When Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the U.S. president's proposal from Friday night – actually, he's already done that – Israel, and not just the International Criminal Court in The Hague, will be compelled to declare him a war criminal. A negative response to Joe Biden's proposal, the best offer in town, the last chance for saving the hostages, will constitute a war crime.
Saying no to Biden means saying yes to more futile, wholesale bloodshed, of Israeli soldiers and, more so, of Gaza's inhabitants; yes to the death of the last of the hostages in Hamas captivity; yes to genocide; yes to war in the north; yes to declaring Israel a pariah state. If Netanyahu says no to Biden – nothing could be more certain – he will be saying yes to all of the above. And someone affirming all of the above should be condemned as a war criminal by his own country, unless we are all war criminals.
Between Friday and Saturday nights, one could still have taken pleasure in the delusion that Netanyahu would say yes and that the war would end. The U.S. president's offer, ostensibly an offer made by Netanyahu, was a work of art in its composition, a judicious diplomatic plan for exiting the disaster zone of Israeli-Palestinian relations. There will never be a better plan. It heralds the last chance for Israel to abandon this war and cut its losses.
But every Saturday comes to an end, with warmongers emerging from their Shabbat lairs. With his choice of presenting his plan during the evening prime time for secular Israelis, Friday night, Biden afforded us a glimmer of hope, one that vanished as soon as it appeared, with the appearance of three stars in Israel's skies, heralding the end of Shabbat and the continuation of the war.
Biden means well. Israel has nefarious intentions. Biden wants peace, but Israel wants war. Even Hamas, at this point, wants peace more than Israel does. Throughout this war, I refused to believe that Netanyahu was driven entirely by his own political fate.
The Netanyahu I knew, I believed, had other considerations. In saying no to Biden, he is erasing the last vestiges of statesmanlike demeanor he had assumed, if any still remain, the aura of relative moderation and mainly what we believed for years: that when deploying the army and embarking on war, he was the most cautious and measured prime minister Israel has ever had.
The October 7 war cracked this belief from its outset. Continuing the war now will end this perception for good. Continuing the war not only bolsters suspicions regarding Netanyahu's motives, it also bolsters suspicions regarding his partners and extortionists on the right: Genocide is what they're after. There is no other way of describing their lust for revenge and blood, always insatiable.
But one doesn't have to wait for their words. Leaflets dispersed on Saturday by the IDF in Beit Hanoun, calling on refugees who had returned to their destroyed homes to again evacuate them, are the true Israeli response to President Biden's plan to end the war. They also illustrate what the war will look like from now on: an endless cycle of death and destruction. After Rafah we go back to the beginning, to the northern Gaza Strip, like in a game of Monopoly, but with cruelty, and from there southwards to Rafah, through the ruins of Jabalya, and so on, in blood-soaked mud.
The army's printing presses will not stop printing leaflets and the refugee Palestinians will be moved like cattle in a slaughterhouse; until no stone is left standing in Gaza, nor "wood scraps for a fire or coal for a stove, a place with no bread, fire, water, only with handfuls of ashes," in the words of the poet Moshe Tabenkin.
Biden wanted to put an end to all this. He's wanted to for a long time. He wants to, but doesn't do a thing. To his plan presented on Friday he should have added one resolute sentence: If Israel rejects this plan, the U.S. will immediately stop providing it with arms. Right away. Only thus can this nightmare be ended, a horror with no end in sight for now.