What comes after Gaza’s destruction? A response to Gideon Levy
A Palestinian man carries a toddler amid makeshift shelters in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, May 2026
Jamil Khader writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 4 June 2026:
In his recent Haaretz op-ed, “Israel’s Solution to the Gaza Problem,” Gideon Levy argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza reveal the existence of a coherent postwar strategy rather than the absence of one. According to Levy, the destruction of Gaza is not simply a military campaign aimed at defeating Hamas. Instead, it is part of a broader project to dismantle Palestinian society itself.
Having devastated Gaza’s infrastructure and social institutions, Israel is now moving toward what Levy describes as the next phase of its plan: reducing Palestinians to a fragmented population of the disabled, injured, hungry, homeless, unemployed, and socially disorganized. Once Gaza’s society has been sufficiently destroyed, Levy argues, the conditions will be created for the final objective—mass expulsion.
Levy’s intervention is important because it rejects the familiar claim that Israel lacks a political vision for Gaza. On the contrary, he argues that Israel’s refusal to permit governance by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or any alternative Palestinian institution reveals its actual objective. Israel does not seek a different government in Gaza; it seeks the destruction of governance itself.
The systematic targeting of teachers, doctors, engineers, civil servants, journalists, and social workers is therefore not accidental. It is part of a deliberate effort to eliminate the institutional foundations necessary for collective life. No society can function without the people who reproduce its social, educational, medical, and administrative infrastructure. Their elimination transforms Gaza into a space of chaos and dependency, making displacement easier to achieve.
While Levy’s analysis is compelling, it remains limited by its humanitarian and sociological framing. He accurately describes the destruction of Palestinian society but does not fully theorize the political and economic logic driving that destruction. Most significantly, he continues to reproduce the assumption embedded in the title itself: that Gaza constitutes a “problem” requiring a “solution.” The question that remains unasked is why Gaza appears as a problem in the first place.