Obliterating the oppressed Palestinians of Gaza to punish them for the sins of their Hamas masters may finally accomplish one of the chief goals of the hard right in Israel.
Since becoming Israel’s prime minister for a second time in 2009, Bibi Netanyahu has cynically acquiesced in Hamas’ brutish control of Gaza while keeping the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank off balance and ineffectual. As a result, he can always tell advocates of a two-state solution, “See, there are no good Palestinians for us to deal with.”
The carnage being wrought by Israeli bombs and bullets in Gaza is likely to leave whoever survives so radicalized and hate-filled that there will indeed be “no good Palestinians” for Israel to deal with.
Though coverage of the crisis has exhaustively chronicled human suffering, there has been little reporting on what to expect the day after the killing stops – how the participants are likely to reposition themselves to make peace, repair the damage and wrench every possible dividend from mixed results and acres of savaged flesh.
This bit of prose is my own feeble attempt to fill in some of the blank spaces and prompt speculation about how Israel will deal with its inevitable victory – as inevitable it surely is — when there are, by a ghastly new calculus, “no good Palestinians to deal with.”
Let it be stipulated – there can be no doubt about this — that the United States will playing a major role in the political cleanup, discreetly pulling strings in all the right places to help save Israel from itself as it emerges, tattered and enraged, from the worst humiliation and bloodshed its people have suffered on any single day since the founding of the country.
The Biden administration is already in an awkward lover’s dance with Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who despite his own blood-soaked hands is certain to play a key role in orchestrating an end to the current crisis. Writing in Time magazine, three Mideast experts point out that just weeks ago “the Saudis were already in advanced talks with the United States to secure several long wished-for priorities, ranging from civilian nuclear assistance to military, defense, and trade pacts.” They were also poised to normalize relations with Israel. So, the building blocks are in place for substantial US-Saudi cooperation in the eventual peacemaking process.
Let it also be stipulated that a less visible, more subtle reckoning will be visited in due course on Iran, the offstage inspiration and armorer to Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and so many of the other furies now raging through the Middle East.
Over the past thirty years there has seldom been consensus among Iran’s neighbors on how to contain the regime’s ambitions and interactions with Islamist extremists. In 2018 an independent think tank conducted a study of the topic, drawing on the experiences of the six members of Gulf Cooperation Council, a top-drawer debating club designed to promote dialogue among the participating heads of state.
The study found that among the GCC members, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain were the most hardnosed in their dealings with the Iranians, at times advocating for a united Arab front against them. The remaining constituents, Oman, and Kuwait and Qatar typically play a cagier hand, making nice with the Saudis diplomatically and publicly while secretly making money and sometimes political common cause with Iran.
The Abraham Accords negotiated by the Trump Administration in 2020 rejiggered these alignments by nudging by the UAE and Bahrain into breakthrough bilateral agreements and normalized relations with Iran’s archenemy — Israel.
The prospect of the Saudis following suit, very much alive before the crisis (thanks to US matchmaking), carries immense portent since any such breakthrough would confront Iran with a formidable de facto Arab-Israeli alliance.
Indeed, the very specter of such a bonding may have helped bring us to where we are today. Many experts believe it was this apparition that drove the Iranians to unleash the Hamas terror attacks into Israel, their objective being to sew such regional chaos that the Saudis would be obliged to rethink their plans.
In any case, whatever the trigger, we are now on the brink of a full-blown Mideast conflagration.
Several days ago, in a bid to contain it, Biden officials persuaded the Qataris to hold onto $6 billion in oil revenues belonging to the Iranians. The funds had been frozen by the U.S. long ago, entrusted to Doha for safekeeping and were to be returned to Teheran as part of a recent U.S.-Iran prisoner swap – a deal which the Qataris themselves helped broker.
U.S. intervention sank the payback.
Score one against the Iranians.
The role Qatar played in this little screw job highlights just how essential this tiny nation might be in any prospective solution to the current Mideast crisis.
Since Qatar has a relatively small Shia population, much smaller than the Shia communities of neighboring Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, its rulers feel less vulnerable to manipulation by the Shiite fanatics governing Iran — and freer to engage with them.
The two countries are bound economically since they share access to the largest gas field in the world. In 2010 the Qatari monarchy struck a security agreement with the mullahs in Teheran and has allowed them to use Qatari banks to transfer funds to their terrorist proxies, including Hamas. The Qatari regime has also have permitted Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political guru, to set up house in Doha. He resides there even now in moneyed splendor, safely scheming and conjuring the next mission for his operatives in Gaza and Lebanon.
The US is constrained in its ability to leverage the Qataris because of its need to maintain access to strategic military bases on lease from them. But there is no question that Qatar provides an invaluable window on both Iran and its vulnerabilities and on the murderers of innocent Israeli civilians. It is also a channel for discreet communication with the perpetrators of these atrocities.
And where there is a channel, however unsavory, there is the beginning of the promise of negotiations with those on the other end.
Count on a lot of backchannel peace-feeling, brokered and enabled by our friends in Doha.
But they aren’t the only game in town, of course. Think again of the Saudis.
