Gabriel G Tabarani
Washington has thrown its weight behind a Gaza-first strategy.
The plan is clear: Hamas must disarm. A technocratic Palestinian administration should take over. An international stabilization force would back local security. Reconstruction would follow. Israeli forces would withdraw in phases, but only after credible demilitarization.
Right now, American pressure is directed mostly at the Palestinian side. The United States is pushing Hamas to dismantle its military infrastructure. It is leaning on Egypt, Qatar and Turkey to use their leverage. At the same time, Washington is demanding sweeping reforms from the Palestinian Authority — financial transparency, institutional restructuring and tighter security control — before it can play a serious role in postwar Gaza.
This imbalance is deliberate. From Washington’s perspective, the immediate risk of renewed war comes from Gaza, not the West Bank. If Hamas rebuilds, the cycle starts again. Stopping that is the priority.
But diplomacy rarely operates in a vacuum. While attention is fixed on Gaza, the West Bank is changing — and not in small ways.
Settlement expansion has accelerated. Outposts once considered illegal are being formalized. Infrastructure corridors are tying settlement blocs more tightly to Israel’s administrative grid. Planning decisions are shaping a territorial reality that becomes harder to reverse with each passing year.
These are not isolated housing approvals. They are cumulative shifts. And over time, cumulative shifts become structural facts.
At the same moment, the Palestinian Authority is weaker than it has been in years. Financial strain has limited its ability to pay salaries regularly. Public trust has eroded. Corruption, political stagnation and the absence of elections have hollowed out its legitimacy. Security coordination continues, but the political foundation underneath it is thinner.
Here lies the contradiction at the heart of the Gaza-first approach.
The U.S. plan assumes that a reformed and credible Palestinian Authority can eventually govern Gaza. But the viability of that authority depends on conditions in the West Bank. If the PA continues to weaken there — financially, territorially and politically — it will struggle to project authority anywhere else.
None of this absolves Palestinian leadership of responsibility. Reform is not cosmetic; it is essential. Without real anti-corruption measures, transparent finances and a clear monopoly over the use of force, international backing will remain cautious and conditional. If the Palestinian Authority wants to return to Gaza, it must show it can govern differently.
Yet reform alone cannot compensate for a shrinking political horizon. If territorial fragmentation deepens and the prospect of statehood appears increasingly abstract, Palestinian institutional reform will lack public traction. People do not rally around institutions that seem disconnected from political possibility.
Israel’s security concerns are real. No Israeli government will withdraw from Gaza — or tolerate large-scale reconstruction — without confidence that Hamas has been dismantled. That logic explains the sequencing Washington has adopted.
But sequencing can become siloing. If Gaza stabilization proceeds while the West Bank drifts toward deeper entrenchment, the result may not be renewed diplomacy but a more consolidated, long-term stalemate.
History offers caution. American mediation has succeeded when security measures were tied to a broader political architecture and when incentives altered the calculations of all major actors. It has faltered when interim steps hardened into permanent arrangements and final-status questions were indefinitely postponed.
Today, the United States is applying real pressure — but unevenly. That may be unavoidable in the short term. The threat from Gaza is immediate and visible. The transformation of the West Bank is slower, more bureaucratic and less dramatic.
But it may prove more consequential.
If the Palestinian Authority collapses fiscally or loses what remains of its legitimacy, the security vacuum will not produce moderation. And if territorial changes accumulate beyond political reach, future negotiations will operate within far narrower confines.
From a regional perspective, the stakes extend beyond Israeli-Palestinian dynamics. Gulf states considering deeper economic integration and normalization are watching not only cease-fires but long-term stability. Investors assess trajectories, not headlines. A destabilized West Bank would complicate both.
The United States still has leverage — military, diplomatic and financial. It can condition aid, shape incentives and influence sequencing. But leverage works only if it is aligned with a coherent end state.
The current strategy answers an urgent question: how to prevent Hamas from rearming.
It has yet to answer a deeper one: what political structure will emerge once Gaza is stabilized?
Gaza may be the immediate crisis. The West Bank is the strategic test.
If Washington treats them as separate files, it risks solving one problem while entrenching another. If it connects them — security, governance and territorial policy moving in parallel — it may preserve space for a political future that still feels distant, but not yet foreclosed.
In the Middle East, temporary stability often hardens into permanent reality. The direction of that reality is being shaped now — in both Gaza and the West Bank.
This article was originally published in Arabic on the Asswak Al-Arab website
