Here’s what happened last week: The Israeli right gathered in the Knesset to discuss Gaza’s future. They spoke in grand terms about destiny, sovereignty, and the Jewish people’s historical claim to the land. They invoked Am Yisrael. They talked about swimming against hostile currents. They radiated conviction.
And then, days later, Washington announced its own plan: a technocratic Palestinian committee, a “Board of Peace,” Turkey and Qatar at the table, and Israeli politics exploded.
The explosion tells you everything you need to know about the state of Israeli strategic thinking on the right. Or rather, the absence of it.
Because here’s the thing: The right knows exactly what it wants. It wants Israeli control. It wants to prevent Hamas’s return. Many want a settlement, openly or eventually. Some want annexation. Others want military governance transitioning to something else, at some point, under conditions to be determined later.
What the right doesn’t have, what it has refused to produce, is an actual plan.
Not a vision statement. Not a list of principles. Not another conference where serious men in suits talk about the land of Israel and the will of the people. A plan. The kind with steps. The kind that answers the unglamorous questions: Who runs the water system? Who pays teachers? Who issues work permits? Who stops the next militia from forming in Jabalya?
The left, for all its failures, figured this stuff out decades ago. “Two-state solution” is three words that contain an entire infrastructure of meaning. It has maps, funding mechanisms, diplomatic recognition, and a story about what comes next. You can hate it. You can think that October 7 destroyed any remaining credibility it had. But it exists as a political product that the world can recognize, respond to, and organize around.
The right has nothing equivalent. It has rage, justified rage, at the idea of outsourcing Gaza to the Palestinian Authority or international monitors or anyone who thinks the problem is Israeli intransigence rather than Palestinian rejectionism. It has a deep, reasonable belief that Israeli security cannot depend on goodwill from Ramallah, Brussels, or the UN.
But when you ask how that translates into governance, actual, day-to-day governance of two million people in a territory the size of Philadelphia, the answer fragments into competing impulses that never quite become policy.
Full sovereignty? Great. When? How? Under what legal framework? With what status for the existing population? Funded by whom? Secured how?
Military rule first, civilian transition later? Fine. Transition to what? Managed by whom? With whose legitimacy?
Emigration? To where? Under what conditions? Paid for how? And what happens to those who stay?
These aren’t gotcha questions. They’re the basic building blocks of statecraft. And the Israeli right keeps treating them as if they’re somehow beneath the moral clarity of the larger cause.
A plan including Turkey, Qatar, better than no plan at all
This is how you get Turkey and Qatar in Gaza.
Not because Washington loves Ankara or Doha. Not because the Biden or Trump administrations are secretly pro-Hamas. But because when you leave a vacuum, someone fills it.
WHOEVER SHOWS up with a plan, even a bad plan, even a plan that empowers actors hostile to Israel, beats no plan at all.
The backlash in Israel was instant. Netanyahu’s office said the Gaza Executive Board wasn’t coordinated with Israel and contradicts Israeli policy. Smotrich said countries that empowered Hamas can’t replace it. Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir rejected the whole framework. Opposition head Yair Lapid called it a diplomatic failure and said he’d warned this would happen without an Egyptian alternative.
They’re all correct. And they’re all describing the same structural problem: Israel didn’t define the day after, so someone else did.
At the Knesset conference, several speakers acknowledged this. They talked about long timelines, bureaucratic friction, and the need to work with existing systems. National Missions Minister Orit Strock was honest about the question of whether Israel will openly claim Gaza, including to Trump. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli suggested starting with a northern bloc of communities, even if full settlement comes later.
That’s progress, I guess. At least it’s not pure magical thinking. But it’s still not a doctrine. A doctrine has a name. It has phases. It has a theory of legitimacy that doesn’t just rely on the IDF staying forever. It has answers to the questions that international partners, regional actors, and Israelis themselves will inevitably ask: What’s the endgame? What’s the legal status? How do you prevent another insurgency? How do you avoid permanent occupation?
Technocracy isn’t the answer, by the way. The White House can announce a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza and dress it up in neutral language about restoring services and rebuilding institutions. But technocracy is never neutral. It’s a claim about who has authority. And if you let Turkey and Qatar appoint the technocrats, or oversee them, or fund them, you’ve already lost the argument about whose influence shapes the future.
This is where the right’s postponement strategy hits a wall. Netanyahu has built a career on deferring hard choices, managing contradictions, and keeping everyone inside the coalition by never forcing them to choose between competing visions. That worked until October 7, which showed what a deferred strategy looks like when it collapses.
The day after in Gaza will be decided by whoever takes ownership of it in the executable policy. If the Israeli right wants sovereignty, it needs to do the unglamorous work of defining what that means in practice, step by step, tradeoff by tradeoff. It needs to name the doctrine, attach people to it, and defend it as a coherent alternative to international administration or regional trusteeship or whatever else gets proposed.
Otherwise, the next committee will arrive. And the one after that. And each time, Israel will be reacting to someone else’s design, because it never produced its own.
You don’t get to complain about Turkey in Gaza if you’re not willing to say what should be there instead. The issue lies not in sound bites, but in policy. In policy.
The right has the conviction. It has the public’s support. It has the moral argument that Gaza under Hamas was an existential threat and can never be again. It lacks the discipline to make that something the world, or even Israel, can do.
Until it does, the day after will keep arriving from abroad, one technocratic committee at a time.