Bloomberg ran a story on February 18 suggesting geopolitical developments and generalized global “turmoil” (a euphemism for gratuitous bloodletting in eastern Europe and the Mideast) could upend the stock rally.

Of all the collateral damage from the wars, that’d surely be the most tragic were it to be borne out: A stock selloff. God willing it won’t happen. Allahu Akbar.

A picture at the top of Bloomberg’s article depicted desperate Gazans fleeing the dust-swept scene of an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis. A mother shielded her young son’s mouth and nose in a striking encapsulation of Gazans’ plight: Breathing is a risk too great to take. They later changed the banner image to a stock photo of the NYSE.

Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday indicated that negotiations aimed at freeing the remaining Israeli hostages and establishing the parameters for a prolonged ceasefire were dead. Dead, just like nearly 29,000 Gazans, an unknown number of hostages and Netanyahu’s political career. Thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv over the weekend to protest Netanyahu’s government.

The war’s an abysmal failure. Despite what it’s fair to describe as near unanimous international opposition to the plan, the IDF intends to go ahead with an offensive in Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million Gazans (more than half the population) are crowded. “Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: ‘Lose the war,'” Netanyahu said, striking a characteristically belligerent tone. “We will not bow to any pressure… because we are a nation of heroes.”

Joe Biden’s doing the best he can to manage an unworkable situation. Again and again, Biden says publicly that the US is committed to protecting civilians in Gaza, and The White House has expressed extreme consternation at the looming offensive in Rafah. And yet, the US intends to veto a new Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. The excuse: Ongoing peace talks. The same peace talks Netanyahu said were at a hopeless impasse. The logic goes as follows. Backing calls for a ceasefire is inconsistent with facilitating the peace negotiations. That may be true, but it doesn’t make it any less absurd.

The most vexing aspect of the debate around the war in Gaza is the extent to which the handful of people still defending Netanyahu’s “strategy” (note the scare quotes) for countering Hamas won’t be honest about their position. The saving grace is that the overwhelming majority of such people don’t truly understand the dynamics. So, it’s not actually dishonesty. It’s just ignorance.

The bar to have an informed opinion on this particular geopolitical quandary (i.e., how to think about Palestinian statehood in the context of Hamas) is impossibly high. If your resume doesn’t include a stint in Palestinian government (or at least a “stint” being a Palestinian), your opinion’s all but worthless. It’s important, I think, that we try to internalize that and humble ourselves accordingly. Let me put it like this: If your opinion about how a given conflict should be resolved has no odds of corresponding to any permutation of possible real-world outcomes, then of what use is your opinion?

Scarcely anyone who truly knows what they’re talking about takes seriously the notion that Hamas can be removed from the Palestinian political scene. The IDF can cite all the figures they want in terms of dead “terrorists” but when the dust clears, Hamas’ll still be there. I’ve learned over the past three or so months that even well-informed Westerners, a minority to be sure, are either unwilling or unable to internalize that admittedly disconcerting reality.

There’s a lot of truth to the standard talking point that Israel never had a “partner for peace” on the Palestinian side, but it’s also true that successive Israeli governments worked to subvert efforts to establish the trappings of a functional, peaceable state in the West Bank, while in some ways facilitating Hamas’s grip on Gaza. The strategy was straightforward. As long as a terrorist organization’s in charge of Gaza, Israel could argue that Palestinian statehood was a non-starter. After all, you can’t reasonably be expected to accept a state partially run by terrorists on your border. The irony was (and still is) too much to bear: The Israeli right deliberately coexisted in a so-called “unstable equilibrium” with a terrorist quasi-state in order to preserve the excuse for denying peaceful statehood to Palestinians. Who could’ve predicted such an “equilibrium” wasn’t ultimately sustainable?

Meanwhile, constant efforts to undermine notoriously fragile governing structures in the West Bank succeeded in creating the appearance of (indeed, the reality of) pervasive corruption and complete political ineptitude there. The Israeli right then turned around and cynically asked what kind of people would support an organization like Hamas. The implication was that Palestinians are backwards. Hopeless. Savages, even. At best, they’re incapable of self-governance. Just look at the West Bank! At worst, they’re terrorist sympathizers. Just look at Gaza!

It’s absurd when you have it spelled out for you, no? But a lot of you fell for that ruse over the years. Or at least judging by your comments on my editorials since October.

Anyway (and tragically), here we are. With 1,300 innocent Israelis butchered on October 7 and somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 Gazan civilians dead in the months since.

In discussions and debates about the “day after” in Gaza, I wonder why more attention isn’t given to various “worst”-case scenarios (the scare quotes are there because technically speaking, there can only be one “worst”).

Gaza’s a “moonscape” now, to use the popular (and apt) description. Making it livable again will require tens of billions in investment to rebuild residential housing blocs, reestablish public services and so on. I doubt that investment’s forthcoming. It certainly won’t be timely, and there’s a chicken-egg dilemma when it comes to reconstruction: There’s no government in Gaza. Who do you make the check out to? Who gets the suitcases full of Qatari cash?

Israel may be willing to occupy the enclave militarily, but it’s quite difficult to imagine they’ll be interested in playing an administrative role. Netanyahu’s ruled out the PLA and even if he hadn’t, it’s so discredited organizationally among Palestinians that its chances of success in governing Gaza are vanishingly small. That’s particularly true given that any attempt to establish working governance structures without Hamas representation would surely lead to a violent Hamas insurgency, which many Gazans would support.

The clear and present risk is that what’s left of Gaza’s largest cities become mini-Mogadishus where Hamas exercises de facto control through black markets and mafia-style protection rackets. In other words, a severely degraded version of pre-war Gaza that’d count as one of the most dangerous places on Earth. That situation could (and probably would) persist indefinitely given that the sense of urgency at the international level for finding a better way would fade over time as new crises take precedence. Gaza would be left for dead and far from being safer, Israelis would be living next to a tiny failed state where anything goes, anytime.

The other risk — the left-most tail risk, if you will — is a total collapse, wherein Israel actually does succeed in eliminating Hamas as an organization with the capacity to act collectively in Gaza, but fails to prevent a post-war spiral into localized anarchy. While acknowledging that “intact” is a cruelly relative term for a desolate topography where more than 50% of the structures are either destroyed or damaged, Gaza’s cities and refugee camps are “intact” in that they do still exist. So anarchy, in a strict, Hobbesian sense, seems unlikely. Or at least less likely than the failed state scenario sketched above. But anarchy’s possible. And depending on how Israel (and anyone who participates) enforces the blockade post-war, that could look like Syria east of the Damascus corridor during the darkest days of the country’s civil war: A free-for-all where a hodgepodge of Sunni extremist groups compete for God’s glory. Geography might save Gaza from that outcome. It’s just not very big, and even in a severely degraded state, Hamas and PIJ would stamp out competition fairly quickly.

The least likely scenario is some manner of peaceful reconstruction funded by an international consortium of investors and presided over by a UN which, thanks to the US veto, can’t even decide whether the shooting should stop, let alone when. It doesn’t help that Israel was at least partially right about the UNRWA. No Israeli government will ever trust that organization again, and it’s the only organization (besides Hamas) with any real claim to managerial competence in the strip (and I’m using “competence” very loosely there).

Supporters of the Israeli invasion invariably ask this question of critics: “What was Israel supposed to do in light of the hideous depravity on display during the October 7 attacks?” The wholly unsatisfying answer more than four months later is: “Something else.” Or at least if the goal was actually to make Israel safer over the long-term. If, as seems more likely, the goal was simply to “get it back in blood,” so to speak, then mission accomplished I suppose. Now what?