Netanyahu's Other War. I

Initial skirmishes with Joe

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The most exciting for me of the revelations from the teasing of Bob Woodward's new book on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and US politics (it's titled simply War) wasn't about Trump's and Putin's continuing relationship, anyway, though it was nice to have some confirmation about that. I was more impressed by the stuff reported by CNN on the relationship between Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu: 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked Netanyahu during an April phone call, Woodward reports.

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said.

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” Biden responded....

“I know he’s going to do something but the way I limit it is tell him to ‘Do nothing,’” Biden told his advisers, according to Woodward.

But Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu boiled over as the war continued to escalate.

“He’s a fucking liar,” Biden said privately of Netanyahu, after Israel went into Rafah, Woodward writes.

“Bibi, what the fuck?” Biden yelled at Netanyahu in July after an Israeli airstrike killed a top Hezbollah military commander and three civilians in Beirut, according to Woodward.

“You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” Biden said to Netanyahu.

I'm kind of glad to see some evidence he's been feeling like that, as he should, if his approach to the various Israeli crises since October 7 is anything like the way I've understood he ought to be doing it, since I first started writing about it on October 10, with the understanding that in the first place the horror of October 7 was truly traumatic for Israelis, like September 11 in the US, and that trauma is a very bad basis for action (maybe you can just kill your abuser on the spot, the way it might happen in a movie script, but more likely it's more complicated than that, and what you really need is physical safety in the first place, and counseling or therapy in the second to help you make the smart decisions).

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I told them so, too, not that there was any reason to think they'd listen to me, but I was heartened to notice that President Joe Biden was telling them the same thing, early on: 

When I was in Israel yesterday, I said that when America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged as well, and while we sought and got justice, we made mistakes. So I caution the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.

Binyamin Netanyahu, of course, was not blinded by rage, unless against those who challenged his right to remain prime minister for life, or at least as long as he remained under criminal indictment for his corruption. He was determined to make use of this horror, in a pattern I've watched developing since the raid, to preserve his own position by fighting any efforts toward peace in Gaza, even if it meant abandoning the Israeli hostages and engulfing the entire region in conflict, and in particular to throttle the peace plan that had been emerging among the diplomats gathered in Doha on October 6, which would have stabilized the Middle East with the creation of a Palestinian state—without antagonizing the US, the plan's principal sponsors, beyond the point they could tolerate.

This is now pretty largely confirmed in a deeply reported piece in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer; the story of Binyamin Netanyahu's war against Joe Biden's effort to stop the killing, free the hostages, and set the establishment of Palestine in motion, a sideshow to the immense human suffering that came alongside it but an important part of the story in its own right.

Foer opens with a prologue set on October 6, detailing the plan through the eyes of Brett McGurk:

McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was meeting in his office with a group of Saudi diplomats, drawing up a blueprint for a Palestinian state. It was the centerpiece of a grand bargain: In exchange for a Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. At a moment when Israel was growing internationally isolated, the nation that styled itself the leader of the Muslim world would embrace it.

The officials were there to begin hammering out the necessary details. The Saudis had assigned experts to redesign Palestine’s electrical grid and welfare system. The plan also laid out steps that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would need to take to expunge corruption from its administrative apparatus.

I myself happen to have guessed that something like this was going on, from a weird little scoop in a Politico story by Nahal Toosi, that the ongoing US-brokered negotiations in Doha between Israel and Saudi Arabia were being attended by a party of Palestinians, presumably from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It was something that hadn't previously been observed, and I started constructing for myself a pleasing fantasy in which these negotiations were going to be focused on creating some kind of national status for the Palestinian people, unlike Jared Kushner's "Abraham Accords" in the previous presidency, which had been devoted to bribing smaller Arab governments into throwing the Palestinians under the bus. Biden, the longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, the best informed foreign policy president since Franklin Roosevelt's third term, was readying to do something really new: at least that's what a Biden official suggested to Toosi:

”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.”

(My bold.) Because what, other than envisioning the creation of a Palestinian state, could have brought them on board?

And it wasn't a fantasy, as Foer's reporting shows. That was the idea.

