Author’s note:
Trying to analyze the Gaza crisis as it has evolved over the past two months is enough to give anybody a bad case of whiplash.
Every time mediation efforts or battlefield developments seem to be slipping into discernible trend lines, a surprise intrudes, often ghastly and soul-shocking, and jerks events and predictions in radically new directions.
Six things, however, can be said with some certainty at this juncture, on the eve of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s much anticipated speech to the U.S. Congress on July 24.
We are on the cusp of a potentially game-changing ceasefire/hostage agreement.
Netanyahu remains addicted to playing spoiler, for reasons ranging from ego to the risk of criminal persecution and a terrible political reckoning if and when the war ends.
Internal divisions within his own right-wing coalition, over negotiating terms, the West Bank, Palestinian statehood and granular internal issues like the drafting of ultra-orthodox Jews, limit his maneuver room and threaten his destruction if he does not cleave to the most retrograde views,
Every other moment the now enfeebled Biden administration tacks imaginatively if sometimes disingenuously to try to keep a ceasefire and hostage deal within glimpsing distance at the end of the tunnel.
An entirely new variable, conducive to a settlement (and possible regime change in Israel), has recently entered the picture. Israeli military commanders, parting company with Bibi, have determined that Hamas cannot be eliminated as a threat, thus undercutting his oft-repeated rationale for continuing the war in the name of total victory.
And finally, as the only real constant, innocent civilians in Gaza keep dying at a rate that rends the soul and forever mortgages Israel’s international standing.
As we learned in Vietnam you can never prevail if the collective conscience turns against you.
A localized pause:
Israel’s decision a month ago to suspend military operations for eleven hours each day along a strategic trucking route in southern Gaza was not only a commendable moral gesture but a canny political one.
The road stretches seven and a half miles from the Kerem Shalom crossing on Israel’s border and connects to a highway heading north into central Gaza.
Opening it up to traffic under improved security conditions could advance one of the major objectives of the still-tenuous mediation talks, the surging of humanitarian aid to famine-wracked Gaza.
It could help burnish Israel’s tattered global image and cheer Joe Biden and other friends of the Jewish state who worry that the humanitarian fallout from its Gaza campaign is exacting a political and moral toll that can never be re-balanced in the global square.
The pauses were initiated on June 16 and will continue until further notice, according to IDF advisories. If they prove sustainable, localized ceasefires could begin popping up all over Gaza.
Sadly, however, the existing test case has, so far, yielded only mixed results. Trucks remain stacked up at the Kerem Shalom crossing and just beyond it, and security along the chosen route is catch-as-catch-can. International aid organizations are howling for relief.
Nor has it helped that Prime Minister Netanyahu reacted to the pauses as if the IDF had slapped him in the face and implemented them on its own. “We have a country with an army, not an army with a country,” he fumed publicly
Experienced Bibi-watchers saw this as pure theater, his way of deflecting responsibility for a decision he doesn’t want to have to defend to his uncompromising right-wing supporters.
But if that’s his objective, it’s an uphill climb, since there is ample evidence that a similar localized-ceasefires concept figures importantly in a new if evolving strategic design approved by the Israeli government.
Even the current pauses seem to have been vetted across the board. Israeli officials reportedly discussed them with UN agencies before initiating them and even reached out to UNRWA, the UN entity specifically charged with assisting Palestinians.
Earlier this year UNRWA lost most of its international funding after Israel accused a handful of its staffers of colluding with Hamas. Making nice with UNRWA would therefore require lots of sign-offs at the highest levels of the Israeli government.
The very timing of the pauses likewise argued for top-tier authorship. The decision kicked in at a moment when no one in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv would have cut any slack for the enemy without a full government thumbs-up. During the previous week Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, had unleashed dozens of missiles towards northern Israel, ratcheting up tensions to the break point, and, in southern Gaza, eight Israeli soldiers had died in a rigged bomb explosion, the deadliest incident for the army since January.
Gamechanger
If you are looking for a single event or circumstance that set Bibi & Company on their current path, I can think of no better cue sheets than a State Department bulletin issued May 20 and a Wall Street Journal report published on June 2.
Based on the substance of these sources and the inferences to be drawn from them (and subsequent events), here’s what we can deduce:
During the third week of May Biden’s National Security adviser Jake Sullivan visited Israel and helped nail down a revamped operational plan for the Rafah campaign that changed everything.
At Sullivan’s prodding – and under threat of a slowdown in certain U.S. weapons deliveries — Netanyahu and his war cabinet agreed to shelve plans for a two-front assault on Gaza’s southernmost city. They decided instead to concentrate on select targets and to set their immediate sites on securing the Philadelphi Corridor, a smugglers’ paradise on Gaza’s southern border, which has long been used to funnel weapons to Hamas.
They also consented to relocate refugees massed in Rafah to nearby safe zones and to consider, if not automatically endorse, what would become Biden existing peace proposal.
On May 27, just a week after the Sullivan visit, the war cabinet duly approved the President’s four-page draft, according a later exclusive aired by Israel’s Channel 12.
On May 29 the IDF announced its successful occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor.
Then two days later Biden unveiled an outline of the peace draft to the public and famously claimed that it had Israel’s endorsement.
That claim and just about everything else about the draft remains hotly debated. But more than 300,000 refugees were shifted out of Rafah and into marginally safe emergency camps, with the U.S. providing both food and tenting equipment.
And it would appear from available evidence that the Israelis are now winding down the Rafah operation, or at least tightening its objectives, to capitalize on what they have accomplished so far. Not only have they secured the Philadelphi corridor as planned; they have also seized control of the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt and have installed an airtight inspection system at the Kerem Shalom gateway.
If you like analogies, imagine that U.S. interdiction efforts along the Ho Chi Minh trail system in Laos had effectively severed supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam. That, in effect, is where the Rafah campaign is today. The Israelis are positioned to deprive arms and war materiel to Hamas units still hanging on in southern Gaza – and to free up forces to re-pacify previously secured areas in the north where Hamas regrowth is apparent.
In debuting the current peace plan (May 31), Biden argued that Hamas had been significantly degraded, even if U.S. intelligence findings were more ambiguous.
In policy terms that meant the Netanyahu government could comfortably pursue the more selective, less destructive tactics long favored by Biden officials and could risk being generous in its civilian aid policies (ergo, the pause decision) and possibly in its approach to a mediated peace.
Possibly.
There were signs, to be sure, that the IDF intended to have another go at Khan Younis, where Hamas’s evil genius, Yahya Sinwar appeared to be ensconced underground. But, to judge from troop deployments and controlled leaks, the light at the end of tunnel was winking ever brighter.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Anthony Blinken continued to tool around the mid-east, trying to rally support for the day-after plan that he and other Biden officials believed was still missing from Israel’s strategic playbook.
In Biden’s ideal iteration, the plan – which the administration first broached just before October 7 — would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and make their bonding the centerpiece of a new regional security alliance, underwritten by the U.S., and sufficiently robust to contain Iran and its proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
The biggest “known unknown” boils down to this: whether the extant ceasefire proposal – the essential predicate to everything else — can overcome the chronic suicidal paranoia that afflicts both Gaza combatants.
It is this question that looms large in the following ruminations.
Making peace now – but how?
As of June, the first step in the right direction was to “get a little pregnant,” to consummate a scripted or de facto temporary ceasefire that just might, with the proper care, morph into a permanent one along the lines Biden proposes.
But how to accomplish that?
As is true of any marriage, arranged or consensual, trust was the sina qua, non, but in this case, trust was a stranger to just everybody who counted.
To make things worse, the last time mediators had tried to build trust between the two sides they had tried too hard and failed miserably, leaving still corrosive ill feelings strewn around.
