Russia’s history with Chechnya has lessons for Gaza

The war between Israel and Hamas is approaching its fourth month. Israel is steadily making gains in Gaza and slowly taking over the area. 

By any account, the war is far from being over. Yet everyone — Washington, Jerusalem, Brussels, Cairo and Ryad — is talking about the “day after.” There is no patience for victory, but there is a lot of hunger for some political horizon to get back to everyone’s favorite business of “conflict management.” 

There have been many ideas floated around. They are mostly absurd, crazy or naive. They include reestablishing full long-term military and civilian control of Israel over Gaza, resettlement of some Gazans in other countries, bringing in the Palestinian Authority to control the enclave or importing a multinational force under the United Nations umbrella to control the strip. 

However, there is one proposal, old but long forgotten and currently supported by the Israel Defense Forces general staff; to set up local authority based on Gaza’s powerful clans that are free of Hamas’s influence. It is an idea that needs to be examined in detail as it may provide an answer to the difficult question of Gaza’s future.

It is not the first time this idea has made an appearance as a possible approach to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Before signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel’s governments, particularly the government headed by Yitzhak Shamir, considered local Palestinian leadership consisting of clans, city and town mayors and civil servants as the bulwark of the future Palestinian partner. The Madrid Conference in 1991 was the last serious attempt to defend and advance that approach. 

Unfortunately, due to many external and internal pressures, such as the American position in support of the PLO’s participation and dissenting opinions inside Israel, the decision was made to give the PLO the second ticket to life and bring it back from Tunis. The idea that without the PLO, already entering political oblivion with the end of the Cold War, there would be no possible agreement proved to be an irresistible solution to the difficult problem. A solution that was simple, elegant and wrong. 

With the arrival of the PLO and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the local element in the West Bank and Gaza was subsumed and crashed as an independent force.

Once the idea of supporting an organization with a history of die-hard terrorism and giving them weapons had been discredited as a quick peace-building exercise, everyone started looking into the original idea of employing “local talent” as a potential path to nation-building.

The interested parties are looking for the precedents of the approach being successfully applied. Afghanistan and Iraq are frequently mentioned as examples to the contrary. There are many reasons, too many to enumerate, why those attempts at nation-building by relying on the local power structures failed. 

However, those are not the only examples. There is another one, albeit coming from a very different direction. 

Russia, in the early 2000s, faced a situation not dissimilar to what Israel is experiencing with Gaza today. It is important to remember that the similarity does not extend to the nature and origins of the two conflicts in Chechnya and Gaza, as many flashpoints of the former were either instigated or fabricated by Moscow. And Moscow never stopped considering Chechnya as part of the territory of Russia. 

Yet the immediate problem — for Moscow then and Jerusalem now — to be solved is very similar; how to pacify an entity headed by a fanatical Islamic organization or regime. 

Moscow, after its first disastrous Chechen War, realized the force was not enough to achieve long-lasting stability. The missing component was a local leader, supported by local forces, aligned with Moscow and sharing the vision of future coexistence based on mutual interdependence. 

Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son, Ramzan, turned out to be exactly the force Moscow was looking for. 

The Kadyrovs with military and financial support from Russia managed to achieve what many thought was impossible — the end of the latest Kavkaz War. That huge achievement allowed Russia to outsource its military responsibility in the South Caucasus, concentrate on its economy and consolidate the regime of Vladimir Putin. 

That approach also created a real monster in the form of semi-independent Chechnya and President Kadyrov as a feudal lord on the regional scale. It created much sought after stability in the South Caucasus where the interests of Chechnya and Russia became tightly connected. That stability, as with everything in the modern Russian state, was predicated on the vertical power structure and personal relationship between Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov. As long as both of them were alive, the relationship would persist. 

That approach was exactly what Moscow was trying to achieve in its dealing with Chechnya. The same approach is unacceptable to Israel because it does not create a stable peaceful neighbor in the long term. It does not even attempt to create a civic modern society, and its only goal is to freeze Chechnya out of any modern development and channel the destructive tendencies in the direction away from Moscow until the moment Vladimir Putin is gone. One may argue Israel tried something similar with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and failed.

Israel will have to figure out how, so to speak, to take Kadyrov out of Chechnya. Is it possible in Gaza to achieve control based on local power centers with Israel’s backing without creating an alternative power structure only interested in its own self-preservation and no desire to develop Gaza into something beyond one’s fiefdom? The participants at the Madrid Conference had similar ideas but did not possess the experience of the last 30 years. 

The approach based on the power vested in local clans is an idea that must seriously be considered by policy planners. However, one must understand that Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya don’t provide the exact examples to follow or prevent but give a general canvas of reasonable options to be considered.

Lev Stesin is a founding member of San Francisco Voices for Israel.