Making Saudi Arabia part of a Gaza solution is a massive strategic breakthrough.
Israel is absolutely right to insist on removing the barbaric Hamas — an enemy of the Palestinians no less than of Israel — from power in Gaza. The threat its regime poses would not be acceptable to anyone — not anyone — on the planet, if they were the ones affected. But the more responsible politicians and generals in Israel also know there is more than one way to achieve this, that endless war has disadvantages, and that the Jewish way is to seek wisdom and not just power.
That does not apply to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose calamitous time in office is now reaching its apogee. After presiding over the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, the PM is now feverishly rejecting a plan cooked up by the Biden Administration with the help of Arab and European countries that would achieve Israel’s twin aims of removing Hamas from power and saving the Israeli hostages.
It’s a safe bet that he’s driven by the probably correct calculation that the end of the war would bring the end of his rein, since some 75% of Israelis tell every pollster who’s interested that they want him gone. He hopes Israelis will buy this as “standing firm.” I do not want to see the world force Israel’s hand — that would be a victory of sorts for global jihad, which would be awful. Since Netanyahu is almost certainly beyond redemption, it is the Israelis themselves who should show him the door.
This is not inconceivable, because Israelis are certainly starting to sense that something is not quite right, and there is increasing doubt about the idea that the two goals are compatible in the context of a prolonged military occupation,
The concern is that a prolonged war, perhaps lasting throughout all of 2024 as some generals have warned, would entail a series of excruciating costs, including the sacrifice of the 100+ hostages, the deaths of many hundreds more soldiers, a hammer blow to the economy and the devastation of Israel’s standing around the world. If the government persists in its public rejectionism, add to that a conflict with the Biden Administration, which would be strategically calamitous.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been shuttling around the region and a few weeks ago presented the outline of the American ideas to Israel. There are still details to be worked out, and if Israel were wiser it would engage and make sure the plan included aspects important to it. Either way, here — based on reports and conversations — are the contours:
- The plan would gradually, in phases, end the war with its costs to life on both sides and to the economy.
- Also in phases, it would achieve the return of all the hostages — which many Israelis want prioritized.
- It would mobilize Saudi Arabia, moderate countries in the Gulf and the region and all of the West behind Israel’s goal of having Hamas no longer rule Gaza — replacing it with a rejuvenated version of the Palestinian Authority, backed up by various forms of regional and global assistance.
- It aspires to involve Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries in the pacification and reconstruction of Gaza, aligning their interests with those of Israel and away from Hamas – a major strategic breakthrough.
- It would make formal the path toward peace with Saudi Arabia, an outcome whose strategic, economic and political benefits are incalculable – for Israel, the Saudis and the region, cementing an alliance against Iran and its proxies.
- It would likely end the active conflict with Hezbollah and enable Israel to focus on the diplomatic effort to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to push back its forces from the border.
- It would probably end the Houthi outrage in the Red Sea, which would be very much appreciated by Egypt, which relies on the Suez Canal for much of its foreign currency, and by the world, which needs it for an eighth of global trade.
What Israel has to do in exchange is to agree on the Palestinian Authority’s role in Gaza, and also to the principle of a two-state solution — sometime down the road. Netanyahu presents this as an unacceptable cost. But in fact, this too is a benefit.
After the Oct. 7 invasion from Gaza, Israelis are understandably jittery about handing territory over to anyone. But Israel is not being asked to pull troops out of the West Bank fully by tomorrow but to enter a process that will lead to partition and some version of Palestinian independence.
That is something that has already been accepted by every one of Netanyahu’s predecessors dating back to 1993, and has indeed been accepted by Netanyahu himself in a major 2009 speech (though one may suspect he was dissembling).
And critically, eventual partition is something Israel itself needs, because if it incorporated the West Bank and Gaza it would already be a Jewish-minority country, and if it refused voting rights to the majority it would be a pariah and would ultimately have its hand forced by the outside world.
There is no other pathway for an export-leaning economy surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors and hugely reliant on a US military and diplomatic umbrella. Ignoring this in the name of ideology or the principle of self-reliance is idiocy.
One may argue that all this is irrelevant because Hamas itself hasn’t accepted the deal. Indeed, Hamas has so far conditioned a release of the hostages on a return to the status quo ante – which Israel is right to reject, and which the Western world, under the right circumstances, would back Israel in rejecting.
Moreover, there are persistent reports that the Hamas leadership is starting to understand that being left on their own amid the utter devastation in Gaza, with no one willing to fund a reconstruction, is a pretty good recipe for being ripped limb from limb by the desperate population (at long last). There are indications the leadership would agree to an exile, and indeed, they so richly deserve a fiery death that they should grab any such option.
Israel should accept the US plan in principle, and make sure it is framed in such a way as to bring the region and the world behind a total delegitimizing of Hamas and a ban on its participation in any Palestinian elections. There is quite literally no reason for Israel not to do that, collect the good will of the world, and let the pressure then shift to Hamas. One of the basic inadequacies of the current government – and they are, of course, legion – is that they seem to not understand something so basic.
Indeed, if Israel’s government were competent at messaging, if it understood the first thing about proactively driving a narrative, it would be flooding the media zone with offers to end the war immediately on condition Hamas surrenders and coughs up the hostages, and it would be pulling together the Arab coalition to help stabilize and rebuild Gaza, and not waiting for the Americans to do it – not to say spitting in their face when they do.
It is increasingly reasonable to conclude – as many have in Israel and at the White House – that Netanyahu prefers to drag out the war, arguing that wartime is no time for changing leaders. He is a criminal defendant on trial for bribery, badly discredit by the failures on Oct. 7, and now facing polls that for three months have shown three quarters of the public would prefer that he resigned. His hope is to drag things out in the hope that memories of the epic breakdown on Oct. 7 will fade, and that Donald Trump will be returned to the White House.
Indeed, it is precisely by biting the hand of Biden even as that hand feeds him that Netanyahu can help bring that outcome about. This not only contradicts Israel’s interests, but projects shameful ingratitude to Biden, who flew to Israel in the days after the massacre and has steadfastly supported its response. Without that support, Israel’s position in the world, after causing so much death and destruction in Gaza, would be untenable – from the Security Council to the Hague to the basic matter of munitions supply.
Biden is paying a massive political price at home in an election year – with Muslim Americans whom he needs in Michigan, with minorities and progressives whom he needs everywhere. It is plainly helping Trump, to the horror of the world.
It doesn’t take a major cynic to suspect that Netanyahu indeed hopes to see Trump return, bringing with him a transactional and illiberal landscape devoid of humanitarian concerns and any pretense of decency.
There is a straight line from Netanyahu’s current conflict with the Biden to his 2015 speech in Congress against President Obama’s effort to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. Here’s how that ended up: Israel is an unpopular cause with the Democrat-leaning half of the US and among its youth in general – and Iran is a nuclear threshold state because Netanyahu convinced President Trump to pull out of that same deal a few years later. No benefits; only exacerbated dangers.
That more or less sums up what Netanyahu offers the country today. That he remains in power is a major calamity for the country, the region and the world.
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