The story of what happened – actually, there are two stories — should erase any complacency you may have about the chances for good-faith bonding this time round.
Case Number 1: The errant emissary:
Back in early May during mediation efforts keyed to a previous draft agreement, this one authored by Qatar and Egypt, there was a snake in the diplomatic woodpile.
Call it “noble intent gone awry.”
It expressed itself through the covert manipulation of dueling drafts as they flew back and forth between Hamas and Israel and among key mediators. During these exchanges, little amendments, inserted into each new update by hidden hands, wound up discrediting the entire process, soiled Biden’s credibility as an honest broker, and likely quickened Israel’s decision to assault Rafah.
The details would emerge in a CNN report published shortly after the key events went down.
In early May, according to CNN, an Egyptian intelligence operative serving as a mediator, took it on himself to alter the terms of a draft that had just been approved by Israel and was on its way to Hamas for consideration.
The meddler, Abdel Khalek, a senior deputy to the Egypt’s’ intelligence chief, allegedly tinkered with certain passages to make them more Hamas-friendly.
“More of Hamas’ demands were inserted into the original framework than Israel had tacitly agreed to in order to secure Hamas’ approval,” a source told CNN. “But the other mediators were not informed; nor, critically, were the Israelis.”
As a result, the draft, which Hamas publicly endorsed on May 6, was not what the Qataris, the Americans or the Israelis believed had been passed along.
The changes, CNN reported, “led to a wave of anger and recrimination among officials from the US, Qatar and Israel, and left ceasefire talks at an impasse.”
After learning of the amendments, the chief U.S. negotiator, CIA Director William Burns, “almost blew a gasket,” according to one CNN source.
When Netanyahu was asked about the bastardized passages, which seemingly left Hamas free to attack Israel again, he remarked sourly, “I hope Egypt understands that we can’t agree to something like that.”
Case Number 2: guileful guarantors:
Even as mediator Khalek was plying his editorial mischief, anonymous leakers spread word in Arab and Israeli media that the U.S. had reached secret understandings with Hamas behind Netanyahu’s back to smooth the way to a deal.
According to these sources, nameless American mediators were even then, in early May, baiting Hamas on the QT, offering to guarantee, on behalf of the Biden administration, an enduring ceasefire in Gaza once both sides implemented the first phase of the Qatari-Egyptian proposal. The same middlemen were also (allegedly) ready to have the U.S. underwrite and ensure a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza after the main elements of the deal were in effect.
Here’s how The Times of Israel reconstructed the leaks in a story posted, Saturday, May 4, before the unfolding negotiations petered out:
“With Arab and American mediators pressing intensely for a temporary ceasefire, several reports [posted on ] Saturday said Hamas was prepared to accept the latest proposal, in light of assurances from the United States that there will be a ‘sustainable cessation’ of the war….
“Citing unidentified sources, the Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper said American mediators had promised that Israel would completely withdraw from Gaza under the third and final phase, and the war would effectively end.
“An unnamed Hamas source gave a similar statement to Israel’s Channel 12 news.”
On May 5, Hamas put a pin in all this off-the-books bartering by lobbing rockets at the Kerem Shalom crossing, killing four Israeli soldiers.
Netanyahu instantly shut down the crossing to all aid traffic. For good measure, he delivered a fiery speech at a Holocaust remembrance event, defending Israel’s right to self-defense. Though much of the speech was in Hebrew and clearly directed at fellow Israelis, one passage, in English, sounded like a declaration of independence from the United States.
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” Netanyahu thundered. “But we know we are not alone because countless decent people around the world support our just cause. And I say to you, we will defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now!”
As if to poke a finger in Big Brother’s eye, the IDF sent warplanes to pound select targets in Rafah and drop leaflets advising 110,000 civilians to evacuate to designated humanitarian zones. It was the start of the long-debated Rafah blitz. An infuriated Biden phoned Netanyahu and — according to a White House statement — “reiterated his clear position on Rafah,” a reference to his oft-stated opposition to any Israeli attack on the city without provision for civilian safety.
Amidst all this came a surprise message from Hamas endorsing ceasefire terms which, unbeknownst to the U.S. or Israel, had secretly been buffed by Egypt’s middleman, Khalek. Not surprisingly Netanyahu complained that the new Hamas offering fell short of Israeli demands.
Over the next several hours, Hamas leakers resurrected the guarantees story in hopes of creating an aura of U.S. support for the updated ceasefire terms they were flogging.
“Hamas sources have received assurances from the U.S. and Qatar, as well as Egypt, that Israel will not resume the war after the three-stage deal is implemented,” The Times of Israel reported, paraphrasing a leak Hamas had just dropped on the liberal Israeli journal, Haaretz.
Commenting to Al Jazeera, Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya insisted Israel would be required to “temporarily stop military operations” during Phase I of the pending draft agreement and to embrace “a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations” in the next phase.
He cited Egypt as “the guarantor of the deal,” but claimed that “mediators” had assured Hamas that President Biden was committed to implementing it.
In Jerusalem anxieties spiked, and as Axios reported on May 6, “Israeli officials claim the Biden administration knew about the latest hostage and ceasefire deal-proposal Egypt and Qatar had negotiated with Hamas but didn’t brief Israel.”
Two of Axios’ sources described Israeli leaders as being “deeply suspicious that the Biden administration gave guarantees to Hamas about its key demand [namely] that a hostage deal will lead to the end of the war.”
Another source, whom Axios described as a “senior Israeli official” (possibly Netanyahu himself) reportedly told the outlet, “We think the Americans conveyed the message to Hamas that it [the U.S.] will be okay when it comes to ending the war [on such terms].”
Given all this, it is no wonder that Biden, before unveiling the latest truce blueprint, made sure Bibi had received a complete advance copy and had signed off on it. That way, there could be no misunderstanding about what the U.S. was proposing or sharing with Hamas, and no chance for any creative middlemen to muddy the waters.
The Biden template:
You may not realize this, but only a few insiders and mediators know the precise terms, the actual language, of the deal Biden introduced on May 31 and described as Israeli-approved.
The actual four-page draft proposal – if it is still just four-pages — is being closely held so that particulars can be debated without anyone being committed to anything definitively before a workable consensus is reached.
In his initial remarks about the draft, Biden outlined its contours but glossed over particulars. A week later The Wall Street Journal claimed to have reviewed a copy but did not publish it. On June 10 the UN Security Council passed a US-backed resolution endorsing the proposal but added only marginally to what was publicly known about it.
The same day, however, Israel’s Channel 12 aired extensive details of what purported to be a version of the text that Israel had approved on May 27 just before Biden’s own presentation. As described by the broadcaster, it contained 18 separate clauses and bore the ponderous title, “General Principles for an agreement between the Israeli side and the Palestinian side in Gaza on the exchange of hostages and prisoners and restoring a sustainable calm.”
A follow up article in The Times of Israel described the Channel 12 readout as “the most detailed picture to date of the contents of Israel’s proposals,” but noted that the broadcaster had offered no sourcing information and only random quotes.
Thus, even now – even as Biden officials and Netanyahu’s right wing confederates finger Hamas for stonewalling the deal, there are questions about who precisely is stonewalling what.
Drawing from the President’s speech, the U.N. Resolution, the Channel 12 report and various published sources, here’s what can be said with some certainty about the envisioned three-phase “Biden-cum-Israeli-cum-UN-plan.”
Phase 1 would involve a six-week “temporary” cease-fire in Gaza, the release of some hostages – women, older abductees and wounded ones — and the freeing of a larger number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. (The swap ratio of hostages to prisoners remains under discussion.)
Phase 1 would also see an Israeli troop withdrawal from populated areas of Gaza, vastly increased humanitarian aid deliveries, and relocation of displaced civilians to their homes.
(Remember that last provision. It has proved a bellwether of Israel’s commitment to the deal.)
