-fire and hostage deal that allows Israeli forces to remain in the Gaza Strip. That is a big deal.
Assuming an agreement is reached, the disposition of the Gaza Strip will become a major issue in the Middle East. Although various organizations, analysts, and governments have come up with a variety of plans for post-war Gaza, most of them are unrealistic. The Gulf states are not coming to the rescue with money, NATO countries are not sending peacekeepers, and Palestinians are not likely to accept an international mandate for Gaza. There is one group, however, that has a plan that may appear just as unrealistic—but the difference is that they may have an opportunity to try and implement it: Jewish settlers.
The settlers—and the religious Zionist movement more broadly—do not believe in a two-state solution and bitterly opposed Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. At the time, they argued that evacuating the area would not bring Israel security, but rather the opposite. Regular rocket fire from Gaza in addition to four conflicts—2008 to 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021—reinforced this view, but the horrors of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack seem to have convinced a large segment of the Israeli public that withdrawal was a mistake. According to a recent poll from the Israel Democracy Institute, 42 percent of Jewish Israelis now support resettlement of the Gaza Strip, while 52 percent oppose and 6 percent do not know. Folks should take little comfort in the fact that most Israelis still oppose resettlement in Gaza, as the political parties that represent the anti-resettlement majority are out of power and will likely remain so for the next two years and perhaps beyond.
The settlers also see an opportunity in the return of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to the White House. Trump’s pick for the U.S. ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is an ally. Take all this together and no one should be surprised if settlers drop a double wide in the middle of what used to be a settlement in Gaza or even along the border fence—and dare the Israeli military not to defend it. The settlers do not agree on everything, including what would happen to the Palestinian population in Gaza, but after the brutal conflict of the last 14 months, it’s not hard to imagine the worst.
Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
