Reinventing Gaza: Recycling Failed Solutions

From the very first moment, it was clear that the American plan to manage Gaza after the recent war was not merely a technical proposal for reconstruction or the administration of specific areas. As documents examined by Western media reveal, it is an American attempt to reproduce a political and security vision for the future in a space where all lines of tension intersect: Israel’s security concerns, the deep humanitarian collapse, the internal Palestinian division, regional competition, and the absence of any American capacity to exert absolute control over what happens on the ground. This mix of factors makes any plan, even before its implementation, seem more like an attempt to “buy time” rather than a genuine solution.

The Guardian’s report titled “U.S. Army Plan to Divide Gaza with a ‘Green Zone’ Secured by International and Israeli Forces” (14 November 2025), on the “Green Zone” and ASC documents, does not only provide operational details but also offers a real window into the depth of American doubts about any country’s ability—even the strongest—to shape Gaza’s future with certainty.

The documents clearly show that the U.S. administration does not know precisely what the sector will look like in a few years. It oscillates between contradictory ideas: from the concept of alternative safe communities—ASC—intended for small groups of Palestinians, as confined spaces to experiment with a quasi-independent governance model, to abandoning it altogether and returning to the traditional “Green Zone” concept, as seen in Baghdad after 2003. This shift reveals that the plan is not based on a precise understanding of Gaza’s reality but on preconceived assumptions, and sometimes on political illusions that Washington had previously attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to discover that social and political realities are stronger and more complex than any blueprint or security plan.

Since 2007, after Hamas took control of the sector, two hypothetical models emerged in Western and Israeli thinking: Taliban-style Gaza versus liberal-democratic West Bank. At that time, high expectations were built on this notion—that Palestinians would compare two political models and consciously choose the “moderate” option, and that time would favor the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. But reality showed that this approach was naïve: the division did not produce two parallel models but one deep division, which neither ended Hamas’s rule nor led to the birth of any tangible political alternative. Today, the U.S. administration repeats the same idea but in a new formulation: “Two Gazas,” with the southern sector divided in a Berlin-like fashion, one green and safe under international supervision, and the other red, exposed to tension and conflict, as if the plan seeks to impose, through lines on a map, a social reality that the population has no capacity to change.

This approach also reflects an American attempt to align with Israeli perceptions, including Kushner’s previous formulations, which focused on establishing “secure governance centers” within the sector, managed by non-partisan local figures, under strict oversight, and isolated from armed factions. Notably, this approach repeats the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan: creating local forces, disconnected from authority, politically unqualified, assumed to generate stability, while reality has shown that such forces are incapable of imposing order and often become tools of local conflicts or institutional failures.

It is clear that Washington understands that Israel is incapable of producing a sustainable post-war model, and that the Israeli government itself faces domestic political constraints. Therefore, the American plan appears more like political maneuvering than a real project; it aims to manage the “gap” rather than build a system capable of resilience. The United States seeks to prevent an explosion, buy time, and provide Israel with what it considers security guarantees, without having to engage directly in reconstruction or face the immediate political and humanitarian costs.

The plan contains a fundamental contradiction. It assumes that Gaza’s society will accept a security formula without political legitimacy, that a new local force can maintain order and prevent chaos without possessing real authority or a social base, that Israel will not intervene directly to alter reality, and that regional actors will merely observe. All these assumptions make the plan, even before implementation, more of a crisis management project than a real solution.

At its core, the documents provide a clear example of the U.S. administration’s knowledge crisis: uncertainty about the future, reliance on tools that previously failed in similar experiments, and failure to read Gaza’s complex reality. The United States seems to be recycling “temporary solutions” from the past, while fully aware that Gaza is neither Baghdad nor Kabul, and that local populations and actors have the capacity to reshape events unpredictably.

The key takeaway from this report, as a critical reading, is that Gaza today is managed more by assumptions than by a clear plan: a plan that does not know where it will stand a year from now, how it will deal with the actual forces on the ground, or how it will balance the interests of Israel, regional actors, and the Palestinians themselves. Everything in these documents suggests that Gaza’s future remains open to all possibilities: either reality will surpass all projections, as happened after 2007, or it will produce an entirely new model, far removed from “two Gazas” or a “Green Zone,” and perhaps far removed from all the maps crafted by international policy rooms.