For weeks Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has been engaged in a deft bait-and-switch gambit to provoke Hamas into rejecting a Gaza peace deal so he can avoid the onus of doing so himself.
His twin objectives: to keep Biden peacemakers guessing and his own hardliners smugly secure in their own crimped agendas.
This isn’t some malevolent judgment on my part. American and Israeli mediators have also accused the Prime Minister of such gamesmanship – though discreetly.
The immediately salient issue, the one on which Bibi’ duplicity now turns, boils down to this: whether Israeli forces must withdraw from Gaza as part of a proposed ceasefire/hostage deal or are to retain a foothold in two separate locations, a nine-mile stretch along Egypt-Gaza border known as the Philadelphi Corridor and a thin four-mile buffer zone bisecting central Gaza, called the Netzarim Corridor.
Keeping troops in these areas would enable the IDF to monitor and limit arms smuggling to residual Hamas units, an essential objective. But it would also violate the terms of a framework peace formula that has shaped negotiations for the past two and a half months.
On Monday August 19, after meeting with Netanyahu, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that Bibi had accepted a proposed “bridge” agreement that would help both sides strike an interim ceasefire bargain despite thorny technical issues.
The terms of the “bridge” arrangement were not revealed. But the clear implication was that the issue of the two corridors had been satisfactorily resolved and that the IDF would withdraw as previously agreed.
But within twenty four hours, according to Israeli press reports, Bibi was telling hostage families that he had “convinced” Blinken that Israeli troops must remain in “strategic” areas of Gaza, including the southern border.
A “senior US official,” leaking anonymously to the BBC but likely Blinken himself, promptly decried these “maximalist statements” as inimical “to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line.” Later, speaking openly from Cairo, Blinken insisted the bridge agreement is “very clear on the schedule and locations of IDF withdrawals from Gaza.
“Israel has agreed to that,” he added.
But it was too little too late.
The confusion had spooked Hamas and by Tuesday evening, August 20, the terrorist group had publicly rejected the bridge proposal despite earlier private expressions of support for it.
According to the BBC, Hamas sources described what had taken place as “a coup” to topple previous understandings and demanded that ceasefire plans be “based on where talks were in July rather than any new rounds of negotiations.”
Biden officials tried gamely to spread the blame around, but Andrew Miller, who had served, until recently, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, was more ecumenical in his finger-pointing.
“We’ve seen [Hamas topsider Yahya] Sinwar essentially veto or scuttle what was agreed,” he told the press. “And we’ve seen Netanyahu add additional conditions.”
The framework:
The disengagement issue seemed to have been addressed – and resolved – much earlier, in the US-Israeli framework proposal announced by President Biden on May 31. As part of “Phase Two” of this projected deal, later endorsed by the UN, the IDF was to vacate Gaza once a permanent ceasefire and second hostage release had been implemented.
A month later, on July 6 Hamas made a major concession by dropping its previous demand for an upfront Israeli commitment to end the war. It looked as though a breakthrough was at hand.
But the following day Bibi abruptly unveiled new “non-negotiable provisions, including a demand that the IDF be allowed to occupy the two corridors indefinitely. He also insisted on better terms for an initial hostage/prisoner exchange.
Almost immediately Hamas balked, and mediation efforts stalled. American and Israeli sources accused Hamas of backtracking but some official leakers in Washington fingered Netanyahu himself.
The subsequent “bridge” deal proposed by Blinken was an effort to repair the damage and move negotiations forward.
What comes next — maybe:
Various intermediaries are even now huddling in Cairo and elsewhere to try to restart hard bargaining. “If they cannot get Hamas on board, they may be out of options, increasing the chance of an increase in violence between Israel and Hezbollah and a direct confrontation between Israel and Tehran,” Erin Banco wrote in Politico.
In fact, thatoversimplifies the problem. The basic difficulty is that the Biden administration is now hostage to Israel’s extreme right wing, which controls Bibi own political fate and thus his policy choices and by extension those available to us.
