Those principles are clear: that a permanent ceasefire should exist
after an initial exchange of hostages; that there should be a full
withdrawal of Israeli troops; that the people of Gaza should be free to
return to their homes; that there should be no change in the territory
or demography of Gaza; and that its people should have full access to
humanitarian aid, alongside reconstruction efforts.
Sticking point
Israel disagrees with each and every one of these principles. It has
said consistently that no ceasefire should prevent the achievement of
its war aims, which include the dismantlement of Hamas as a military
power and as a government of Gaza. It continues to block aid through its
land border crossings and has no intention of lifting the siege,
especially after the war ends.
More critically, it has made no commitment to sticking to a ceasefire
should negotiations between the first and second phases of the prisoner
and hostage exchange fail.
This is the crux of the matter. There has been only one substantive issue preventing a ceasefire deal since the first exchange of prisoners and hostages last November.
Israel has yet to give any official response to either Biden’s speech
or the UN resolution. Blinken is doing all the talking for it. How
curious, then, that Blinken, on his latest Middle East tour, placed all
the blame on Hamas for not yet accepting the deal.
The talks are stuck on Israel’s refusal to accept an upfront
commitment to a permanent ceasefire. It is on Israel that Blinken should
be applying all of Washington’s pressure.
This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month
And yet, Blinken declared:
“Israel accepted the proposal as it was” - a comment that flies in the
face of repeated public statements from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu casting doubt on the deal, in addition to recent remarks from
National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, who said it would take another seven months to destroy the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
“Hamas could have answered with a single word - yes,” Blinken said,
surpassing himself in a brazen attempt to turn the truth on its head.
Hamas has now given its formal response, and Middle East Eye has seen a copy of that reply.
There are changes to the document, which are not, as it claims, minor
- although they are more compatible with what Biden and the UN
resolution said, than the Israeli position is. Hamas has included the
Philadelphi Corridor in the list of areas that Israeli forces should
withdraw from in the first 42-day stage of the deal. It also insists
that prisoners to be released by Israel are in accordance with Hamas’s
list, which includes high-profile resistance leaders such as Marwan Barghouti.
Shielding Israel
The most substantial change is to the wording of paragraph 14,
which deals crucially with the transition from stage one to stage two,
and the key question of whether any party can withdraw unilaterally from
this process and go back to war.
Paragraph 14 used to say that the temporary cessation of violence
would continue into stage two “so long as the negotiations on the
conditions for implementing stage 2 of this agreement are ongoing”, and
that the guarantors of the deal would make “every effort to ensure that
those indirect negotiations continue until both sides are able to reach
agreement”.
The revised version from Hamas says the temporary ceasefire would
continue “until a sustainable calm” is announced, by which is meant a
full cessation of military activities on both sides, and that
negotiations would continue until the two parties reach an agreement on
an exchange of prisoners.
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In addition, Hamas now demands that Israel lift its 17-year siege of
Gaza and withdraw all its forces in the initial stage of the ceasefire
deal.
These key changes address the meaning and substance of Biden’s speech
and the UN resolution. But Israel will be implacably opposed to them,
as they mean that once the first set of hostages and prisoners has been
released, Israel will not be able to back out of a permanent ceasefire.
It does not take a genius to see that shielding an Israel that has no
intention of abiding by Biden’s words, let alone the UN’s, is not doing
anything to advance US goals.
These are clear: Biden’s overwhelming personal political interest as
an ageing president, seeking re-election while not always being able to
read his teleprompter,
is to shut this war down as soon as possible. He has even more interest
in doing so before it spreads, as it shows every sign of doing, to Lebanon and then the wider region.
Blinken is doing the opposite. He is letting Washington get dragged
ever deeper, and with more direct military involvement, into a regional
quagmire of Netanyahu’s creation.
Only one party benefits from a continuous war in Gaza and a new front
opening up in Lebanon, and that is the Religious Zionist extreme right.
Netanyahu cannot abandon that party. Benny Gantz’s defection from the war cabinet
would be nothing politically next to Itamar Ben Gvir’s exit. The moment
that happens, Netanyahu knows he has a challenger for the leadership of
the ruling right-wing coalition.
That sinking feeling
Accordingly, Netanyahu has responded to every failed round of negotiations by going on the military offensive.
After his rejection of the ceasefire deal hammered out during the
debacle in Cairo and Doha, and amid the increasing possibility of being
served with an international arrest warrant for war crimes, his response was to launch the offensive on Rafah.
Here again, the Israeli national interest called for caution. He
showed no hesitation in jettisoning the support of the Egyptian army,
which if he thought about things strategically, as a real leader should,
he would realise that Israel will need after this conflict is over.
Egypt’s generals could make life painful along Israel’s eminently
porous 200-kilometre border with Sinai, by releasing the brakes they
apply on the drug smugglers and warlords who roam the desert.