In addition, through indirect talks, Hamas and Israel would begin negotiating other parts of the bargain, transitional elements, to be completed in Phase 2 if necessary. According to Channel 12, these elements would include a second hostage release, involving of IDF soldiers and other male abductees, and a permanent ceasefire to replace the initial temporary one.
Phase 2, as conceived, would last 45 days, but could bloat well beyond this if the two sides deadlock on key issues.
If a permanent ceasefire is successfully negotiated in Phase 1, the two sides would, in Phase 2, “announce restoration of a sustainable calm (cessation of military hostilities permanently).” According to Channel 12, they would then move on to the second hostage/prisoner exchange.
But if ceasefire discussions remain incomplete in Phase 1, they would spill over into Phase 2, and “last for as long as both parties abide by their commitments,” with the scheduled second hostage release presumably being held in abeyance until a permanent peace is in effect.
According to Channel 12: “all procedures in [Phase 1]…including the temporary cessation of military operations by both sides… will continue in Phase 2 as long as the negotiations… are ongoing.”
(This “guarantors” provision apparently was designed to avert misunderstandings like those that bedeviled the Qatari-Egyptian draft in May.)
Should a permanent ceasefire take hold in Phase 2, and once remaining live hostages are returned, the IDF would, as a capper, fully withdraw from Gaza.
In Phase 3, as summarized in the U.N. Security Council Resolution, “a major multi-year reconstruction plan for Gaza would begin and the remains of any deceased hostages still in the Strip would be returned to Israel.”
As we all know, Biden repeatedly represented the tabled proposal as a done deal for Israel and reflective of what Hamas had sought in the past.
Both characterizations had the ring of truth. But both were overstatements, since the most desirable and difficult provisions of the draft, though threaded through it, were so tightly interwoven — and the priorities of the two warring parties so diametrically opposed — that it was difficult to see how any progress could be made beyond Phase 1.
“The transition from the first to the second phase appears to be a sticking point,” the Associated Pressobserved in a masterpiece of understatement. “Hamas wants assurances that Israel will not resume the war, and Israel wants to ensure that protracted negotiations over the second phase do not prolong the cease-fire indefinitely while leaving hostages in captivity.”
A larger hang-up was that Hamas wanted to advance Biden’s ultimate objective, a permanent ceasefire, to Phase 1, while Netanyahu objected to any such commitment at any time until he had obliterated Hamas.
Needless to say, these conflicting agendas helped explain much of the hemming, hawing and finger-pointing in subsequent weeks.
But there was also something else, another source of dissension.
On June 9, Israeli commandoes valiantly rescued four hostages from Hamas hideaways in central Gaza, while leaving 274 civilians dead as collateral damage and nearly triple the number wounded. Claiming that many of these casualties were Hamas fighters (undoubtedly some were), Bibi’s right-wing supporters hailed the operation as proof that war, not diplomacy, was the key to saving the abductees.
But anyone with half a memory could dispute that. Over the past nine months the IDF has recovered only three other live hostages (plus 19 dead ones) and accidentally killed three others (as far as we know). By contrast the weeklong negotiated ceasefire in November yielded as many as 105 hostages.
IDF commanders, inured to the realities of war, drew the proper conclusion. “What will bring most of the hostages back home alive is a deal,” IDF spokesman, Rear Adm. Hagari asserted right after the rescue operation.
Waxing wise about the Biden deal, one American analyst described it as a Rubic’s cube with ill-fitting parts, more bait than bargain-maker, a way of luring the two side sides into small accommodations that just might become habit-forming if we’re lucky.
Secretary of State Blinken seemed to be thinking this way when he remarked recently that an initial temporary cease-fire would have plenty to recommend it all by itself.
“The cease-fire that would take place immediately would remain in place, which is manifestly good for everyone,” he said.
Similarly, on June 2, David Horovitz speculated in The Times of Israel that Biden didn’t really expect the existing proposal to be enacted as written and would happily settle for implementation of its “more immediate goals with only a vaguer hope of long-term fateful change” – to wit: a modest upfront hostage release, an open ended but ill-defined truce subject to endless re-negotiation, disengagement of some IDF forces, a lessening of tensions along Israel’s northern border, and increased aid deliveries to Gaza.
“The Israel-Hamas conflict is a zero-sum game,” Horovitz wrote. “Israel wants to destroy Hamas; Hamas wants to survive and get back to destroying Israel. Neither side will agree to terms that definitively thwart its core goals.
“By extension, therefore, complete clarity from Biden would have doomed the deal he is more realistically trying to achieve.”
Point well taken.
But, as we have seen, the lack of complete clarity is what sank negotiations last time around.
Shuffling the deck:
When centrist Benny Gantz resigned from the war cabinet on June 9, ten days before the “pause” announcement, he in effect gave Israelis permission to rethink their priorities in terms favorable to Biden’s grand design.
A former defense minister and long-time rival of Bibi’s, Gantz had dumped an ultimatum on him the previous month, threatening to resign in six weeks’ time unless steps were taken to relieve the government’s deepening paralysis with respect to Gaza.
The plan he urged on Netanyahu would 1) eliminate Hamas, 2) bring the hostages home, 3) establish an alternative government in Gaza, 4) relocate Israelis displaced from the shell-pocked area just south of the Lebanese border, 5) ensure normalization with Saudi Arabia and 6) widen military service to all Israelis.
Apart from the final provision, it was a variation on the Biden-endorsed blueprint.
Six weeks later, hours after the successful hostage rescue, Gantz made good on his threat and left the government.
In his parting remarks he accused the Prime Minister of delaying “fateful strategic decisions” because of “political considerations.” This, he maintained, “prevents us from moving forward to a real victory.”
His fellow centrist, Gadi Eisenkot, who had served as a non-voting observer in the war cabinet, resigned in protest as well.
Their departures didn’t – and won’t collapse the government, since Netanyahu and his coalition partners still have 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
But the cabinet shakeup, coming on top of the hostage rescue, encouraged families of the abductees to press harder for an immediate ceasefire to free their loved ones.
Bibi’s ultra conservative backers reacted with equal vehemence, hardening demands for total victory and threatening once again to desert the Prime Minister if he denied them, though to some extent this was pure bluff since they knew that, as nomads in the Knesset, they would have little political power at all.
Meanwhile an ancient political dispute suddenly boiled over, the one Gantz had stoked.
It had to do with whether orthodox jews should be exempt from military service.
The exemptions had long been official policy, in part because conservatives loved them and, more recently, because Bibi, who needed conservative support, had avoided addressing the issue legislatively or administratively in any definitive fashion lest he rile one interested party or another, including Israel’s Supreme Court.
For the Court the key question was one of equity: Why should secular Jews in an egalitarian society face conscription and possible death in combat, while the Haredim, as the religious students are called, get a pass?
The Gaza war had deepened the controversy, and finally in March the Court had ordered the state to stop funding religious schooling for the Haredim. That in a wink made them imminently draftable. (In late June Court would weigh in again, ruling there was no legal reason to keep the exemption in place.)
As the hapless students took to the streets in protest, Bibi’s right-wing partners raced to the rescue, making their own loyalty to him contingent on his solving this problem to their satisfaction, as if he didn’t have enough to contend with.
Once Gantz quit the cabinet, calling, as we have noted, for an equitable conscription policy, Bibi found himself on thin ice indeed. Instant political polling showed him suddenly trailing his old rival Gantz by six points in any direct matchup.
For Bibi, holding onto the PM’s job wasn’t simply an ego trip. It was his stay-out-of-jail card, the only way he could avoid having to answer long-standing corruption charges that could put him behind bars.
