Just remember: When spitballing, there are no dumb suggestions. But if you take them seriously, they turn into dumb ideas. Really, really dumb ideas, which sometimes make it into the papers.

Fortunately, the spitballing session under way reported today by the Wall Street Journal has little chance of being taken seriously by anyone. The latest idea to avoid a return to full-scale war in Gaza rests on the idea that Hamas will comply with orders to leave and take their families with them. That plan does have a historical analogue, but likely not one that will convince Hamas:

As Israeli forces prepare for a renewed offensive targeting Hamas’s top leaders in the Gaza Strip, Israeli military and political leaders are confronting the challenge of what to do about the thousands of fighters that represent the group’s power base.

To address that challenge, some Israeli and U.S. officials are discussing the idea of expelling thousands of lower-level militants from the Palestinian enclave as a way to shorten the war. The idea is reminiscent of the U.S.-brokered deal that allowed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and thousands of fighters to flee Beirut during Israel’s 1982 siege of the Lebanese capital. …

Separate U.S.-Israeli discussions about moving Hamas fighters and their families out of the Gaza Strip aim to provide some Hamas fighters with an exit strategy and make it easier to rebuild Gaza once the fighting ends.

As ideas go, this is … certainly one of them. Let’s start with the notion that Hamas will simply agree to leave Gaza and live somewhere else that doesn’t border Israel, never to return. That’s an absurd notion, given both Hamas’ charter and its sponsorship by Iran. Both Tehran and Hamas want a war of annihilation with Israel, and for that matter so does Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another of the combatants in this war. They couldn’t care less about the civilians in Gaza; in fact, the US and other countries keep making their human-shield strategies pay off with their pressure on Israel to fight less effectively against the terrorists in Gaza. This idea gets their incentive structure completely backwards, which is rather remarkable after 17 years of Hamas operations.

But even if they did agree to leave — where would they go? No other Arab country would even take Gazan refugees in general, let alone the terrorists who keep starting wars with Israel. And for good reasons, one of which is Beirut itself and the reason why Arafat and the PLO had to get ejected from Lebanon.  At various times in the 1970 and 1980s, neighboring countries have taken Palestinians into their countries, only to have them start civil wars and wreak havoc as Arafat and his team tried to seize power. Arafat touched off a bloody civil war in Lebanon that ran for nearly a decade after he got pushed out of Beirut. That came after Syria had to expel the Palestinians, where they had fled after King Hussein of Jordan chased them after Arafat and the PLO tried to assassinate him twice.

Don’t expect Egypt to take them in either, as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made plain since the war started. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mortal foe of al-Sisi, and Hamas wants to seize the Sinai and turn it into a power base to use against both Cairo and Israel. This is why Egypt partnered with Israel on a containment strategy for Gaza after Hamas got elected to power, and why they refuse to open their side of the border even now.

So where would Hamas go if they do take an offer of an “exit strategy”? Iran? Hah. They make good proxies for the mullahs, but there’s no way they let their vipers into their own tent. Besides, the Iranian people would revolt over that before Hamas got a chance to conduct a coup.

And again, all this rests on the idea that Hamas wants an “exit strategy” from the war they keep starting and restarting, and if one counts rocket and missile attacks, never stopped in the first place.  Does this sound like a plea for an “exit strategy”?

Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated.

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The only way to get Hamas out of Gaza is to let the Israelis finish the job. The US and other Western nations have tried all of the other shortcuts, and they simply won’t work. Just as with the Nazis, the only way to defeat them and to discredit their ideology and barbarism is through a defeat so crushing that it changes all of the incentives for the Palestinians. It is time to restore the pricing signals for starting wars rather than letting the Gazans off the hook for their murderous insanities. Wars truly end through unequivocal defeat at arms or by capitulation and surrender of the political order to the victor, especially when the losers started the war in the first place. If the Gazans want the war to end, they’d better start giving Option 2 serious consideration, and fast.

Aside from that, though, the spitballing does appear to have produced some workable ideas for a postwar order:

One proposal for how to govern a post-Hamas Gaza, developed by the Israeli military’s think tank and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would start with the creation of what it calls “Hamas-free safe zones” that would be ruled by a new Gaza authority backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Such an arrangement would require a flat-out occupation by someone to enforce that new order. In the short term, that would have to be the IDF, but that’s not sustainable in the long run. If the Saudis and the UAE were willing to commit troops to establish a new Gaza “authority,” that might lend it some credence with Gazan civilians. Egypt would be another obvious choice, as would Jordan, and perhaps a Sunni multilateral force comprising all four plus others in the Abraham Accords would be the best option. Without it, though, Hamas would easily return and seize power, or some other Iranian proxy would arise and start the cycle all over again.