In the weeks since the unveiling of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” the renewed Israeli offensive to permanently “conquer” all of Gaza, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s internal decision-making is not oriented toward a singular strategic endgame, but toward a recursive logic of exhaustion.
Israel isn’t choosing between total conquest and technocratic containment via an Arab-brokered ceasefire plan. Instead, it is deploying these options as devices to stretch the war and weaponize its duration rather than end it. Neither is an actual alternative to the other.
This is not a paradox, but a method. “Gideon’s Chariots,” with its objective to concentrate over two million Palestinians in Rafah and “cleanse” the remainder of Gaza, is not merely a plan of conquest. It is a fantasy of sterilization dressed in logistical rationality. Its brutality lies not only in its intentions–military and demographic–but also in its open-endedness, because it will be an occupation without governance or responsibility.
It imagines Gaza as a surgical field: empty of social density and politics, a flattened terrain where the Israeli army may operate unhindered and where civilians are transformed into captives or debris. This is where extermination can proceed behind the veil of humanitarian logistics. But this is the thing: while Israel announces its plan and leaks many of its contours, making sure that the endgame of extermination is out in the open, it also delays its fulfillment.
The rejection of the Egyptian proposal for Gaza’s postwar governance, meanwhile, functions less as a strategic rebuttal and more as a temporal maneuver: it defers the stabilization of Gaza, suspends the possibility of a postwar architecture, and secures Israel’s role as the sole arbiter of movement, aid, reconstruction, and survival. The proposal–which secured the backing of the Arab League–offered a ceasefire, the release of prisoners, and the creation of a Palestinian technocratic administration in Gaza under regional and international auspices. The governing authority would be civilian, non-Hamas, and possibly linked to the Palestinian Authority. Arab security forces, primarily from Egypt and the UAE, would maintain public order. Israel, in theory, would retain the ability to strike if Hamas rearmed, but the core logic was one of pacified governance and externally monitored reconstruction.
But this alternative, while marketed as pragmatic containment, reveals its own structure of control. It does not offer Palestinains liberation or sovereignty. It does not restore Palestinian political life. Instead, it imagines a depoliticized Gaza, administered through foreign technocrats, where governance is reduced to management and resistance is metabolized into security threats.
Yes, it ends the massacres, but it continues the process of unmaking through other means. Yes, it stops ethnic cleansing and genocide, but it only offers a minimum respite.
In this scenario, the Palestinian is rendered administrable but unrepresentable–visible in spreadsheets and surveillance systems, but invisible as a subject of history. Where “Gideon’s Chariots” proposes the elimination of the interlocutor, the Egyptian plan offers their neutralization. Where the former seeks erasure, the latter guarantees containment.
In this way, Israel is not simply fighting Hamas. It is managing the time of collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure, of regional diplomacy, and of its own internal contradictions. The so-called “plans” it circulates are not blueprints for action, but instruments of disorientation. By alternating between military escalation and diplomatic non-engagement, Israel traps adversaries and allies alike in a theatre of endless anticipation.
These plans become not resolutions, but literal traps: they embolden some, humiliate others, and erode the coherence of any alternative vision. But Israel remains within the suspended terrain of both plans. On the one hand, it seeks to retrieve its prisoners before completely wiping out Gaza. On the other, it aims to appease the Arab governments that have remained silent, have not severed their ties with Israel, and have gradually–though assuredly–offered an alternative to genocide through a politics of sterilization. Not to mention that the prospect of completely undoing the people of Gaza remains alive, serving Netanyahu’s own management of his coalition and his desire to emerge as a historic leader who decisively ended the Palestine question.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel’s relationship with the Gulf states. By signaling openness to normalization and regional security arrangements–while simultaneously deepening the humanitarian catastrophe–Israel forestalls clear ultimatums. The prospect of a reconfigured Gaza under Arab oversight is floated as a hypothetical, a distant possibility, while irreversible facts are manufactured on the ground: entire neighborhoods are erased, populations displaced, infrastructure reduced to dust.
Behind the language of planning lies a campaign of sterilization and condensation–a vision of Gaza not as a home, but as a holding site. Leaked reports whisper of forced transfers, of Palestinians being sent to Libya or elsewhere in Africa, sketching futures of removal dressed in the language of pragmatism. In other words, Israel maneuvers, cajoles, agrees, renges, returns to blood, and ultimately remains hesitant in fulfilling even its own plans.
But even this strategy shows signs of fatigue. The army is stretched. Reservists are exhausted. Public support, once monolithic, is now fractured, especially around the government’s inability to recover Israeli prisoners and its disregard for their lives. The political elite may posture unity, but societal cohesion is fraying. The very trust that once linked military necessity to civil legitimacy is eroding.
These signs of erosion are not only internal. The longer the war continues, the more international legitimacy Israel forfeits. The ICC warrants, the ICJ rulings, the intensifying accusations of genocide–these are not merely moral censures, but signs of the beginnings of institutional isolation.
And yet, rather than shift course, Israel doubles down, leaning into ambiguity and attrition, hoping to exhaust global outrage the way it hopes to exhaust Palestinian resistance: through delay, confusion, the normalization of collapse, and of course, through coercion by the weaponization of antisemitism.
