The U.S. Plan for a Postwar Middle East Isn’t Gaining Much Traction.

American goals for the region require forging a consensus on who will secure and rebuild Gaza

By David S. Cloud, William Mauldin and Vivian Salama.

Updated Jan. 18, 2024 3:04 pm ET

Israeli strikes in the three months since Hamas’s attack on Israel have left much of Gaza City in ruins. Photo: Omar Ishaq/Zuma Press

WASHINGTON—Biden administration officials say the path toward a more stable Middle East goes through the ruins of Gaza. But that goal keeps running into the harsh realities of a region plunged into conflict.

U.S. goals for the region require forging a consensus on who will secure and rebuild Gaza after the Israeli invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior U.S. officials have made repeated trips to the Middle East since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, much of the time focused on building support among Arab allies and Israel over mapping out a postwar Gaza.

Overall, the U.S. goals are proving elusive amid the continuing war and spillover violence in the Red Sea and elsewhere. Israeli and Arab leaders vital to any resolution remain at odds over how to move to the next phase and what roles they would play.

In the Biden administration’s thinking, a blueprint for governing postwar Gaza would lay the groundwork for more sweeping long-term changes in the region. Key features include a revived process to create a Palestinian state, security guarantees for Israel and the normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations. Those steps would curtail Iran’s ability to foment instability, U.S. officials said, though its nuclear program would remain a threat.

Administration officials said its far-reaching blueprint is attainable, though that entails difficult decisions for governments in the region. 

“It’s hard to imagine, but it really is the only path that provides peace and security for all and, what is more, it is not impractical, it can be done,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national-security adviser, said in remarks Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“The problem,” Blinken said at a separate forum event Wednesday, “is getting from here to there.”

Among the first pieces the U.S. needs to fall in place is a more marked Israeli shift to lower-intensity military operations in Gaza. That would allow for stepped-up deliveries of humanitarian aid for hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians whose plight many Arab governments say must be addressed.

An Israeli-Hamas agreement for at least a temporary cease-fire—much like one intermediaries brokered earlier in the war—might unlock still other pieces, including the release of some or all of the more than 100 remaining hostages still held by Hamas. Then on the table, according to U.S. plans, would be an overhaul of the Palestinian Authority so that it could take part in running postwar Gaza.

One obstacle to these U.S. plans is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The Israeli invasion of Gaza has devastated swaths of the densely packed strip and, according to Palestinian authorities, left more than 23,000 Palestinians dead.

As Israel pursues its goal of destroying Hamas’s leadership and military capabilities, Netanyahu’s government has so far largely parried Blinken and other senior officials’ calls for closer alignment on postwar planning, especially over a future Palestinian state. 

The split was on display Thursday when Netanyahu said that he told the Biden administration that Israel needs “full security control” west of the Jordan River, which includes Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza. He said that requirement “contradicts the idea of self-rule” for Palestinians.

“I tell this truth to our American friends, and I also stopped the attempt to force on us a reality that would harm Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said at a news conference.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who is a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution organization based in Brussels, said the White House has so far exerted little effective pressure on Israel to scale back its war in Gaza so that the U.S. blueprint for stabilizing the region can proceed.

“The U.S. is playing the role of both arsonist and firefighter in the Middle East,” he said. “There’s an inherent tension between unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza and trying to prevent regional escalation because one is the cause of the other.”

Biden has grown frustrated over the soaring civilian death toll in Gaza, according to administration officials. Some Biden phone calls with Netanyahu have become terse, these officials said, particularly when the U.S. was trying to broker hostage negotiations and humanitarian aid for Gaza while Israel continued to bombard the enclave.

At a political fundraiser last month, Biden condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing and said the country was losing support globally.

Saudi participation in the postwar order is seen as a linchpin to the U.S. plans, U.S. officials said. The prospect of normalized diplomatic relations is enough of a prize to make Israel more flexible on arrangements for postwar Gaza, they said.

Only a month before the Gaza war, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said publicly that normalization was getting closer. At the time, he stopped short of demanding the creation of a Palestinian state, as the kingdom has insisted on for decades. 

Saudi officials, however, want a halt to the fighting in Gaza before they will focus on the aftermath. 

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“Our priority and our emphasis is on finding a path to de-escalation, and that is primarily through a cease-fire in Gaza,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said Monday in remarks at the World Economic Forum.

If Israel curtails its offensive, the U.S. thinking goes, then work could turn toward overhauling the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, to address corruption, put in place new leaders and retrain security forces to move into Gaza once Israeli troops withdraw.

The Houthis’ military spokesman in a televised address this week. The Yemeni rebel group has launched attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea as a show of support for Hamas. Photo: yahya arhab/Shutterstock

Under those circumstances, Netanyahu might drop his opposition to the Palestinian Authority, which he has said is as much of a security threat as Hamas. With a more credible Palestinian Authority, the U.S. might have more luck restarting discussions about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a crucial demand of Saudi Arabia and other Arab governments. 

Even U.S. officials say that getting all the pieces of the U.S. blueprint into place remains a daunting task.

U.S. officials are focused on getting Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and King Abdullah II of Jordan on board to help persuade the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to accept U.S. calls for reform.

After meeting Abbas in his West Bank compound last week, Blinken said the Palestinian leader was “prepared to move forward and engage in all of these efforts,” although no change in leadership or governance was announced.

Sisi and Abdullah have discussed the Palestinian issue and the importance of a Palestinian state, spokesmen said, but the leaders didn’t appear to put public pressure on Abbas after meetings with Blinken.

—Anat Peled in Tel Aviv contributed to this article.