American-Israeli Disputes Over Managing the Second Phase in Gaza: "A Clash of Visions or a Division of Roles?"

Introduction:

In the aftermath of the recent war on the Gaza Strip, the features of a new transitional phase have emerged, one that goes beyond merely halting military operations to rearranging the system of governance, administration, and control within the Strip — politically, security-wise, and economically. The matter is no longer confined to arrangements for calm, or the entry of aid and reconstruction; it has become tied to redefining who holds sovereign decision-making power, who controls the joints of daily life for the population, and who draws the shape of the political and security system that will govern Gaza in the post-war phase. In this context, the Strip has turned into an arena of strategic competition between international and regional actors, and a laboratory for divergent visions on managing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

And despite the public rhetoric suggesting full coordination between Benjamin Netanyahu's government and the Donald Trump administration, political and field indicators reveal deep, undeclared disagreements over the nature of the "second phase" and its ultimate goals. The divergence is not limited to implementation mechanisms or the timing of withdrawal and redeployment; it extends to the very core of the strategic vision for Gaza's future and its position in the conflict equation: will it remain a space subject to direct Israeli security dominance, or will it be re-engineered economically within regional and investment projects led by the United States, stripping it of its political dimension and turning it into a manageable developmental/humanitarian issue?

This paper proceeds from the hypothesis that what appears to be political coordination in fact conceals a struggle over control of the post-war trajectory, and over determining which party holds the reins of decision-making in the Strip — between an Israeli approach seeking to entrench sustainable security control and reproduce the occupation through lower-cost administrative tools, and an American approach inclined toward "monetizing" the crisis through economy, reconstruction, and investment, integrating Gaza into broader regional arrangements without granting Palestinians actual sovereignty. In both cases, the Strip is being treated as an administrative or security file, not as part of a cause of national liberation and the right to self-determination.

The problem of this paper stems from an attempt to unpack the nature of the existing disagreements between Benjamin Netanyahu's government and the Donald Trump administration regarding the arrangements for the second phase in the Gaza Strip, and whether these disagreements express a genuine strategic contradiction over the shape and future of the Strip, or whether they are merely a tactical difference in tools and a division of roles within a shared goal of managing and controlling Gaza without granting Palestinians actual political sovereignty. In this context, this paper raises fundamental questions about which party holds the actual decision-making power in formulating post-war arrangements and the nature of reconstruction projects, and whether these constitute a gateway to stability and development, or a mechanism for reproducing control and economic dependency.