In this moment, what Israel seeks is a “stable instability” in which Gaza is rendered uninhabitable yet governed, massacred yet silent, present yet politically nullified. Both plans–the one it executes and the one it rejects–serve this grammar. Whether through total war or managed containment, the objective remains: to erase Palestine as a subject of history, and to replace it with a population that can be controlled, administered, or vanished. Whether this will succeed remains uncertain. But the cracks are visible in the disillusionment of soldiers and in the rage of Israeli prisoners’ families.
Ceasefire negotiations as a form of interrogation
The way in which Israel has conducted the ceasefire negotiations, caught in a perpetual cycle of proposals, rejections, the resumption of hostilities, and the insistence on non-starters, is rather like the dynamic between the Israeli interrogators of the Shin Bet and the Palestinian prisoners enduring their pressure tactics.
In the rooms of the Shin Bet, the manipulation of time becomes a weapon, and language becomes a tool of disorientation. Truth is not revealed through clarity or dialogue but extracted through exhaustion: physical torture, psychological games, the pretense of friendship, and promises that are easily betrayed. The goal is not to understand the subject but to unmake it–not just confession, but collapse.
“If you speak, I’ll give you a cigarette. If you name a name, you can rest. If you give us one person–just one–we might bring food, a blanket, or something to slow the cold.” Each gesture masquerades as mercy, each act tethered to the logic of the deal. It is governance through exhaustion.
But it is not merely the scene of interrogation. It is a relation in which massacre, negotiation, and measurement feed one another: the massacre produces the crisis that makes the negotiation legible; and the negotiation becomes the space in which the impact of violence is measured. Each Israeli bombing is followed not by silence, but by assessment: has the resistance softened? Has the community broken? Are they ready to concede?
Negotiation is not a deviation from violence; it is one of its modalities–strategic, affective, diagnostic. To speak of negotiation here is to speak of a calibration of ruin and the testing of spirit and fatigue. Just like the interrogator tests the limits of the prisoner’s endurance.
And still, within the dungeon, the Palestinian prisoner sometimes longs for the interrogator, because in a world of sealed doors and slow starvation, he becomes the only one who confirms that you still exist, the only sociality possible.
The irony is that the more weakness you show, the more they withhold. The more you comply, the tighter the screws become. That’s why it is not a negotiation of needs, but an architecture of humiliation calibrated to ensure that even your willingness to speak becomes a further mark of dispossession, or a moment to squeeze everything from the interlocutor and make sure he holds nothing back.
When analysts, diplomats, and commentators invoke the term “negotiations,” it is actually an interrogation, because its structure is designed to exhaust the other until they collapse. And when collapse does not suffice, elimination follows. In this paradigm, Israel does not seek interlocutors, but seeks the unraveling of those it summons to the table.
Beyond the binary
If Israeli negotiation operates as a form of interrogation, then it is equally vital to remember that Palestinians have not only recognized this structure but have also repeatedly sabotaged its operation. Indeed, the history of the Palestinian struggle is the history of refusing the terms of legibility imposed by the occupier: of speaking without permission, refusing speech when compelled, of surviving without seeking recognition. This is not romantic defiance. It is clarity forged under pressure. A political cunning formed in the prison cell, the interrogation chamber, the ruined home, and the negotiating table alike.
Palestinians have long been expected to perform their defeat, embodying restraint while rehearsing moderation and denouncing violence selectively. Yet time and again, these roles are declined. The prisoner who chooses silence over confession; the hunger striker who displaces the temporality of domination by submitting his body to time itself; the mother who insists on naming her dead child not as a victim, but as a martyr; the camp that refuses to dissolve into the dust of humanitarianism—these are not just acts of resistance, but refusals of capture.
It is precisely this refusal that breaks open the false binary that Israel now offers the world: between extermination and containment–“Gideon’s Chariots” and the Egyptian plan.
They aren’t alternatives to one another, but rather structural co-conspirators. One would eliminate Palestinians as subjects through military sterilization, and the other would disarm and administer them through international bureaucracy. One is an open genocide, and the other is a managed disappearance.
This binary is itself becoming unstable, because the fractures are now running through the moral architecture of the international order, daily unmasked in its complicity and selective grief. They run through Israel’s own foundations: a stretched military, an incoherent political leadership, and a society fracturing under the weight of unending war and the anticipation of the return of the messiah. The fractures run through every site where the binary of extermination or containment is refused, and where a third, fugitive possibility begins to flicker.
This third path, though not easily named, is already being lived. It pulses through global solidarity networks that no longer ask for permission but demand accountability. It grows in every courtroom where the word genocide is uttered–not as a metaphor, but as a legal charge. It lives in the recognition that Palestine is not a humanitarian crisis to be managed, but a political cause to be reclaimed.
It lives in the knowledge that Palestine has hollowed out the claims of the liberal order, exposed its foundations, and saturated its vocabulary–and still insists on its presence.
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian scholar and theorist whose work focuses on the politics of resistance, decolonization, and the Palestinian struggle.