More than that, check out a recent article by the always sagacious David Ignatius of The Washington Post.
By his account, sources in Riyadh are telling him that once the IDF has completed its blitz of Gaza, the Saudis might well revive efforts to strike a compact with Israel normalizing relations. You don’t have to be Pollyanna to imagine that this might yield some coordinated maneuvering to rein in Iran and to bring comfort to the dispossessed of Gaza and the West Bank.
One of Ignatius’s sources, a seasoned U.S. diplomat, says Prince MBS is already mulling the wisdom of convening a “peace summit,” backed by “other pro-western Arabs,” that would bring Netanyahu and Palestinian leaders together to “establish a new path to an Arab-Israeli accord.”
As a first or second step, the Arab conferees would presumably come up with an economic rescue package for Israel’s desperately stricken Palestinians. Whatever the wrapping paper, the handout would essentially be a bid to buy their acquiescence in a vastly improved status quo – a re-surfaced playing field minus Hamas but with lots of Arab oil money written into the deal, to be dispensed through a revitalized Palestinian Authority, the now enfeebled, corruption-ridden overlords of the West Bank.
Ignatius’ sources did not volunteer how this might resolve the Palestinians’ more existential concern, their yearning to throw off the Israeli yoke and build their own state. Alas, the Saudis and their regional soulmates, including those who signed on to the Abraham accords, seem to believe with their friend Jared Kushner that everybody has a price – everybody can be bought off — even a survivor of Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza, who has just seen his or her home and loved ones reduced to smudges in aerial recon photos.
In the end, the best Ignatius and his sources can offer in terms of a political answer to this crisis is a quote from Anthony Blinken. Speaking in Israel a few days ago the U.S. Secretary of State, whose lineage is Jewish, conjured a vision of what might be: “A region that comes together, integrated, normalized relations among its countries, people working in common purpose to common benefit. More peaceful, more stable.”
Forgive me for saying so but this seems a little short of actionable detail.
For that, give a look at a recent analysis by Anthony Cordesman of the Washington based think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I have never forgiven the now aging Cordesman for playing defense for Reaganites during the Iran Contra investigation back in the late 1980s. But age tends to season judgment, so in this case, I am willing to give Cordesman some leeway.
His essay, available online, is titled tantalizingly, “The War in Gaza and the Death of the Two-State Solution.”
He argues that sheer military might, now ratcheted to full potential, will allow the Israelis to crush Hamas and deflect or deter any threat from Hezbollah or any Arab challenger in the region.
Iran, in his view, “cannot project meaningful military power other than long-range missile strikes to challenge Israel” and will always be at risk of “far higher levels of Israeli retaliation.” And while Iran can saber-rattle against Arab Gulf states, that very threat, says Cordesman, will only cause them to up their game and redouble efforts to limit Iran’s support of Hamas and the Palestinians.
Once the IDF is done in Gaza, he continues, it will be able to impose whatever military structure there it wants and limit Palestinian mischief in the future to “street demonstrations and small acts of violence.”
But there is, in Cordesman’s view, a downside to this projected reordering of the security picture.
Because of “Israeli anger and the hardline nature of the Netanyahu-dominated joint government,” he believes that state policy, when it comes to peace-making, “will be to isolate or occupy Gaza, to exert even more economic and security pressures on Gaza’s population, introduce new security restrictions on Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, expand Israeli settlements and the Israeli presence in Jerusalem, and take only cosmetic diplomatic steps toward a true political… solution.”
That’s not encouraging. But it gets worse.
Cordesman also argues that all hope for a “two state solution,” the idea of turning parts of Gaza and the West Bank into a Palestinian state as a way of preserving peace – is already “so close to death that efforts to revive it are likely to be little more than acts of zombie diplomacy.”
As a result, Cordesman finds himself leaning towards “no-state solutions” — like the one offered by David Ignatius’ source, which would use Saudi money to buy the Palestinians into quiescence.
“Such efforts clearly will not shape a lasting peace,” Cordesman observes, “but can have a quick practical and political impact” by “bringing a more productive pause in the fighting.”
To his credit Cordesman is not prepared to let Netanyahu & Company off the hook. He wants the international community to pressure the unity government to halt expansion of Israeli settlements, ease civil “restrictions on the 1.9 million Palestinians in Israel proper and the two million in the West bank” and to curb “the economic isolation of Gaza’s two million residents.” He also considers it essential “to ensure that the present arrangements for Jordan’s role in support of the Al Aqsa Mosque continue, along with the restrictions on Israeli religious ceremonies on the Temple Mount.”
As I was making my way through these tough-love proposals, one notion high on my own priority list was conspicuous by its absence. A letter-writer for The New York Times, Bill Gottdenker of New Jersey, hit the nail on the head when offering his own proposals for resolving the current Mideast crisis.
He wrote on October 11: “Israelis must boot Mr. Netanyahu and his ilk and elect leaders who will offer Palestinians respect and some measure of hope.”
So simple, is this formula — and yet so seemingly outside the realm of possibility just now.
Even Mr. Gottdenker seems to realize this. He punctuates his plea for Netanyahu’s ouster by confessing, “I am not holding my breath.”