Palestinians flee with their belongings as smoke rises in
the background, in the area of Tel al-Sultan in Rafah, Gaza, on 30 May
2024 (Eyad Baba/AFP)
Instead,
Netanyahu has humiliated them - and adding insult to injury, deprived
them of a personal source of hard currency by closing the Rafah border
and occupying the Philadelphi corridor.
The unwritten understanding between them was that any such closure
would be temporary. But Netanyahu has now broken that understanding too,
leaving the generals with egg on their face. Not a wise thing to do, in
this region.
Similarly, Netanyahu’s response to Biden’s speech was to launch a hostage rescue in Nuseirat camp, whose beneficial effects on domestic public opinion lasted all of 24 hours.
Wild jubilation at the release of four hostages - Israeli networks
interrupted their recorded programmes on Shabbat to go live - gave way
to sober reflection on the total cost of this operation.
It was not repeatable. It was not a replacement for negotiations. Israel lost a special forces police officer in the extraction, and if Hamas is to be believed, three other hostages as well.
State of chaos
But more puzzling still was the US claiming a decisive role in the hostage release. As the Palestinian death toll soared past 270,
you might have expected National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to
distance himself from such a disaster. He did the opposite, taking credit for what he termed a “daring operation”.
The exact part that US intelligence or their hostage release team
played in this operation is not known. Israeli helicopters were,
however, captured on camera taking off and landing on the beach, a few
metres from the pier the US Navy built to provide aid for Gaza.
Centcom, the US military command that oversees the Middle East, said that
while Israel used an area south of the US-built pier as a landing zone,
“the humanitarian pier facility, including its equipment, personnel,
and assets were not used in the operation to rescue hostages”.
As things stand, and with the active complicity of Blinken, the gap between Israel and Hamas will not be bridged
But a US defence official, speaking with Middle East Eye, said Israel’s use of the beach, with the pier a stone’s throw away, “implies we were part of it”.
Furthermore, the US would have been notified of Israel’s exfiltration plan via the beach because it maintains an air defence system at the pier.
US cooperation with a hostage release operation that killed more than
270 Palestinians, and possibly also a further group of hostages, puts
US policy on hostage release in a state of total chaos.
Its policy goal is to persuade Israel of the obvious truth that the
hostages themselves, and their families, scream often and loudly about:
the only killer of hostages is Israel’s continuing bombardment.
US military involvement in such a murderous operation does the
opposite. “Israel’s argument has always been that it doesn’t need a
ceasefire to rescue hostages,” Frank Lowenstein, the former special
envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, told MEE. “The rescue operation is likely to deepen Israel’s resolve on that.”
US weakness
This is not in US interests. Netanyahu is perfectly logical in his
conclusion that Biden is weak and getting weaker by the month.
He is fundamentally unable or unwilling to apply a brake to Israel’s
offensive. He threatened very publicly to withhold heavy bombs for
Netanyahu’s offensive on Rafah. Netanyahu went ahead with it anyway, and
Biden backed down.
Channel 13 recently reported that
“significant progress” had been reached towards “understandings” that
would allow the suspended shipment to arrive in Israel in the near
future: “Within the framework of the understandings being developed
between Washington and Tel Aviv, Israel will be forced to make
commitments to Washington that it will not attack with certain bombs
that will be supplied by the Biden administration, in populated areas,
including populated areas in Rafah.”
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So Israel can have the heavy bombs Biden promised to withhold, and
continue with the operation in Rafah that Biden warned it not to proceed
with.
At every stage in this eight-month war, US diplomacy has showed its
weakness, and it bears a heavy responsibility for where this has now
landed both Israel and US forces in the region.
As things stand, and with the active complicity of Blinken, the gap between Israel
and Hamas will not be bridged, even though the truth is that that the
gap between the US and Israel is much larger than that between the US or
the UN and Hamas.
Both Hamas and the US, and the 13 other members
of the UN Security Council that voted for the resolution, want an
immediate and permanent ceasefire. Israel is in a minority of one in
making sure that does not happen, knowing that neither Blinken nor Biden
has the political capital left to stop it.
A new low
To carry on the war in Gaza is to ensure that the escalation of the
conflict between Israel and Hezbollah will continue, with each side
striking deeper into each other’s territory. The surest method of
de-escalation on the northern border is to secure an immediate ceasefire
in Gaza.
I cannot think of any other time during the 76 years of this bitter
conflict, when an Israeli leadership has been so obdurate in pursuing
war aims that are unachievable - and a US president so weak and
powerless to stop it.
James Baker or George Shultz were giants of diplomacy and resolve compared with the likes of Blinken.
I previously thought that the combination of Netanyahu and former
President Donald Trump had brought the situation to an all-time low. But
I was proved wrong; worse was to come.
All the concessions Israel got during Trump’s presidency - the Golan Heights, the moving of the US embassy
to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords - pale into insignificance compared
with the backing Biden has given Israel to pursue and continue its war
on Gaza with this savagery, and for this long.
It proved to be the combination of Netanyahu and a Democratic
president that led this conflict to its most dangerous and murderous
moment.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.