THE KEY TO THESE SCENARIOS...:

 If the military goal is indeed to reoccupy Gaza in order to eradicate Hamas, the next questions, naturally, are: For how long, and to replace Hamas with what? There is much more room for disagreement on these two questions of political strategy than on the military strategy, whose parameters are much narrower since they depend on objective considerations and the nature of the military means at hand. The two opposite poles of the political divergence translate into two scenarios that we might call the Greater Israel scenario and the Oslo scenario.

The Greater Israel scenario is the one that appeals most to Benjamin Netanyahu and his acolytes on Israel's far right. The Likud Party is heir to the Zionist far right, known as Revisionist Zionism, whose armed offshoots perpetrated the Deir Yassin massacre, the most infamous mass murder of Palestinians in 1948, amid what the Arabs call the Nakba (catastrophe). On the 78% of the territory of British Mandate Palestine that Zionist armed forces managed to conquer during the war of that year (the Zionists had been granted 55% by the partition plan approved by a nascent United Nations Organization, then dominated by countries of the Global North), 80% of the Palestinian population were uprooted. They had fled the war, frightened by atrocities such as Deir Yassin, and were never to be allowed to return to their homes and land. And yet the Zionist far right never forgave mainstream Zionism, which was then led by David Ben-Gurion, for having agreed to stop the war before conquering 100% of British Mandate Palestine between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

During his recent speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, only two weeks before Oct. 7, Netanyahu brandished a map of the Middle East showing a Greater Israel that included Gaza and the West Bank. Even more relevant to the new Gaza war is the fact -- hardly mentioned in the global media -- that Netanyahu had resigned from the Israeli cabinet led by Sharon in 2005 in protest against the latter's decision to withdraw from Gaza. (Sharon had succeeded Netanyahu as the head of Likud in 1999, following the latter's electoral defeat to the Labor Party then led by Ehud Barak. Sharon then managed to win the next election, in 2003, and offered the ministry of finance to Netanyahu.)

Much more an army man than a politician, Sharon was attentive to the military's plea for a withdrawal of troops from the unruly Gaza, with a preference for controlling the strip from outside. He saw no prospect for an annexation of Gaza similar to what has been occurring in the West bank since its occupation in 1967. He therefore judged that it would be wiser to let the Palestinian Authority, established by the 1993 Oslo Accords, take care of Gaza, while focusing on the West Bank -- a much more prized and consensual Zionist goal.

Oslo required the withdrawal of Israeli troops only from those West Bank areas densely populated by Palestinians, while allowing Israel to maintain control of most of the territory. To show his contempt for the Palestinian Authority, Sharon opted for a unilateral "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005 -- without preparing it with the Palestinian Authority, that is. 

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