Joe Did What?

World Peace Edition

Awaiting the hostages in Tel Aviv. Photo by Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters via CNN, November 25

I come to praise Joe Biden, not to bury him, for working, while certain people were screaming at him for failing to say “cease-fire”, to make a cease-fire and ensure that the victims of Hamas kidnaping would start coming out of Gaza, as desperately needed aid flowed in to the territory’s civilian inhabitants, safe at least for the moment from the continual bombardment that started after the October 7 massacres.

Now there’s going to be a cease-fire for at least four days, probably, during which each day 10 hostages, all women and children (Friday morning it turned out to be 13 Israelis, plus an unexpected 10 Thai nationals and a Filipino abducted from workplaces in Israel, a welcome sign that Hamas cares about its international image), will be sent to Israel via Rafah and 30 Palestinian prisoners (or rather detainees, very few of them having been charged, let alone convicted, of any crimes), also all women and children, returned from Israel to Gaza, and the guns and bombs and even overhead spy drones will fall silent (in part, we’re told, because the Hamas forces have to go looking for the hostages, they’re not clear where they are), and if it goes well, after the four days, extending one day at a time, 10 or so more Israel hostages and 30 or so more Palestinian detainees each day, for—a while longer, that’s not totally clear.

It’s that last bit, largely dismissed or unmentioned in the media coverage, that impresses me as especially important, pointing to a desperately fragile but imaginable path toward peace. By Monday, 40-some hostages will have been brought back, and probably 60-some women and children remain in Gaza captivity (numbers drawing on Times coverage), and upwards of 150 Palestinian women and children in Israeli detention.

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The Israeli government, and Netanyahu personally, will be coming under immense pressure to bring them home as well, from the US, from the Arab countries and especially Qatar, which has been so instrumental in getting things to this point, and from the hostages’ own families and supporters, who have been developing into a force in their own right in the course of the war, commandeering the anti-Netanyahu protest, as I’ve been saying since early this month, and I’m convinced they will really continue the deal to that point, adding another five, six, even seven days to the military “pause”, unless Hamas (or more likely some rogue element within the Hamas organization) does something horrible to stop it.

And will it come to an end then? There will still be a hundred or remaining hostages, many of them not civilians but IDF men and a few women soldiers; and in Israel about 7,500 Palestinian men detained in the West Bank, 2,700 of them arrested since October 7. No, I can’t guess what happens next, but I have the strongest sense Joe Biden had an idea, and it’s related to whatever he was referring to in his Washington Post op-ed piece last Saturday ("The U.S. won't back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas"):

Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.

And the remarks he offered when the hostage exchange finally started up on Friday:

We also look to the future.  As we look to the future, we have to end this cycle of violence in the Middle East.
 
We need to renew our resolve to pursue this two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side by side in a two-state solution with equal measure of freedom and dignity.
 
Two states for two peoples.  And it’s more important now than ever.

I think you can see the effort to turn this horror into a real solution in everything he’s done on the issue (now that we know something more about that) since October 7, starting with the effort to negotiate a cease-fire in return for the hostages (when Netanyahu was absolutely rejecting the proposal) and everything he’s said and written, starting with his plea to Israel not to be blinded by rage and make the kinds of fatal mistakes the US made after the 9/11 attacks (as Netanyahu immediately began to do, issuing maximalist threats days before the Israeli forces were even ready to deploy). Above all, Netanyahu’s need to think about what comes next, after the bombing campaign. Suppose you do “destroy Hamas”, Bibi, what do you do after that?

He won’t directly criticize Netanyahu—a delicate matter, because of the contempt with which Netanyahu has treated him, as president, and Barack Obama before him, and his open backing of our criminal presidential candidate Trump—but he’s been systematically dismantling all Netanyahu’s views on how to proceed, focusing on negotiation, asking for “pauses” (it’s very recently that he started allowing himself to use the word “cease-fire”), demanding Israel’s consent to the UN aid trucks entering Gaza, urging Israeli restraint. He agrees that Hamas must lose control of Gaza but insists on recognition of the suffering of the civilian population, and on a stop to the anti-Palestinian violence in the illegal West Bank settlements:

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources. Every innocent Palestinian life lost is a tragedy that rips apart families and communities….

