Moving Mountains

...on fairly short notice; it's a problem

Mountain moving, via.

I’d been struggling for a couple of days with the need to write a post commemorating the second anniversary of the Gaza war on October 7 when the news came that the negotiators in Sharm el Sheikh, including the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who had arrived on Monday, had brought the war to an end, sort of, or were about to do so, or that the beginning of its ending had been at any rate announced, on Donald Trump’s social media platform under his account:

“Well, I’m blessed!” said the president.

Not by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, though, which pointedly announced that they had already made their final decision (as it turned out this morning for the Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado) on Monday, that is days before Israel and Hamas assented to the 20-point Trump peace plan—Norwegian politicians are warning that Trump might express his rage in tariffs. The White House has issued its official complaint:

“President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X. “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”

I have to say I very much welcome the plan as far as I understand it, in spite of its seemingly being the old mountain-mover’s accomplishment. It obviously can’t make up for the suffering of the last two years, of those Israelis especially living in the desert kibbutzim near the Gaza border who endured the October 7 attack and of all the Gazans who bore the constant bombing and deprivation thereafter, victims on both sides of unspeakable collective punishments—it’s so much better if that stops than if it doesn’t. And there seems to be a great deal of hope that it really is stopping, for some kind of long term, though the initial declaration that the war was over has been giving way to more cautious reference to a ceasefire.

That’s a big part of what I’m having trouble understanding: what is it, actually? What’s been agreed to? In the world outside the White House, there are a couple of really crucial ambiguities, to my mind.

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First, is it a single-step process, as implied by the wording of point 3 (”If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end”)? Or is it a series of phases, like previous proposals? Hamas has always demanded the single step, because once they have carried out their first obligation, giving up all the hostages, they will have given up nearly all their leverage, and all of it when they have finished disarming. An International Stabilization Force (point 15) is to be tasked with protecting people from Hamas as the IDF troops withdraw; will it also protect Hamas members from their their enemies? Will they be safe from the kind of targeted assassination attempts for which Israel has become known, from physicists in Iran to Hamas leaders in Qatar?

Second, the language of point 19 refers to a future time following reforms in the Palestinian Authority when “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people”. What does “may” mean in there? Is that the expression of a hope, or is it a neutral prediction, like “it may rain later this afternoon”? If the former, how does it consort with the firm position of the Likud coalition that such a time must never come—if the latter, what’s it doing in the document at all?

Netanyahu rejected Hamas proposals for a hostage exchange, the first issue, in October 2023 and for negotiating a Palestinian state, the second issue (the first time Hamas had accepted the idea of the two-state solution) in advance of the first such exchange in November. Both of the times Netanyahu unilaterally broke an agreed ceasefire were over that first issue: the insistence of Hamas that the ceasefire needed to be permanent before they surrendered all their leverage by releasing all the hostages; in a more informal way in December 2023, and then again last March, when Hamas was insisting on the agreed framework, in which the parties would move to phase 2, negotiating the end of the war before Hamas gave up more than the 25 they had already released in phase 1. Netanyahu demanded a new agreement, and then went back to the bombing. The two issues are clearly the weakest points in the current agreement as well.

All those efforts to negotiate on the part of the Biden administration are tending to get memory-holed, partly, I suppose, because they all failed in the end; but they’re an essential part of the background from which the Trump agreement has arisen, going back as far not just as October 7 2023, but in fact October 6, when a Saudi-Israeli normalization plan was being hammered out in Doha, Qatar, the day Arab Barometer published their poll showing support for Hamas in Gaza at 27% (Fatah was at 30%), and also around the time Politico’s Nahal Toosi learned that Palestinians, probably from Fatah, were attending the Doha talks with strong US support

They want to be a part of this process, and we would not do it without them,” the [senior Biden administration] 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.

It’s been my belief ever since around October 10 2023 that these discussions were an indirect cause of October 7: that the Islamist Hamas organization running Gaza (but holding important listening posts in Doha) chose that moment to mount its attack across the fence on the Israeli kibbutzim, precisely to forestall this momentary advantage for the secularist PA—although the horror of the violence, the sheer volume of murders, rapes, and kidnappings, was partly because of the the catastrophic failure of Israeli Defense Forces to respond in time to stop it; the Hamas fighters, unexpectedly unopposed, went completely out of control, berserk. And the Hamas leadership, unwilling to admit they’d lost control—they’re psychopaths themselves, of course—preferred to leave the impression they’d done it on purpose.

In any case, it was the the beginning of a new phase in the international discussion of Middle East issues, in which some of the richest Arab countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, began centering the plight of Palestinians in a way they hadn’t done at all before, certainly not in the Trump-era negotiations, for example, of the “Abraham Accords”, of which UAE and Bahrain were the first members. The Biden administration certainly took an interest in this, and the possibility of returning the 1993 Oslo Accords to the conversation, as certainly happened in the diplomacy of October 7, if not quite in its media coverage. According to me.

I was really interested, in this context, in NPR’s interview with Gershon Baskin, an Israeli-American opinion journalist, peace proponent, and two-stater who appears to have been pretty deeply involved in the most recent negotiations between Israel and Hamas, since August or so, when he began telling his interlocutors in Hamas that

the only way that the war in Gaza would end is if President Trump decides that it has to end because Prime Minister Netanyahu had no interest in ending the war whatsoever. He was willing to continue it forever because it keeps him in power.... Every time they said, Israel won’t accept this, Israel won’t accept that, I kept telling Hamas, Israel won’t accept anything. You have to imagine that you’re sitting in a room across the table from Donald Trump, not from Netanyahu. The person you need to convince is Trump.

which is a somewhat depressing way of looking at it: only Trump, the implication is, was so dictatorial that he could overrule the dictator Netanyahu, and that’s what happened, over Netanyahu’s hubristic decision to follow up his quick wars on Hezbollah in Lebanon and on Iran with an assassination attempt on the Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar, home to an enormous US military base, without Trump’s permission:

I don’t think you can find a person in the Middle East - maybe in the entire world - who doesn’t believe that Israel did it without a green light from Washington. The problem is that Israel failed. They didn’t succeed. But the fact that it failed put Trump in a very difficult position, and he immediately had to dissociate himself and the United States from it, saying they didn’t authorize it. They didn’t green-light it. They warned the Qataris that it was coming. They didn’t have enough time, etc.... When Witkoff sent me the message, he even said, don’t distribute this, but you can tell Hamas that we had nothing to do with it. We didn’t green-light it, and we didn’t approve it. We condemned it. And then Trump put it on Truth Social that he condemned it. And I know that Witkoff wrote a lot of the messages that Trump put on Truth Social about the deal, or that’s what I believe, at least...

And that really doesn’t explain why Trump (possibly) succeeded and Biden failed to stop this terrible and unnecessary war (I’ve ascribed that to the cowardice of Benny Gantz failing to participate in the Biden plan to push Netanyahu out of power). It certainly doesn’t explain Baskin’s complaint that Biden’s point man Brett McGurk wouldn’t listen to him, Baskin.

What Baskin ends up saying is that Trump won basically by being Netanyahu’s soul mate and sharing his ideology:

They support the American Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. They were hostile to Barack Obama. They were hostile to Joe Biden, and they’re very supportive of Donald Trump.... Netanyahu’s a Republican, and Trump has the ability to tell Netanyahu what to do and not, and Netanyahu cannot say no to Trump.

and that, I think, is a good reason for thinking that this solution won’t pan out; it’s biased in favor of its own resistance to change.