The Future of the Occupation: What now for Palestine after Gaza?

The Future of the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories after Gaza is an open-access collection that reads like a field guide for citizens, journalists, policy staffers, students and anyone who refuses to look away. 

It begins from an unflinching fact: that ceasefires and the summit statements did not end the occupation, they reshaped it. 

The opening chapter states this without rhetorical gymnastics and asks a harder question that too many conversations still dodge. 

What, exactly, will the occupation look like in five or 10 years if current forces keep pulling in the same direction, and what would it take to bend the curve?

The book’s core contribution is methodological rather than ideological. Instead of promising certainty, it uses scenario planning to map several plausible futures. 

That distinction matters. For three decades, public debate has ping-ponged between slogans about a two-state solution, a single democratic state, or some indefinite status quo. The scenario chapter cuts through that noise. 

It identifies the drivers that actually move events, such as Israel’s internal political incentives, the capacity and legitimacy of Palestinian leadership, the degree of US and European willingness to impose costs on Israeli annexation and the behaviour of regional actors like Iran, Hezbollah and the Gulf states.

The book then sketches futures that are internally coherent, each one grim in its own way but useful as shared maps. 

A set of possibilities

Readers do not have to be experts to follow the logic. They only need to keep track of how those drivers interact.

The first scenario envisions a rapid shift from incremental land grabs to formal annexation, and the second depicts a similarly rapid expansion of occupation that runs into sustained Palestinian resistance.

That resistance in turn brings harsher Israeli responses and higher regional volatility. 

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A third imagines a return to the cruel routines that defined the pre-October 2023 reality, only worse because Gaza’s destruction has pushed human misery to a new baseline. 

A fourth mixes elements of all three. None are optimistic. That is the point. Waiting for a miracle is not a strategy. 

The list of scenarios gives officials and activists a common vocabulary and a way to pressure test their assumptions.

For an average reader, it offers something rarer. It offers orientation.

An edited volume lives or dies by consistency and range. This one is unusually strong on both. 

It moves from the big picture to the main actors, then to the neighbours, then to the larger region, and finally to the question everyone wants to skip to, which is what a credible conversation about peace would require in this moment. 

There is a clear editorial spine. You do not get the usual conference-paper feeling. You get essays that talk to each other, sometimes explicitly, often by implication. The progression feels deliberate. 

You learn enough history to understand the stakes, but the writing never sinks into an academic churn. The sentences land. The claims are specific. The tone is sober without fatalism, and that is a hard balance to strike.

Annexation as a process

Several chapters deserve special mention. Gil Murciano’s essay on Israel’s policy machine is bracing because it refuses to treat annexation as a vague threat. 

He shows how senior officials turned it into an administrative programme, complete with legal tools, budget lines and bureaucratic guardians. 

Murciano also describes how the Israeli government used Gaza to shift the media lens, how it starved the Palestinian Authority of oxygen, and how it framed opponents as enemies of security. 

The result is a portrait of policy as process, not posture. For readers who have heard the phrase creeping annexation for years, the chapter explains why that phrase no longer fits.

When a project gets an office, a schedule and a spreadsheet, it is no longer creeping. It is marching.

Mouin Rabbani’s chapter on the Palestinian Authority lands with the force of a diagnosis. He does not pretend that the PA can be reformed by wishful thinking or donor memos.

He walks the reader through how a body designed to be transitional hardened into a client security apparatus that lost its mandate and much of its internal legitimacy. 

That argument is not comfortable, but it is necessary. Any discussion of a political horizon that treats the PA as a dependable partner without first reckoning with its decay is a conversation that will collapse on contact with reality. 

Abdalhadi Alijla’s piece on Hamas is equally direct. It situates the movement’s decisions in a long arc of governance and resistance, rather than treating 7 October as an inexplicable eruption. 

Whether readers agree with every conclusion is beside the point.

They will come away with a clearer sense of how Hamas calculates risk and opportunity, and why its choices have trapped Palestinians in a vice between an unaccountable leadership and an occupier that has normalised collective punishment.

Regional consequences

The regional chapters are also notable for cutting through romantic myths. Joseph Daher’s analysis of Hezbollah explains how the war reshaped the movement’s deterrence posture and domestic constraints. 

Hasan Jaber’s essay on Jordan explores a monarchy squeezed between a combustible West Bank, a large Palestinian population at home, and a security relationship with Israel and Washington that it cannot casually discard. 

Hamidreza Azizi’s chapter on Iran avoids cartoonish narratives and instead describes a state that calibrates pressure through proxies while remaining careful to avoid a direct war it does not want. 

Paul Aarts’s account of the Israeli-Saudi normalisation chapter reminds readers that the road to a deal was never smooth and that Gaza turned cracks in the pavement into craters. 

