Last month, Hamas ambushers fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a Gaza Strip residential building where Israeli soldiers were laying explosives to blow up the place later. The RPG round detonated the explosives prematurely, brought the building down and killed 21 Israeli troops.
It was the largest one-day loss of life among Israeli troops so far in the four-month war. Beyond that, it highlighted the reality that rival forces are fighting hard even while American diplomats are busily trying to arrange a ceasefire and organize post-war peace talks.
Israel is dedicated to maintaining control of Gaza for the foreseeable future. Its forces are clearing a buffer zone inside the Gaza Strip border to put as much distance as possible between them and Hamas, which triggered the current combat by breaching the border fence between Israel and the territory.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also plans to station soldiers in the enclave after war’s end while setting up a cooperative government of Palestinians, aided by some sort of new international agency to supply food, fuel and other day-to-day necessities to civilians.
Hamas, while still fighting, is focusing on a more distant and perhaps limited scenario: to remain a player in a post-war period when United States-sponsored peace talks might take place. With its military control reduced in the face of Israel’s military onslaught, Hamas decided to respond to a US call for ways to ease the conflict in the short run and end it forever in the long run.
Hamas leaders provided mediators with a proposal for a ceasefire to last more than four months – time to facilitate an exchange of captives with Israel. It also demanded that Israel withdraw its forces from Gaza. In addition, Hamas has approached the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, to form a unified Palestinian government as their side’s participant in proposed long-range peace talks.
US President Joe Biden, eager for some kind of breakthrough, rejected the Israeli plan to effectively occupy Gaza. He termed the Hamas response “over the top.” However, he did not criticize Hamas’s alliance with the Palestinian Authority – in effect, did not reject the idea that Hamas might somehow survive the war as a partner in peace. That alone represented a policy reversal for Biden. At the war’s start, Biden fulsomely endorsed Israel’s effort to destroy Hamas altogether.
The incompatible goals of the warring contestants help explain why American-led negotiations to end the war are foundering. For Hamas, the issue is not only salvaging political influence but ensuring the physical survival of its leadership, which Israel has pledged to capture or kill.
For Netanyahu, political survival is also at stake. He is already being faulted for having underestimated Hamas’ military abilities. Agreeing to accept Hamas’s post-war survival would certainly end his time in power.
Biden has his own political needs, and trying to please both sides, Israeli and the Palestinian, gets in the way. At home, he is under fire from pro-Palestinian groups for backing Israel and from pro-Israeli constituents for trying to restrain Israel’s war tactics and influence post-war strategy. He would like to woo voters from each side to supports his reelection to the presidency this November.
In the meantime, it is being left to Arab countries, notably Egypt and Qatar, to corral the Palestinians into peace efforts.
The Americans are left to exercise influence on Israel, but Netanyahu seems unfazed by the prospect of resisting US pressure.
Rather than entertain Biden’s concerns over the deaths of thousands of civilians in Gaza, Netanyahu has simply pocketed Washington’s verbal support and aid without softening his hardline policies. At one point, he informed Biden that Israel was a “sovereign country” that no one could order around.
Last weekend, Biden requested that Netanyahu not invade Rafah, a city at the Egyptian border that is hosting displaced Palestinians, without first producing “a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.”
Netanyahu responded by asking military officials to come up with a plan and by stepping up aerial bombing of Rafah.
Rather than taking Netanyahu to task publicly, Biden had anonymous White House surrogates express his frustration to a television network. The unnamed officials told the NBC-TV news that the President has been “venting his frustration” about his inability to influence Netanyahu, whom he referred to in insulting and vulgar language.
Netanyahu responded Tuesday by pulling out of US-mediated ceasefire negotiations in Cairo. “Israel did not receive in Cairo any new proposal from Hamas on the release of our hostages,” Netanyahu’s office announced. “A change in Hamas’s positions will allow the negotiations to advance,” it said, adding that the prime minister “will not give in to Hamas’s delusional demands.”
Netanyahu has long rejected Biden’s preferred option for future Israeli-Palestinian peace. Known as the two-state solution, it proposes to provide for Palestinian sovereignty in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Early in the war, Biden prolaimed that, “when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. In our view, it has to be a two-state solution.”
The two-state solution refers to a formula pushed by the US in the early 1990s. It was meant to create a Palestinian state. The plan disintegrated over time in the face of periodic Palestinian revolts that included terror attacks and the gradual entry of some 450,000 Israeli settlers into the West Bank. The process was especially encouraged by Netanyahu during his off-and-on terms as prime minister spanning fourteen years.
Israel dismantled its 21 settlements in Gaza in 2005, but maintained control of air and sea access as well as sharing with Egypt control of land routes into the territory.
Unable to persuade Netanyahu to agree to immediate and long-term Gaza solutions, Biden has started to signal his displeasure by applying indirect, related pressure on Netanyahu. He recently ordered the State Department to investigate whether Israel’s bombing of Gaza had used American-supplied weapons on civilian targets. Biden also placed economic sanctions on a small group of violent West Bank settlers.
Critics of Biden’s diplomacy regard such discrete moves as insufficient. Biden’s “harsh words for Netanyahu, if he even really said them, are nothing more than words,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a research fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, said in a television interview.
“At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is policy, and Biden’s policy has been unconditional support of Israel every step of the way,” Kenney-Shawa told the Al Jazeera TV news network.
“It’s all well and good for the president to say he’s concerned and wants things to happent,” remarked Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy, a research group in Washington, DC. “The actual policy is still unconditional support, and we’ve seen the results of that.”
The Netanyahu government seems unfazed by Biden’s subtle messaging or any other criticism. Michael Herzog, its ambassador to the US, told the Kan, an Israeli public broadcaster, that disputes with Washington has not reached an “historic level of tensions or some sort of crisis.”
He said Biden “maintains a critical dialogue with us that has quite a few questions about how we are conducting the war and the direction in which we are taking it. I do not foresee an end of aid. I don’t expect the US to try to force a ceasefire on us in Gaza.”