Part and parcel of this equation was the war-or-peace issue itself – whether to keep Gaza in full flame or opt for a diplomatic ending. According to a Haaretz exclusive, Netanyahu had conferred secretly with key advisers right after October 7 and had “told them that his objective was to wage a prolonged war in order to delay an investigation into his role in the military disaster and ensure the survival of his government.”
The IDF goes rogue, and gets reasonable:
By June 17, Bibi had decided not to replace Gantz with any of the right wingers vying for his seat in the war cabinet. Each front-runner (e.g. the rabidly hawkish National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir) carried political baggage inimical to Biden and a lot of Israelis. So rather than add to his own troubles Bibi simply shuttered the three-man mini-cabinet and left its other member, Yoav Gallant, to make the most of his prerogatives as Defense Minister and a ranking member of the regular cabinet.
Key decision-making would now be left to that body and, alternately to an informal group of advisers including Ron Dermer.
The sudden fluidity of the political situation – plus the growing threat of second war across the border in Lebanon — seemed to clarify thinking at the highest level of the IDF command. Normally reticent members of the officer corps suddenly began speaking truth to power — and the public — with uncommon candor.
IDF spokesperson, Rear Admiral Hagari had committed what amounted political heresy when, after the recent hostage rescue, he’d acknowledged quite openly that diplomacy, not blunt force, was the best way of freeing the remaining abductees. Ten days later, June 19, he again offended accepted wisdom by emphatically ruling out total victory over Hamas.
“Hamas is an idea,” he told startled viewers of Israel’s Channel 12. Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong… The political echelon needs to find an alternative — or it [the Hamas threat] will remain.”
He wasn’t a lone voice. In a report posted on July 2, The New York Times drew on leaks from “six current and former Israeli security officials” to provide stunning insight into newly revisionist perspectives within the Israeli high command.
The Times told its readers:
“Israel’s top generals want to begin a cease-fire in Gaza even if it keeps Hamas in power for the time being… [They] think that a truce would be the best way of freeing the roughly 120 Israelis still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza… [They] also think their forces need time to recuperate in case a land war breaks out against Hezbollah.. [and that a] truce with Hamas could also make it easier to reach a deal with Hezbollah.”
The Times acknowledged that the IDF’s leadership cadre, headed by Lt. General Herzi Halevi, remained publicly supportive of established policy.
But the six officials who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity argued persuasively that the Prime Minister’s decision to resist all day-after planning had created conditions that effectively redefined the military’s mission.
“That decision,” the Times reported, “has essentially created a power vacuum in the enclave that has forced the military to go back and fight in parts of Gaza it had already cleared of Hamas fighters.”
One source, Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser until early last year, had allowed the Times to quote him by name.
“The military is in full support of a hostage deal and a cease-fire,” he told the Times, based on his own continuing conversations with the IDF command staff.
“They believe that they can always go back and engage Hamas militarily in the future. They understand that a pause in Gaza makes de-escalation more likely in Lebanon….[and] gives us more time to prepare in case a bigger war does break out with Hezbollah.”
Gallant goes to Washington:
On June 23, shortly after arriving in Washington for consultations, Defense Minister Gallant gave the media a glimpse of the army’s evolving policies. He told reporters the IDF was shifting to Stage 3 of a long-standing battle plan for Gaza that would build on the initial intense artillery and air assaults and the follow-up concentrated ground attacks. The army would now, he said, deliver a “a new security reality for the citizens of Israel,” wherein counterinsurgency and special operations would (presumably) reduce the enemy to a minor inconvenience.
In a press conference in Tel Aviv Netanyahu tried to step on Gallant’s message. While ruling out a definitive end to the Gaza campaign, he assured the press that its “intense” opening phase would end “very soon.” He conceded this would free up IDF units to confront Hezbollah, but he was careful, by omission, to leave room for mediation on that front.
Turning to Biden’s ceasefire proposal, he came across like a finicky diner in a Chinese restaurant, picking and choosing from separate columns of the menu. He endorsed the partial hostage release outlined in Biden’s Phase 1, rejected the permanent ceasefire and expansive hostage deal set for Phase 2, welcomed the eventual return of dead hostages scheduled for Phase 3, but vetoed the capper, a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza.
Addressing the widely criticized deficit in his own planning, he tried to give a sense of how Gaza might be administered once hostilities subside. But what he offered was simply a rehash of a widely panned prior blueprint, which imagined a group of miraculously non-aligned Palestinians being recruited to manage postwar Gaza under Israeli supervision – without any help from the Palestinian Authority.
In reporting his remarks, The Wall Street Journal drew on other sources to fill in some of the blanks. By the Journal’s account, the IDF would continue to hold territory along the fringes of Gaza, including the Philadelphi corridor on the southern border. It would also maintain a presence in the so-called Netzarim corridor, a newly improved concourse that runs across the center of the Strip.
In theory Israeli forces, operating from these locations, could react quickly to provocations anywhere in the enclave and keep Hamas cells from being reinforced or resupplied.
The Netzarim corridor would also allow the IDF to police the flow (and potential lethality) of Gazans relocating from south to north.
The Journal’s reporting on this point provided early warning that Bibi’s support for the Biden ceasefire formula, which provided for free civilian movement within the enclave, was destructively conditional.
If your head is spinning from all these jumbled revelations, the confusion is warranted. Bibi’s TV interview was all over the place and devoid of the kind of probing follow up questions that might have clarified things. It was the first sustained sit-down he had given to Israeli newsmen since Oct 7, his avoidance reflex growing out of an apparent aversion to being questioned about the worst security breakdown in Israel’s history.
He did have more to say – this time, about the Americans. It was not charitable. During a cabinet session the same day, he repeated a recent gratuitous slur, accusing the Biden administration of stinting on arms deliveries to the IDF.
Vexed and perplexed, Biden officials insisted publicly and privately that the arms flow continued as planned, except for a paused shipment of 2,000 pounds bombs that the President didn’t want to be used in refugee-packed Rafah. Though that shipment remained on hold, the IDF’s need for it had abated with the just announced shift in strategy.
Bibi never explained the reasons for his complaint or what weapons he thought were being withheld.
A U.S. source told CBS News that IDF topsiders might be miffed that U.S. weapons were no longer being delivered at an emergency pace, even though no emergency exists.
An Israeli leaker, speaking on background to the Associated Press speculated that Bibi was just trying to create a pretext for claiming personal credit for any favors that Gallant might extract from the Americans. A number of Democrats argued that the wily Prime Minister was just up to his old thumb-on-the scales partisanship, trying to give Trump and the Republicans talking points to use against Biden.
New consensus, sort of:
What transpired behind closed doors during Gallant’s all-important visit to Washington remained buried under carefully layered diplomatic doublespeak.
The best insights were to be garnered from a Washington Post column published on June 26 by the venerable David Ignatius. He had long been a preferred if discerning beneficiary of deeply informed insider leaks about the Gaza crisis.
By his account a “senior administration official,” evidently in conversations with him, had praised the Defense Minister’s “professional approach to all issues of the security partnership between Israel and the United States.” The arms control controversy reportedly had been resolved, with the U.S. confirming delivery of all needed weapons – apart from the 2,000-pound bombs.
Most critically, according to Ignatius, Gallant and his interlocutors had worked out a “transition plan” for postwar Gaza, to be overseen by U.S. and Arab partners, which would proceed even without agreement on the Biden-Israeli peace proposal.
Under its provisions a Palestinian force would gradually assume responsibility for local security, its training to be provided by an existing U.S.-Israeli assistance program for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Conceptually this arrangement would provide a backdoor way for the PA to become involved in the transition plan.
Bearing in on specifics, Gallant had proposed creating secure “bubbles” in northern Gaza and gradually expanding them to the rest of the Strip. He seemed to be suggesting a variation on the “pause” initiative being tested along the short roadway outside Rafah.
