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BIBI UNBOWED
The Israeli prime minister's hand has been strengthened by a bogus ceasefire in Lebanon
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Fourteen months after Israel’s greatest trauma, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing another round of pleadings on three pending corruption charges dating back years, is still the darling of the extreme religious right in Israel and is riding high in the polls, with the blood of tens of thousands in Gaza and Lebanon and a few in Iran on his soul.
He has defeated Hamas, bombed Hezbollah into a corner, and largely destroyed Iran’s capability to defend itself against future Israeli air attacks. He has assassinated enemies and ignored the rage of much of the world about Israel’s continued attacks against defenseless Gaza, all the while enjoying sustained political and military support from the Biden White House. Now he is looking forward to even greater backing from the incoming Trump administration. American bombs and dollars are still flowing into Israel, as the economy there continues its slump, with many successful high-tech firms having fled months ago from Israel’s unsettled market and constant inflation.
Netanyahu is known to have a difficult personal life with a wife who insists on interviewing his significant appointees and two grown sons, both of age to be reserve members of the Israeli Defense Forces. They have spent the past fourteen months living lives of safety and ease—one in London and the other in Miami—as their peers have been at war.
Throughout all of this, Netanyahu and his subordinates in the government have turned language inside out and continued bombing innocents in Gaza, the West Bank, Beirut, and Baalbek.
Israel’s recent ceasefire agreement with Lebanon is a perfect example of such double-talk. An expert on international negotiations recently gave me a blistering assessment of the ceasefire that some leading American newspapers have hailed as a significant step toward peace. The Western media has fostered hope that a similar agreement can be reached with the diminished Hamas leadership to bring the surviving October 7 hostages, if there are any, home from Gaza.
“It is a bizarre agreement,” the expert told me. “There are no signatory parties on behalf of Country A, Country B. It is not even an agreement. It’s an announcement by the US and France that they understand X, Y and Z. It’s all about what the US and France understand but not the obligations of the parties.”
The expert said that the ceasefire is in no way “legally binding and has no duration . . . but US officials have said it is designed to be permanent.” The peace, if it comes, will be monitored by soldiers of the reinvigorated Lebanese Armed Forces, whose formerly demoralized troops were recently described by the Economist as one of the few respected institutions left in a chronically fragmented country. Adding to the complications, the expert said, is the fact that most LAF soldiers “view Israel as the enemy, especially since Israel is burning one-third of the country to the ground. The army will never let itself be used against Hezbollah. LAF was always a force for internal security . . . just as [are] all Middle Eastern armies the US controls and arms and trains. . . . And if the US cares so much about the LAF then why is it letting the Israelis kill LAF soldiers and officers?”
The expert was referring to the fact that the Israeli military and air force have continued their attacks in southern Lebanon under the auspices of a side ceasefire agreement between the US and Israel that permits such attacks to take place up to fifteen miles north of the border with Israel, and sometimes miles beyond that limit if intelligence warrants them. The agreement also enabled those who had fled their homes in northern Israel and southern Lebanon to return. Roads on both sides of the border have been filled by those desperate to return home. Many of the returning Lebanese are Shia supporters of Hezbollah.
Reports in the Western media largely depict the near daily Israeli bombing in Lebanon as primarily aimed at Hezbollah targets. Not so, said the expert, who has been monitoring the Middle East for decades. “Israeli jets were not bombing Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon,” he told me. “They were destroying every Shia village and neighborhood in the country. They were destroying hospitals, schools and mosques and social and financial institutions, and they were targeting ambulances drivers and emergency healthcare workers.”
The United States, he told me, despite its public support for the ceasefire, is at the same time supporting the Israeli war in Lebanon. Washington, he said, “is not a neutral and well-intentioned observer here. If the US wanted to hold Lebanon together” it would pressure Israel—that is, Netanyahu—to back off.
The Biden administration, he said, “has not been engaged in diplomacy. It has just been delivering Israeli ultimatums demanding that Hezbollah and Lebanon surrender.”
I took the expert’s opinion—I’ve not seen anything close to his view in an American newspaper—to a well-informed American official known for his honesty and integrity. He was blunt about the current situation. “Israel is not waiting for the next go-around. They are mopping up and consolidating their current hold” in their part of the Middle East. “It is a fact,” he said, that “when a ceasefire is broken in the Middle East, the Israelis are the ones to do it first. Hezbollah is trying to pretend that they are still a force to be dealt with, but it’s all over.
“The game is also over [for Hamas] in Gaza,” he said. “The brave ones who tried to fight are all dead, and all those who are left are too chickenshit to fight.” He said another blow to any hope for Hamas came during the recent state visit to England by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, which, along with Turkey and Hamas, has supported the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Energy-rich Qatar has been the most important financial backer of Hamas, for many years with the tacit approval of Netanyahu. I was told by the knowledgeable American that the emir has made it known at a state dinner for him at Buckingham Palace hosted by King Charles that Qatar no longer supports Hamas. Al Thani also met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 10 Downing St. and visited Parliament.
What is to happen, I asked, to the two million or so Palestinians still being bombed and starved and deprived of clean drinking water or any semblance of decent housing and sanitation, with no sign of support from the Arab and Western world and no way to flee Gaza?
The answer, in essence, was a question: What happened to the American Indians in the plains of the Dakotas?
So here we are. Netanyahu, despite his lies and his refusal to make the return of hostages a priority, has enough breathing room and political support from an anxious and fractious public that has endorsed his policy of taking the war to Hamas, to Lebanon, and to Iran—long perceived as the ultimate threat. The United States has had his back throughout, and there is reason to believe that the Trump administration will go all-out in support of the amoral prime minister.
There will soon be an annexation of a significant chunk of the West Bank, ending vague notions of a two-state solution. The extreme right wing in Israel, to which Netanyahu is beholden, want to turn parts of north Gaza, which is now being evacuated, with many who resisted being forced out at gunpoint, into an Israeli religious colony.
Netanyahu now has the chance to improve his political standing further by going after the Haredim in Israel, ultra-orthodox followers of the Torah whose refusal to serve in the armed forces has become a political issue among families whose reservist sons and daughters are being recalled to active duty for a second time.
What about the Gazans now struggling to survive day by day or hour by hour? That question leads to a resigned shrug, even from the best of public officials. There are winners, and there are losers. Donald Trump won the presidency despite his oft-repeated total support for Netanyahu’s Israel. If he has a point of view about the plight of the many Palestinians now facing despair, starvation, and possible death, it has not been articulated.
There are some persons of integrity, as I have learned, among his foreign policy team, but so far Trump’s only concern for Palestinians has seemed to be a sense that photographs of maimed and dead Palestinians are bad publicity.