But even as McGurk and the Saudis were hashing it out in Washington, news came from Israel that hundreds or thousands of fighters from the Palestinian Sunni militia Hamas had crossed the Gaza fence and embarked on a berserker rampage through the kibbutzim and military posts along the border, as if they were trying to wreck the whole thing (indeed, I found myself wondering if it wasn't because of the Saudi-Israeli negotiations that the Hamas organization had done the thing they did; because they hadn't been invited, because they would have no role in the new arrangements, because everybody including the Gaza citizenry at that point hated them, and, like the wicked fairy in "The Sleeping Beauty", they might be trying to put a curse on the process, out of pure spite).

And then came the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, Hezbollah, on October 8, launching (generally harmless) rockets at Israel, though signals from Iran said they disapproved of the initiative, and in retrospect it seems clear that it wasn't meant to be taken too seriously:

Hamas’s invasion had caught Hezbollah and its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, by surprise. Nasrallah, who had envisioned leading his own invasion of Israel, was irked that Hamas had moved first, and annoyed that it had failed to give him the courtesy of a warning.

Hezbollah’s initial salvos seemed calibrated to assure Israel that it didn’t want a full-blown conflict.

But IDF was skittish, in part because they long ago decided that Shi'ite Iran was the enemy they must take seriously, and almost decided to invade Lebanon on October 11, over a report that Hezbollah fighters were drifting over the northern border in paragliders, the way the Hamas fighters had done from the western border of Gaza, and had attacked a funeral. Americans could not confirm any of this, and tried to talk them out of it; Biden called Netanyahu:

“If you launch this attack, you’re guaranteeing a major Middle East war. If you don’t, there’s a lot we can do to deter that. If Hezbollah attacks, I’m with you all the way. If you start the attack, that’s a much different picture. Let’s take our time.”

In the end, Israeli intelligence acknowledged they had misread the evidence: the invaders from Lebanon were a flock of birds (the editing in The Atlantic has left the story of this humiliating overreaction almost unintelligible; I got it from the radio, if you want to check it out), and the Israeli operation was called off.

They had some reason for being panicky; the fact that the Hamas incursion took place at all was a colossal Israeli intelligence failure, and the fact that they'd been able to kill so many before the IDF managed to stop them made it worse. They didn't want to make a mistake like that again.

Indeed, Hamas had taken so many more hostages than they intended that they wanted to offload some of them, and the Israelis didn't seem interested. The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim, told Secretary of State Antony Blinken:

“We’ve been talking to Hamas, and Hamas is ready to release some of the hostages.” In return, Hamas wanted Israel to pause the air strikes that had been pounding Gaza. “We’ve been trying to talk to the Israelis,” the emir said. “We can’t get anyone to focus on it.”

And he was right. The issue of whether or not to negotiate with hostage takers and kidnapers has long been particularly important in Israel, as a subject of policy debate, and there is a specific policy known as the Rabin Doctrine, that it's preferable to extricate victims by military means, but exceptions have been made since the early 1980s, when terrorists began hiding them more effectively. Binyamin Netanyahu has a personal history in the debate, from 1976 and the dramatic and brave rescue at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda, when his older brother Yonatan, a commander in the operation, was killed, to 2011 and his own second prime ministership, when he bowed to public pressure to free Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive for five years, in exchange for 1,027 detainees in Israeli prisons, which led to his being severely criticized by various fellow politicians (who remembered his saying in 1999 that he disagreed with the Rabin doctrine because there should never be negotiations). In this case, they were unwilling to try negotiations.

This was, I believe, a violation of their own policy as carried out in the Shalit case and elsewhere—the criterion for turning to negotiations was how likely a military rescue was to succeed; and the Gaza hostages were obviously being held in the maze of tunnels beneath the territory (built by Israelis decades earlier when they were occupying it), and would be incredibly difficult to get out. During the planned Israeli ground operation, on the other hand, it would be much more difficult. The Americans understood that, and urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas before the ground operation began, but the Israelis never really responded. 

That is, eventually they did respond, in late November, with a deal that released 81 Israeli women and children (plus 23 Thais and a Filipino) during a four-day cessation of hostilities, in return for 240 Palestinian prisoners, but then dropped again out of consideration. Six hostages have been rescued since then,  a much smaller number than that of hostages who have been reported killed, probably smaller than the number that have been killed by Israeli fire or bombing, though that's a lot harder to judge. The fact remains that Israel, meaning Netanyahu and his far-right allies, has rejected the only method that really works, for the last 11 months, as the hostages themselves die or are killed, in spite of the outcry from the Israeli public demanding a return to negotiations.

To be continued...