He had also endorsed a U.S. diplomatic initiative to damp down tensions between Israel and Lebanon. A truce deal, already crafted by the U.S., would require Hezbollah forces to pull back from the Israeli-Lebanon border while obliging Israel to make reciprocal border adjustments.
It would go into effect once there is a Gaza ceasefire.
In offering support for this initiative and all others discussed during his visit, Gallant had professed to be speaking for Israel’s military establishment.
Push forward/push back:
As Gallant wound his way home, Bibi began muddying the waters in an apparent effort to keep his restive right wingers from jumping ship.
According to Israel’s Channel 13, he let the White House know that in his upcoming address to the U.S. congress he would stake out a new position on Palestinian statehood that would bolster the Saudis’ incentive to normalize relations. But almost simultaneously, his office leaked word to The Times of Israel, reaffirming Bibi’s opposition to a Palestinian state – a major Saudi objective — and ruling out any dramatic new announcements in his speech to Congress.
Meanwhile, apparently fearful that Bibi, or Hamas, might seize on any new pretext to dig in, U.S., Qatari and Egyptian mediators raced to adjust portions the Biden-backed ceasefire draft to sweeten it for both sides.
According to an exclusive report in Axios, posted on June 29, the amendments under consideration attempted to address new demands from each side that could determine whether a Phase 1 “temporary” truce evolves into a Phase 2 “sustainable calm.”
A gloss by The New York Times provided further clarity. Both sides, according to The Times, were willing to endorse the temporary ceasefire envisaged in Phase 1 and favored some still evolving version of the proposed hostage-prisoner swap to take place at this stage.
The main point of contention appeared to be Israel’s sudden insistence that it be allowed to introduce for discussion and resolution in Phase 1 such broader issues as the demilitarization of Gaza.
Hamas feared this would give Netanyahu endless pretexts to stall off a transition to Phase 2 and a permanent ceasefire or to bail out of the deal altogether after obtaining the modest hostage release set for Phase 1.
Hamas clearly preferred to keep Phase 1 negotiations narrowly focused on the proposed prisoner-hostage swap so as to keep the way clear to its main objective – an end to hostilities.
According to a report in The Times of Israel, posted July 3, a “senior Israeli intelligence official,” possibly someone negotiating for the government, had grown concerned about spoiler tactics by Netanyahu.
Israeli negotiators had assured Bibi the latest Hamas draft was far better than the “non-starter” previously submitted by the group, the leaker stated.
Even so, the Prime Minister’s Office had told the press the talks were deadlocked over a last-minute Hamas demand that Israel be barred from resuming the war after Phase 1. The PMO had also delayed announcing publicly that the Hamas draft was in hand, thus making it appear that the bad guys were stonewalling
According to the Times of Israel, its source – this “senior official” — was “appearing to accuse the premier of trying to harm the talks.”
In fact, the games were just beginning.
Bad guys bend:
On Friday, July 5, Israel’s chief negotiator, Mossad chief Barnea headed for Doha to tell mediators that a major Hamas demand was still a no-go. Since November Hamas had insisted that Israel agree up front and in writing to allow a temporary ceasefire to evolve seamlessly into a permanent one, now foreseen in Phase 2 of the Biden-endorsed deal. Barnea’s aversion to any such concession was simply vintage Netanyahu.
Over the following weekend thousands of Israeli demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv and lesser townships to demand a flexing of all hardlines so as to hasten a ceasefire and hostage release, though nobody expected much joy from Hamas.
And yet, on Saturday, rumors of a softening of the enemy’s position began surging through press and diplomatic circuits, and on Sunday, the unimaginable happened. Upending all prevailing assumptions, a senior unnamed Hamas official confirmed that his masters were ready to discuss a hostage deal and an end to hostilities without requiring that Israel commit itself in advance to “a complete and permanent ceasefire.”
All that was needed, he suggested, was a verbal guarantee from mediators that Israel was headed in that direction.
Afterwards, armchair experts would ruminate long and hard about what had prompted this stunning reversal. Bibi himself, citing intercepted messages among Hamas leaders, attributed their concession to growing defeatism.
If you accept this take, it helps explain what happened next.
On Sunday night, July 7, just hours after receiving Hamas’s olive branch, Bibi stomped it into the ground. Claiming simply to be restating long established principles, he issued four “non-negotiable” demands, including a stipulation that Israel be allowed to resume fighting after any preliminary hostage and ceasefire deal and to keep on fighting “until its war aims are achieved.”
He also demanded that any final bargain rule out arms smuggling to Hamas across the Gaza-Egypt border, bar the return of thousands of “armed terrorists” to northern Gaza, and permit Israel to “maximize” the number of hostages to be returned as early as possible.
The hardened provisions on smuggling and repatriation threatened to jinx everything. The Biden blueprint, which Bibi had approved, would allow displaced Gazans to head back to their home turf anywhere in the Strip. No mechanism had been established for weeding out terrorists, but remedies were under discussion.
Moreover, Egypt Israel and the United State had already begun noodling ways of thwarting smuggling across the southern border, the Philadelphi corridor, including installation of a sensor-studded barrier.
So, Bibi was jumping the gun on these issues to no evident purpose except to thwart progress, preempt solutions and provide himself with an excuse to keep the IDF stationed inside Gaza – along the Philadelphi corridor and the Netzarim corridor further north, in violation of Biden’s larger promise of an eventual Israeli withdrawal.
Everywhere you looked, the outrage was immediate.
“The statement from Netanyahu’s office was met with anger by Israeli security officials and mediators, who, not for the first time, accused the prime minister of trying to sabotage the deal,” The Times of Israel reported.
An anonymous security official told Israel’s Channel 12 that Netanyahu was simply “dragging out the process, trying to stretch time until his speech in Congress [on July 24] and then the [Knesset] recess.”
A foreign mediator raged publicly that Bibi’s new demands cut to the very heart of the negotiations, the effort to assure Hamas that Israel will stand down militarily after the initial phase.
“We are at a critical moment in the negotiations, the lives of the hostages depend on it,” opposition Leader Yair Lapid admonished the Prime Minister. “Why issue such provocative messages? How does it contribute to the process?”
On Monday, July 8, Hamas leaders accused Bibi of using “psychological warfare” to discredit their own “flexibility and positivity.” and called on mediators to resist his “maneuvers and crimes.”
Adding to the din, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based spokesperson, complained of suddenly heightened IDF activity in Gaza City and warned it could blow up the negotiations altogether.
Over the next two days, Defense Minister Gallant tried to reassure Biden officials that things were not falling apart, though it quickly became clear he was not speaking for Bibi.
In exchanges with White House official Brett McGurk, he promised an Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor. and a reopening of the nearby Rafah crossing (as long as Hamas was prevented from returning to the area). In a social media post he hailed “U.S. leadership” in promoting a dialogue with Egypt aimed at stopping cross-border arms smuggling.
He also attempted to demonstrate his own independence by announcing an initiative that was certain to give Bibi heartburn – a newly adopted decision by the IDF to begin drafting ultra-orthodox men in early August, as authorized by the Israel’s Supreme Court.
Amidst all this, the White House attempted some damage control of its own by
leaking a best-case scenario to David Ignatius of The Washington Post. The resulting column, which Ignatius posted on July10, bore the headline, “A Gaza Ceasefire Agreement Appears within Reach.”
“A senior U.S. official told me Wednesday that the ‘framework is agreed’ and the parties are now ‘negotiating details of how it will be implemented,” Ignatius reported.
He described as a “breakthrough” Hamas’s decision to waive its demand for an upfront promise of a permanent ceasefire, and reminded readers that both sides had “signaled their acceptance of an ‘interim governance’ plan” for Gaza that would begin with Phase 2. As he had explained in an earlier column the scheme would entrust initial security work in day-after Gaza to 2500 Palestinians from the West Bank, trained by the US, approved by Israel, and backed by moderate Arab states.