Only by holding onto his job and the immunities it confers can Bibi avoid a public reckoning for the intelligence failures leading to October 7 and dodge prosecution on bribery and corruption charges filed against him before the war. And only by pandering to the most extreme elements of his coalition, which gives him a four-seat margin in the Knesset, can he retain his protective grip on power.
The top right-wingers who hold the whip hand over him are Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Interior Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Both insist on total victory over Hamas and refuse to prioritize the hostage issue even though Israel’s security and military elites have determined that Hamas cannot be destroyed and that only diplomacy can free the remaining abductees.
Thus constrained, Bibi has no incentive to accommodate any concessionary U.S. policies except in the most disingenuous and superficial way. And because the US remains implacably protective of Israel for all the right reasons, moral and strategic, it has little incentive — or latitude — to punish such inflexibility.
This is not to say that Biden is frozen in place. Israelis of every political stripe know that Uncle Sam is their greatest protector and that they flout US interests at their peril.
Right after October 7 Biden famously traveled to Israel and embraced the nation’s grief as his own, thus solidifying a bond that has since earned him special consideration. Moreover, every time Bibi’s own brinkmanship has placed his country in mortal jeopardy, Biden has raced to the rescue, often sending U.S. warships to tilt the regional balance against Israel’s Iran-backed adversaries.
In each case, he has effectively bolstered his moral and political credit with Bibi’s countrymen.
Early in the crisis Biden intervened personally to avert a wider war by persuading the Prime Minister not to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. A few weeks later US diplomacy leveraged Hamas and the Israelis into a temporary truce that freed 105 hostages. The following January, Biden pressed Israel to begin drawing down its forces in Gaza and to help facilitate aid deliveries to the starving population. US diplomats also wrote into successive peace proposals an injunction for all parties to intensify such aid deliveries.
In early March Biden ordered the US air force to join other nations in parachuting foodstuffs into Gaza. And in mid-April, after an Israeli air strike killed three Iranian operatives in Syria, the US organized and directed a multilateral effort by friendly Arab states to blunt a retaliatory missile barrage against Israel launched from Iran itself. Only one of 300 drones and projectiles reached Israeli territory, wounding one individual.
Soon afterwards, as Bibi prepared to mount a direct assault on refugee-clogged Rafah in southern Gaza, Biden prevailed on him to provide for civilian safety and downsize his objectives to focus on selective strikes and seizure of the Philadelphi corridor and the Rafah crossing.
More recently, after the IDF’s ill-advised hit on Hamas mediator Ismail Haniyeh during his visit to Tehran, the US intervened to persuade Iranian leaders that because the killing was by a remote-controlled explosive and produced no Iranian casualties it should not be viewed as a direct provocation meriting immediate and direct retaliation. Simultaneously, American diplomats rushed to fashion a peace deal to damp down resurgent tensions along Israel’s Hezbollah-infested border with Lebanon.
Meanwhile, as if all this were not enough, it has been left to Biden to plan for the “day after” in Gaza since Bibi’s right wingers have long sought to settle the enclave themselves and thwart any progress towards Palestinian self-rule.
Biden has long had an answer to all this, a grand design. He means to build on the Abraham accords by promoting normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and make their bonding the centerpiece of a regional alliance to offset the Iranian threat.
But because the Saudis demand that all players endorse, in advance, a pathway a Palestinian state, Israel’s hard liners, and thus Bibi himself, have dug in their heels
As an alternative, working with Israel’s increasingly independent Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, Biden officials have begun lobbying for “an interim governance plan for Gaza.” It would assign security and administrative responsibilities to 2,500 Palestinians from the West Bank, all of them trained by the U.S., approved by Israel and backed by moderate Arab states. By soft-packaging Palestinian influence this way, the plan is thought to have a remote chance of winning support from Smotrich & Company — with the emphasis on remote.
Covert US arm-twisting:
For those who believe Biden could have done more to bring Bibi and the ultra-nationalists to heel, there is a solid defense brief to be offered on his behalf, though few people are aware of it.
That’s because it’s been executed behind a screen of deniability.
Part of it has played out in angry private phone calls between Bibi and Biden and shouting matches between lesser administration lights and their Israeli counterparts.