The picture that emerges is of a neighbourhood where every actor is juggling contradictory imperatives and where every choice has a domestic price tag.

Maged Mandour’s chapter on Egypt is a cold shower for anyone clinging to nostalgia about Cairo as an honest broker that can unlock diplomatic doors by force of history. 

He shows how the Sisi regime made a survival choice that placed Israeli gas, security coordination, American indulgence and Gulf credit above every other consideration. 

Mandour notes that Egypt blocked a mass expulsion from Gaza into Sinai, which was a real red line, but otherwise behaved as a reactive state that absorbs consequences rather than shaping outcomes. 

That is not an insult. It is a description of a militarised system that treats foreign policy as a function of regime maintenance. 

For readers puzzled by Egypt’s posture during the war, the chapter provides clarity without illusions.

Then there is the closing chapter by Omar Dweik and Erwin van Veen, which refuses to sell a fantasy. 

There is no quick fix, and the word “process” has been abused for a generation. 

Yet the authors do something more useful than spinning a new plan with a glossy name. They argue for sequencing work that makes actual peace talks possible later. 

That means raising the cost of annexation now, using social and economic pressure that does not wait for reluctant governments. 

It means sustaining a long horizon of dialogue infrastructures, networks and narratives that can survive the next scandal or election. 

And it also means tying regional diplomacy and normalisation to measurable steps on the ground, so that there are no free lunches for leaders who want the benefits of grand bargains without the obligations. 

Above all, it means addressing the crisis of Palestinian representation with something more serious than speeches, which is to say a renewed political home that can speak for Palestinians beyond narrow factional frames.

Ways going forward

Why celebrate a book that offers so little cheer? Because clarity is an act of service. The editor selected contributors who do not hide behind euphemism.

The prose does not pretend that symmetrical language is the same thing as fairness. The essays name the occupation as unlawful and describe Gaza without euphemistic fog. 

They also explain why repression will not make Israelis safe in the long run. It will disfigure Israel’s politics while guaranteeing periodic eruptions of violence that are more radical than the ones before. 

None of that is a slogan. It is an observation about cause and effect. You feel the difference on the page.

Read this book, and then press it into someone else’s hands. If you work in government, the scenario framework will help you make choices that are resilient to surprise

The book also earns praise for its editorial craft. Many collections read like stitched fragments.

This one reads like a single conversation with different voices. The scenario framework gives the volume a backbone and the sequence of actors, neighbours, and regional powers adds ribs. 

The final chapter ties the organs together. That coherence matters for a general audience. It keeps you oriented.

It allows you to place a new headline, a new outrage, or a new diplomatic overture into a map that you already understand.

In an information environment that rewards distraction, that is a public good.

There are places where a second edition could go further, and the fact that the volume invites that kind of engagement is part of its strength. 

The concluding chapter sketches the role of non-state leverage against annexation, and readers would benefit from a tighter playbook that spells out how specific instruments might change incentives. 

Targeted trade measures in settlement-linked sectors, professional association boycotts, procurement screening by municipalities and universities, and financial compliance pressure on entities that blur the line between civilian administration and military control are not abstract ideas. They are real levers with real constituencies.

Equally, the call to renew Palestinian representation would be even stronger if paired with a brief roadmap that lays out options for sequencing elections, diaspora participation and security sector reform trade-offs. 

None of this undercuts the book’s achievement. It simply points to how the argument can be operationalised.

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For an average reader who wants to understand the next five years rather than only relive the last five months, the payoff is immediate. 

You learn that annexation is not a talking point but a programme that lives in bylaws, line items and signatures. 

You learn why calls for the PA to do more are often a way of dodging the PA’s own crisis of legitimacy. 

You learn why Egypt has looked cautious, why Hezbollah has looked both confident and constrained, why Jordan sounds alarmed, why Tehran calibrates rather than lunges and why the fever dream of rapid Israeli-Saudi normalisation keeps failing its stress tests. 

You also learn that there is work worth doing even when there is no formal process to join, which is to say that politics does not begin or end at the negotiating table.

The verdict is simple. Read this book, and then press it into someone else’s hands. If you work in government, the scenario framework will help you make choices that are resilient to surprise.

If you write about the region, you will find lines and formulations that explain rather than inflame. 

If you're organised, you will find leverage points that are hard to dismiss. If you are a citizen who feels overwhelmed by the stream of horror and spin, you will find a way to think about unbearable news without turning away. 

The book refuses false balance, maps hard realities with usable language and refuses to waste the reader’s time.

In a debate that is too often theatrical, this is work that takes the reader seriously. That is reason enough to celebrate it.  

The Future of the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories after Gaza is an open-access book edited by Erwin van Veen. It is available as a hardback and free online at Springer.