If a cease-fire deal was “clinched,” he continued, it could reduce the danger of a wider war by opening the way for peace talks with Hezbollah and accelerated efforts to normalize relations between Israel and the Saudis.
“It would also create a potential valedictory moment for the president, affording him a chance to step back honorably from his quest for a second term or, conversely, to double down,” Ignatius concluded.
No sooner had the column dropped into the digit-sphere than Israeli aircraft began dropping leaflets all over Gaza City warning that the area would soon become “a dangerous combat zone” and urging citizens to evacuate south towards shelters in central Gaza.
Since it is difficult to believe U.S. intelligence had not foreseen this development, it is tempting to conclude that the story leaked to Ignatius by some “senior official” was either cover for the Israelis, to help them conceal their new war plans, or (much more likely) a last-minute impotent attempt to head off the worst.
In any case, over the next twenty-four hours, not only did Bibi unleash all hell on Gaza City (once again) but he toughened up two of his newly articulated “non-negotiable” demands. Though negotiator Ronan Bar, head of the Shin Bet, had just arrived in Cairo to discuss how to harden the Philadelphi corridor with a barrier and sensors, Bibi suddenly insisted on July 11 that the IDF would have to stay on the border to ward off smugglers. He also re-emphasized that “any deal must prevent the return of armed terrorists and the entry of weapons to the north of the strip.” In effect he was reaffirming his determination to keep IDF units in central Gaza, stationed along the Netzarim corridor.
“If you insist on principle that you are staying in Philadelphi and that you are staying in Netzarim, the meaning is that there is no deal,” Michel Milshtein, a former Israeli intelligence office told The Wall Street Journal.
What made Bibi’s comments all the more insulting to Biden himself was that their timing coincided with a Presidential press conference in Washington, which essentially echoed the themes of Ignatius’ column the day before.
During the presser Biden tried to reassure Israel that a ceasefire wouldn’t mean, “Walk away from going after Sinwar and Hamas.”
Drawing on leaks from unnamed “U.S. and Israeli officials,” a reporter for Axios attributed Bibi’s growing inflexibility to his continued sense that Hamas was flailing. An Israeli official involved in the mediation talks told the news site that while Bibi did relish a deal, he was prepared to go to the brink.
“Netanyahu gave these tough demands because he is trying to use Hamas’ weakness to get as much as he can out of the negotiations,” the official said. “But there is a risk that he will go too far and the negotiations collapse.”
In a separate interview Tamir Hayden, former head of Israeli military intelligence, broached another possible risk, the loss of an opportunity to staunch hostilities with Hezbollah. A pause in Gaza would allow for that, he acknowledged, but without it, “people will say enough is enough. Let’s finish the job in Lebanon. And that means a war.”
The blood-drenched mop up:
When Bibi sent the IDF back to Gaza city on July 11, it was an admission of failure, the price he had to pay for refusing to plan for the day-after in Gaza out of deference to right wingers who could not abide the idea of Palestinian self-governance.
In the next week and a half, the fighting spilled over into central Gaza and areas further south. Rafah City itself remained locked down, with IDF staying clear of certain neighborhoods for fear of accidentally killing hidden hostages or perhaps because of Biden’s abiding aversion to military action in such populated areas.
But on July 13 Bibi ordered an airstrike inside an Israeli designated safe zone stretching from northern Rafah to Khan Younis. His intended target: Hamas’ number two, Muhammad Deif, allegedly the mastermind of October 7.
Intelligence reporting suggested that Dief had, for some reason, abandoned his tunnel hideout and been forced to confer above ground with Rafa’a Salameh, another top Hamas official.
Though Salameh was reported killed in the bombing, there has been no firm information on Deif’s fate. But according to the variously reliable Palestinian Health Ministry, ninety civilians were killed in the incident and two hundred eighty-nine injured.
Whatever the actual numbers, news photos and reports from aid workers at the scene bespeak terrible carnage.
Nonetheless, Bibi and his apologists were quick to assure the public that Hamas is on its backfoot because of his refusal to compromise at the negotiating table and his continued commitment to total victory, i.e., the bloodying of Hamas till death do us part.
But what the record also showed – indeed what it seemed to prove above all else – is that the application of force without “proportion” can produce only one outcome: a Mogadishu-like death-scape that will inevitably serve as a breeding ground for future enemies.
What follows is confirmation of your worst suspicions.
Overkill by any other name:
At the outset of this war, I wrote (in Substack) that the immensity of the threat posed to Israel had altered the “proportionality” formula normally used in warfare to determine how many innocent deaths – or how much collateral damage — can be tolerated in the name of some existential objective.
But that was only the half of it.
As it turns out, Israeli policy in Gaza has long been governed by a carefully tweaked, somewhat elastic theory of how much force is too much. Old timers in the IDF call it the Dahiya Doctrine.
Here’s the skinny:
In July 2006, with Israel under constant rocket attack from southern Lebanon, the IDF responded by bringing massive firepower to bear on the Hezbollah stronghold in Dahiya, a Beirut suburb, and on the surrounding homes and factories. “This was the deliberate application of ‘disproportionate force,’ such as the destruction of an entire village, if deemed to be the source of rocket fire,” Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University wrote in The Times of Israel earlier this year.
Shortly after the Lebanon “experiment,” the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University published a position paper promoting the Dahiya doctrine “as the way forward in response to paramilitary attacks,” according to Rogers. The study “made it crystal clear that the Dahiya doctrine goes well beyond defeating an opponent in a brief conflict, and is about having a truly long-lasting impact,” Rogers explained.
“Disproportionate force means just that, extending to the destruction of the economy and state infrastructure with many civilian casualties, with the intention of achieving a sustained deterrent impact.”
By Roger’s reckoning the IDF has applied the doctrine in every subsequent Gaza conflict, including the present one.
Which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering the personalities involved.
The IDF commander Lebanon in 2006, General Gadi Eisenkot, later became chief of general staff of the army. Though he retired in 2016, Bibi recruited him after October 7 to serve as a non-voting adviser to his war cabinet.
One of Eisenkot’s disciples is Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
As noted above, during his visit to Washington in June, Gallant signaled a shift in the IDF’s Gaza strategy to a final mop up phase. According to The Times of Israel Secretary of State Blinken then gave Bibi license to get tough in this next round by declaring that Hamas alone was to blame for the stalled peace process. Informed sources also speculated to the newspaper that the U.S. election season and Biden’s own political troubles made it difficult for the U.S. to contain Bibi and his fellow hardliners.
Bibi, in his own interactions with the press, sought to justify his continued heavy reliance on firepower by pointing to what he said were its devasting effects on the enemy.
His right-wing supporters applauded. Advocates of the disproportionate use of force doubtless felt vindicated.
Cheerleaders:
There is a striking uniformity to much of what Bibi and his closest associates are saying these days about the war — so much so that it seems they are reading from the same master script.
I suspect they are also rehearsing the lines Bibi will deliver to the U.S. Congress on July 24.
Bibi offered a lengthy and detailed self-evaluation at a press conference on July 14. the day of the IDF attack on of Muhammed Deif. His verdict on himself, one of the most compete of the last two months, was nothing short of idolatrous.
Some of the omissions were also eye-popping.
Two days later, Lazar Berman, a diplomatic reporter for The Times of Israel, put his own gloss on the same material in spin job masquerading as political analysis.
On July 19, Elliot Kaufman, letters editor for The Wall Street Journal published a op-ed that added embroidery to the developing story line and included pithy quotes from Bibi’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz.