But throughout the Gaza crisis, the administration has also waged a sub rosa information war, based on strategic leaks from well-orchestrated official sources, to undermine and discredit Israeli hardliners, isolate Bibi, head off a direct IDF assault on Rafah, nudge Israel into “day after” planning, and encourage more moderate voices inside Israel itself to speak out.
On November 28, smack in the middle of the historic six-day truce in Gaza, a New York Times headliner, sourced to unidentified “administration officials,” highlighted the urgency of aid shipments to Gaza, a theme that would quickly become a leaker’s favorite. A month later. on New Year’s Eve, another Times exclusive, quoting heavily from anonymous US officials, revealed that Gaza had become an obsession for Biden, commanding more of his personal attention than any other issue in his presidency. Unnamed insiders described his pilgrimage to the Holy Land on October 18 as a daring personal act and a rebuff to senior staffers who had fretted about his physical safety and the political risks of nuzzling up to Israel just as press reports were blaming the IDF for destruction of Al Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza.
Zeroing in on motive, the Times sources noted that “Mr. Biden’s biggest fear was an expanded war in which Iran would empower proxies in addition to Hamas to attack Israel, or Israel would launch a pre-emptive war against such forces.”
For other examples of exquisitely crafted top-down official messaging, check out the backlog of columns that David Ignatius has filed for The Washington Post since October 7.
Ignatius is a brilliant strategic analyst in his own right, but he has long been the favored beneficiary of handouts from ranking administration sources intent on making policy arguments or scoring political hits without putting their names on them.
Relying on such blue-ribbon tipsters, Ignatius has written compellingly about the Mogadishu-like conditions in areas of Gaza which have been cleared of Hamas but left ungoverned, the virtues of various peace proposals, including the Saudi normalization deal, and the chronic toxic obstructionism of Bibi and his right wing allies.
In one rare open-source piece, Ignatius drew on the wisdom of former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, to offer what may be Biden’s best bet for realizing the proposed Saudi-Israeli alliance.
“Biden wants to make Bibi swallow the frog (and do the deal), or gag on the frog (and make way for another government).” Indyk was quoted as saying.
“Either way,” Ignatuis remarked, “the United States hopes the impasse will be broken.”
Other preferred Administration conduits include Axios, Politico and The Wall Street Journal, whose reporting often reads like something drawn from the President’s Daily Brief. Moderate Israeli leakers have chimed in and echoed Biden’s arguments via Haaretz, Axios and The Times of Israel.
In short, an ongoing subterranean conversation in select media has allowed the President and fellow travelers to shape perspectives on the crisis in ways that handicap the crazies.
Even so, the administration has pulled its most important punch, the one that would have greatest likelihood of softening Israeli policy in Gaza.
Even as the Rafah campaign was kicking off, the President reminded Israelis of the power at his disposal by withholding 2,000-pound bunker busters, which he worried might be used against the city’s civilian population. But apart from this, the President has declined to use US arms policy– the threatened shutdown of weapons transfers – to leverage our most essential mid-east ally into greater restraint.
In an executive order issued last February Biden did require Israel and other US arms recipients to certify that weaponry made available to them would be used in accordance with US and international law. (It was an extension of the Leahy Act, passed in 1997, designed to ensure that transferred US arms were not deployed against civilian targets anywhere.)
But when Israel filed its written pledge in late spring, Biden officials signed off on it without significant caveat. And in mid-August, even as Bibi wrought havoc with his new nonnegotiable “peace” demands, the US blithely approved $20 billion in new arms sales to his government.
The underlying logic is unassailable. If the US had cancelled the transfers, the shockwaves would doubtless have emboldened Israel’s enemies and destabilized the entire region—none of which would have done anyone any good.
Make no mistake:
Israel remains a beacon of democracy in the autocratic mid-east, and essential to US security interests there and elsewhere. Its cause also remains sacred to Americans like myself.
But in the context of our Gaza policies – and unless and until the US is willing to “disarm” Bibi and his allies into submission — Israeli extremism will remain the tail that wags the dog, to Israel’s own detriment, and our own.