Ben Cohen

Again, Lebanon is a good parallel to explain why the Israelis had a surrogate force, the South Lebanon army, for much of the last two decades of the 20th century.

I think it was sort of dismantled.

in the early 2000s.

And that was not a particularly successful experiment.

And certainly, I think one of the problems is that any Gazans who get involved in a post-Hamas governance structure are going to be demonized in large parts of the Arab world, including in Qatar,

You know, with Al Jazeera and its other propaganda outlets, you guys are collaborating with the Israelis, you're doing the dirty work of the Israelis, you're helping, you're giving an Arab certificate of...

legitimacy to Israel's plans to ethically cleanse Gaza.

You're probably pretty familiar with this kind of discourse, but that functions as a big disincentive.

So if you don't go to the militias, then who do you have?

And all that has really been talked about is a very vague kind of, I guess, trusteeship model of governance.

This has been tried in various parts of the world before with some degree of success.

Cambodia, for example, had a UN transitional authority for much of the 1990s before it could be returned to some semblance of democracy.

So, there are all these historical models out there and now they're trying to graft them onto Gaza.

Under Trump's plan, the transition... What about, if I could... Yeah.

Right now, I don't.

Part because the Israelis have explicitly ruled out any participation of the Palestinian Authority.

Just to give some context here, the Palestinian Authority is not Hamas.

It's based in the West Bank, in Ramallah.

And the dominant faction there is Fatah, which is the main faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.

So it's ostensibly secular.