In his keynoter, the presser on July 14, Bibi lauded himself for having “rejected pressure at home and abroad to finish the war before achieving all its aims.” By staying the course, he argued, he and the IDF had savaged enemy ranks, pressured Hamas into negotiating seriously, and brought hellfire down on those like Deif who had masterminded October 7.
While acknowledging that there was still “a way to go” he promised that “one way or the other, we will get to the entire Hamas leadership.”
He seemed oblivious to the possibility that the carnage he has wrought and the hatred he has sown might come back to haunt Israel for generations to come.
Deftly skirting such hard truths, he and his fellow spinners, Katz, Kauffman and Berman, proceeded to scapegoat the U.S. for (allegedly) handcuffing Israel’s military, delaying its assault on Rafah and thus frustrating Bibi’s effort to free the hostages.
“There was massive international pressure not to go into Rafah,” Bibi groused as he preened and strutted before reporters. “There was American pressure not to go into Rafah…and I said, President Biden, my friend, we have no choice. We will go into Rafah. I will go into Rafah. Because if we leave Hamas there, we won’t get either the hostages or defeat Hamas.”
Despite vigorous give-and take with the reporters, Bibi left unmentioned his own initial doubts about the wisdom of the Rafah operation and his role in delaying its execution.
He also carefully airbrushed out of his presentation anything that might redound to Biden’s credit. He gave no hint, for instance, of Biden’s precise objection to the Rafah operation, his concern that an all-out assault on Rafah, without provision for civilian safety, would be a bloodbath.
Nor did Bibi make any reference to the American role in framing Israel’s all-important fallback option, the decision to seize the Philadelphi corridor and scrub it of the smuggling operations that were funneling arms and supplies to Hamas.
Biden officials had been instrumental in planning the gambit and ensuring Egyptian acquiescence. But Bibi left the impression that the choking off of supplies to Hamas, which helped soften the group’s negotiating position, was the result of the IDF’s own selective probes into Rafah, with Biden playing a generally obstructionist role or simply sitting out the action.
Through this selective retelling of events Bibi conjured a story line that made it appear his redoubtable leadership and unyielding reliance on brute force accounted for Hamas’s willingness to negotiate.
Katz, Kaufman and Berman took their cues from Bibi and shaped their own accounts accordingly.
They also took his lead in faulting Biden for allegedly denying Israel the weapons to finish the job in Rafah.
“There was a reduction of weapons to put it mildly,” Bibi said teasingly to reporters on the fourteenth.
He did not choose to clarify that the only weapons Biden had withheld were 2,000-pound bunker-busters, which he feared the IDF, in its devotion to the disproportionate use of force. might deploy against Rafah’s civilians.
Kauffman, Katz, and Berman were similarly circumspect in treating the subject.
To round out his portrait of Biden as a feckless and unreliable ally, Bibi (with K.K.&B. trailing along) made sure not to highlight for the public a piece of recent history that proved the U.S. to be indispensable to Israel’s survival.
As everyone should remember, on the night of April 13, just a few months ago, a U.S. task force assisted by moderate Arab states intercepted more than 300 Iranian missiles aimed at Israeli territory. Only one of them crossed the border, wounding one person.
The intercept operation was a dazzling success, a testament to U.S. ingenuity and intelligence prowess, and a godsend for Israel.
But it merited only crickets from Bibi (in his July 14 presser), and from Katz, Kauffman and Berman (in their follow-up articles).
Bibi did have time, though, to regale reporters on the fourteenth about his own alleged contributions to the peace process.
Asked if a diplomatic breakthrough was imminent, he maintained that his reliance on force and refusal to rule out “total victory” had kept Hamas negotiators on their toes
His views ricocheted through the Katz-Kauffman-Berman spin cycle.
“If Sinwar is indeed feeling the walls closing in and ultimately agrees to release hostages, it will be at least a partial vindication of Netanyahu’s oft-mocked war strategy,” Berman wrote in The Times of Israel. “He has insisted throughout that Israel will reach Hamas’s leaders, and that only the combination of military pressure and diplomacy can bring hostages home.”
Under questioning by the press pack, Bibi bridled at the suggestion that his hardline positions might have doomed the hostages. “I totally reject these briefs [which claim] that I am stopping a deal,” he retorted. “It’s the absolute opposite.”
No one pressed him on why thousands of hostage advocates and close relatives were even then raging through the streets to protest his seeming inaction.
Nor did any reporter see fit to ask why he had recently upended the diplomatic punchbowl by introducing four vexing non-negotiable demands and by withdrawing his promise to allow the free flow of displaced persons within Gaza.
Thus spared, Bibi walked away with his head held high and not a dent in his political carapace.
In their own follow-up op ed, Katz and Kauffman took a swing at something Bibi had avoided but which they (evidently) thought might play to his advantage if treated selectively – the threat posed by Iran.
Katz, speaking as Kaufman’s interviewee, described Iran as a nascent partner of China’s with all the spoiling power and mixed interests that implied.
He did not let on that the Biden already has a plan for counterbalancing Iran’s regional influence, the proposed establishment of a security alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But he did punch a hole in what everybody knows is the Saudi precondition for going forward – establishing a pathway to a Palestinian state.
Katz, undoubtedly channeling Bibi, declared hyperbolically, “It will not happen,” …It’s suicide.”
Again, in deference to Bibi, Katz slammed another Biden priority, mediating a peace between Israel and Hezbollah.
“A ceasefire in Gaza and a hostage deal will not prevent a war with Hezbollah,” declared Katz. “Israel won’t agree to ‘quiet’ for ‘quiet’ anymore.”
If war comes, he concluded “it will not be like Gaza,” because there won’t be any hostage concerns to constrain Israel’s use of force.
That’s not exactly encouraging.
Gone, but not quite good riddance:
If Bibi finally agrees to peace along the lines now being mediated, it would mean he has reconciled himself to political and personal extinction.
The religious nationalists who prop up his right-wing coalition will surely abandon him if he leaves Hamas intact or makes any concessions to Palestinian nationalism. Any attempt to normalize relations with the Saudis will founder because his coalition partners will not allow him to pay even lip service to the idea of establishing a Palestinian state, as Riyadh requires.
A month ago Bibi’s lawyers urged an Israeli court to continue slow-walking his long-running trial on corruption, fraud and bribery charges in deference to the burdens he bears as a war time prime minister. He may indeed get the reprieve. But once the war ends on whatever grounds, his immunity from prosecution will dissolve. He will also have to answer for the misjudgments and intelligence failures that led to October 7.
Thus, Bibi’s only hope of avoiding the worst he can imagine is to keep faith with the religious nationalists and Zionist fanatics who protect him – even at risk of abetting a forever war and deepening the mistrust and loathing Israel faces across the globe.
On Nov. 4, 2022, just after the new right-wing coalition won election, Tom Friedman of The York Times, one of the most astute Bibi watchers in print, published a column headlined: “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.”
“It was meant to be a warning flare about just how radical this coalition is,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “[T]he situation is now even worse: The Israel we knew is gone, and today’s Israel is in existential danger.”
To stay out of jail, Netanyahu “sold his soul to form a government with right wing extremists” (in Friedman’s words). His partners obliged him to write into their coalition agreement a pledge to annex the west bank because they believe Jews are biblically predestined to control all territory from the Jordon River to the Mediterranean Sea.
His newly formed right-wing government accelerated the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West bank, uprooting and displacing Palestinians who had every right to be there. During the first twelve months, 2022-2023, according to a recent UN report, Israeli interlopers built 24,300 new housing units in existing communities — the largest number in any year since UN monitoring began in 2017. After October 7 Bibi’s security ministry allowed Israeli settlers to form armed militia units to help reservists police the West Bank. Officially condoned murder and intimation of Palestinians spiked.