I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.

(Those steps are now being taken, by the way.)

He also brings himself and Netanyahu into the context, in a way I’d like to linger on for a moment:

Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September.

I remember feeling really disappointed with these negotiations in the summer, focused on getting the region’s military giants, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to recognize each other diplomatically, which seemed to me like a continued plot development of Kushner’s “Abraham Accords” to sideline the Palestinians forever; but I was apparently wrong about that, as I learned literally on October 8 from a piece in Politico on the Hamas terrorist attacks of the day before, by Nahal Toosi. Palestinians, Toosi had learned, far from being thrown under the bus, were deeply involved:

“China is not just showing up. They are showing up with massive, massive offers to these countries,” a senior Biden administration official told POLITICO last week, before the Hamas attack. The official declined to detail the shape of the grand bargain, including what security guarantees the U.S. would offer the Saudis.

The official also said Palestinians had been participating.

”They want to be a part of this process, and we would not do it without them,” the official said. “That is a major change from their policy, which has been they will never engage in any process that has to do with an Arab state normalizing relations with Israel absent a Palestinian state.”

The official didn’t specify which Palestinians, but the reference was likely to people affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.

So there was something in it after all for the Palestinians in general, but not for Hamas in particular. And wouldn’t that have been a sufficient reason for the Hamas attack? For the party of perpetual war to stop this victory for their hated rivals in Ramallah, the party of negotiation?

And Biden apparently thought so too:

Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.

That’s where I end up: Biden means what he’s saying, his ambition reaches that far, to the revival of the moribund idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel in a peaceful Middle East. It’s what he was working for before October 7 and it’s what he’s working for now, against the rightwing, anti-state forces of Hamas and Likud too—what happens after the exchange of women and children prisoners comes to an end and the people on both sides start clamoring for the return of the men as well and the pressure on the Hamas and Likud politicians becomes inexorable. That’s where the movement, somehow, begins.

I’m afraid it’s gotten pretty late for that happy ending. Netanyahu’s and IDF’s refusal to cooperate with the US and other friendly forces, and the ferocious bombing of Gaza have done huge harm. It’s become clear that the IDF had no idea which tunnels the Hamas leadership was hiding out in—not under the Jabaliya refugee camp or the al-Shifa Hospital, anyhow—and all they’ve succeeded in doing is creating more hatred for Israel than existed before. Together with something like 14,000 dead including possibly 60 of the hostages kidnapped on October 7, buried under the rubble with their captors (there is no reason to trust that number as Hamas has reported them in regular installments from October 13 through November 4, but it’s overwhelmingly likely that some must have died that way). Meanwhile, the bombing in Gaza has actually made Hamas pretty popular in the West Bank (not so much in Gaza, naturally, but much more popular there too than it was in the survey taken October 6, when 67% of Gazans reported “no trust at all” or “not a lot of trust” in Hamas). The two-state solution, preferred by solid majorities two months ago, now seems generally rejected, and the US has become deeply unpopular, together with Iran, which is seen as having failed to keep its own commitments. The most popular Palestinian politicians are neither from Hamas nor the current Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, but languishing in Israeli prisons, where (as I’ve said elsewhere) top candidate Marwan Barghouti has been talking about Nelson Mandela and the possibilities of compromise.

In Israel, a poll released Friday (but conducted back on November 15-16) predicted if an election were to be held now Netanyahu’s coalition would plunge to 41 seats in the Knesset, while Benny Ganz’s “Change” alliance would be able to form a government with 79. This is not a victory for the left (the Labor party would get no seats at all), but the Change government would include the Arab-dominated Hadash-Ta’al, so perhaps it’s a victory for some idea of pluralism.

If Biden’s advice had been heeded, Israelis and Palestinians alike would be in a much better position now. It’s a shame people wouldn’t listen.