Throughout Bibi’s current tenure he has battled the courts, ignored their rulings and fiddled with the law to ensure that the children of ultra-orthodox constituents, who share their parents’ piety, remain exempt from military service. That sick crusade appears to be on a losing streak.
Since Israel has no written constitution, the courts and particularly the highest one play a special role in keeping the other branches of government in check and the extremists in harness. In early 2023 Bibi began maneuvering legislatively and through executive fiat to limit the judiciary’s ability to review and reverse his government’s excesses. Israeli moderates and secularists, outraged by his presumption, rose up in protest. Tens of thousands mobbed the streets and the resulting disarray, including within the armed forces, likely emboldened the October 7 attackers and contributed to the lack of preparedness within Israel itself.
Ten months into the war, hardliners in the coalition remain adamant that Israel fight on until total victory and keep the Palestinian Authority out of any day-after planning for Gaza lest the seeds of independence take root and blossom.
Israeli Finance Minister, Bezel Smotrich, a veteran of Bibi’s hard right government, has come to personify many of its worst traits in the judgment of Biden officials. A West Banker who lives in an illegal settlement and has done much to create others, Smotrich delights in tossing off racist and homophobic slurs – to the applause of fellow members of the Religious Zionist party he heads up.
In early 2023 he shocked much of the diplomatic community in Israel by calling for destruction of an entire Palestinian settlement in the West bank.
During a later speech in Paris he declared, “There are no Palestinians because there are no Palestinian people.”
Riffing obliquely about “biblical prophecies” which he claimed were “beginning to come true,” he proclaimed, “God is gathering his people. The people of Israel are coming home.
“There are Arabs around who don’t like it,” he continued.” So, what do they do? They invent a fictious people and claim a fictitious right to the land of Israel, only to fight the Zionist movement.
Amid the initial hysteria over October 7, he championed the famine-inducing blockade of Gaza, claimed to know of two million “Nazis” hiding out in the West Bank, and put a freeze on the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority, thus making it impossible for the PA to tend to the needs of its own constituents. He later proposed the “voluntary,” “humanitarian” migration of Gaza Arabs to other countries.
Another close disciple of Bibi’s, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gavir, has racked up such a questionable legal record, including multiple convictions for youthful right-wing thuggery, that he has been excluded from compulsory military service (through he rightly denies ever dodging the draft). Despite advocating loudly for the Gaza campaign, he is therefore able to leave the killing and dying to others.
Immediately after October 7, he called for a no-hold-barred response, saying, “this is not the time for questions, tests and investigations.” He wiped out any moral distinction between Hamas and other Gazans. “Those who sing, those who support, those who distribute candy – all of these are terrorists,” he exclaimed.
In early 2024 he pronounced the war in Gaza to be an opportunity to encourage “the residents” to migrate elsewhere and refused to rule out Jewish settlements there. He unleashed right wing thugs to disrupt convoys bound for Gaza with humanitarian aid packages. And when several European countries recognized, symbolically, a hypothetical Palestinian state, he burst into the Al Aqsa Mosque in Old Jerusalem, home to Islam’s Dome of the Rock, and declared it to “belong only to the state of Israel.”
Later, on learning of Biden’s decision to pause delivery of 2,000 pounders to Israel to prevent their use in Rafah, he posted a message on social media implying, with a heart emoji, that Hamas “loves” Biden.
Both Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are key to the survival of Bibi’s government and their hold on him explains much of his intransigence on every front, though his own instincts seem wholly compatible with theirs.
They both opposed the decision to “pause” military activity along the key section of roadway leading into southern Gaza. Ben-Gvir said that whoever approved the policy was a “fool who should not remain in his position.” Smotrich complained that any humanitarian aid flow through the corridor could benefit Hamas and “helps it retain civilian control of the Strip in direct contradiction to the goals of the war.”
Both men have raged against the pending truce proposal. Shortly after Netanyahu began studying the latest version, Ben-Gvir threatened to quit and wreck the governing coalition. Smotrich warned he would “not be part of a government that agrees to the proposed outline and ends the war without destroying Hamas and bringing back all the hostages”.
The Biden administration has not suffered these fools gladly. In December, speaking at a political fund raiser, the President not only lamented Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza, but decried the right-wing fanatics in Bibi’s entourage who reject any gesture towards Palestinian statehood.
“This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” Biden observed. “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution.
“Bibi has a tough decision to make.” the President continued. “You cannot say there’s no Palestinian state at all in the future.”
On a more operational level, the administration has cultivated sympathetic listeners within the Bibi’s entourage, most of them former or current rivals who might be tempted to push back against the crazies. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reportedly speaks daily by phone with his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Gallant. The extraordinarily positive results of Gallant’s recent visit to Washington suggest that the stroking has paid off.
The administration has also shmoozed Benny Gantz, giving him a full and warm embrace when he visited Washington in early March without Netanyahu’s approval or even foreknowledge.
The ultimatum Gallant then delivered to Bibi, threatening to resign unless there was a flexing of Israeli policy, echoed Biden on very every key issue. It also pinged Bibi on one other sore point, calling on him to obey court orders and begin drafting ultra-orthodox jews.
The resulting tensions within Bibi’s coalition have confronted him with a variation of the “tough decision” Biden mentioned in December.
With the IDF command and official Washington now pressing for major compromises and implementation of some version of the pending peace deal, Bibi has lost his wiggle room.
He must bow to reason, make a less-than-ideal bargain with Hamas, and forfeit the support and protection his right-wing coalition provides.
Or he can opt for self-preservation, risk alienating the army and Israel’s best protector, Uncle Sam, and squander probably the last opportunity he has to spring any living hostages.
Of yes, and there is the matter of world opinion. It too hangs in the balance.
Don’t kid yourself that the negative public perceptions now dogging Israel, e.g. the outrageous allegations of premeditated genocide in Gaza, can be easily cured. As we learned in Vietnam, once “received truth” gets tainted this way and is recycled again and again in the media, you can never regain the political or moral initiative no matter what the facts on the ground may be.
The Force is no longer NOT with you; it’s thumbing its nose at you
For all my overheated preachifying here, my soul-felt sympathies remain with Israel even as I grieve over the innocents killed, maimed and left to starve in Gaza. And I understand, as well as any outsider can, the Israelis’ desperate yearning to restore the image of omnipotence that kept their enemies at bay in the past.
But in avoiding a “peace of convenience” at this moment, one that would, incidentally, leave plenty of room for IDF commandos to quietly eliminate Sinwar and his immediate political progeny, our Israeli friends are denying themselves the deal of the century, the day-after alliance with the Saudis that Blinken is trying hard to sell to everybody.
The niggling initial price of such a bargain would be a mere kiss and a promise from Israel – some general expression of support for an eventual Palestinian state.
If such a state were to emerge in the fulness of time — with the help of a renovated Palestinian Authority and with all due attention to Israel’s security concerns – it would be a gamble worth every risk, its policies shaped, conditioned and moderated by the enveloping Saudi-Israel-US coalition Biden envisions.
As for Bibi himself, don’t weep for him, Argentina. His fate is sealed, whether the reckoning comes now or after some other terrible mistake on his part.
Listen to the epitaph that opposition leader Yair Lapid conjured for him during a particularly contentious parliamentary session just before Gallant’s Washington visit.
“Mr. Prime Minister, the amazing thing is that you still don’t get it,” Lapid bellowed at him. “You haven’t caught on yet. There will be no legacy. There won’t be a museum named after you, there won’t be a square, there won’t be a Benjamin Netanyahu fountain. There will be only one thing — October 7.”
“You will have no legacy except this destruction. All that will be left of you are two lines in the history books, reading: ‘Under his watch, the Jewish people suffered the most terrible massacre since the Holocaust, and he refused to take responsibility until he was removed.’ This. That’s all that will be written.”