Netanyahu's Other War. II

A plan develops

Dadanite statues dating back to 4th to 1st century B.C.E., found in a funerary temple in Al-‘Ulā, Saudi Arabia, March 2024. Photo by Ali Lajami, via Wikimedia Commons.

Previous installment here.

The prisoner exchanges of November, five weeks into the war, as I wrote at the time, seemed aimed at a broader purpose than simply freeing the hostages captured by Hamas: permanent peace, on a scale most of the world had stopped imagining, towards which this was a step. Biden had signaled it himself, in a Washington Post op-ed the week before the exchanges began:

for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released....

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.

In fact, the program was to move toward the outcome US and Saudi negotiators had been envisaging in Doha, before the war began: while the Israelis stubbornly refused to think about what the end of the war might look like, Biden had already imagined it; a plan already existed, in some detail, with the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia providing the political-diplomatic framework within which the Palestinian state could be constructed from the bottom up, from infrastructure to social safety net, as we now understand, though my readers may have thought it was kind of fanciful at the time, and I didn't really have any evidence of the kind Foer has now provided.  

As long as the hostages were being released, the cessation of hostilities could be maintained, the food and water supply in Gaza could be replenished, the health system restored, a ceasefire evolve into a genuine peace; the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails would supply the makings of a political class to replace not only Hamas but also the elderly and corrupt rulers of the old Palestinian Authority, often seen as Israeli puppets. And then there was the political economy, as Biden said:

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. 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.

But

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This much is clear: A two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.

Nevertheless, it didn't happen. The ceasefire and exchange collapsed in less than a week, with the blame no doubt to be shared by both sides, and the situation reverted to the horror that it had been for some time, with the wildly indiscriminate IDF bombing killing tens of thousand (we later learned that the targets were selected by AI programs known as "The Gospel" and "Lavender", instead of the usual human experts, so they can identify them much faster, but with an official error rate of around 10%, which doesn't include the individuals picked with only the loosest of connections to militant groups, or the many killed and maimed because of the use of "dumb bombs" that destroy entire buildings instead of the "smart munitions" that work more precisely, because "You don't want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people") and refusing to allow aid trucks into the territory for weeks at a time, while the population ate grass and drank seawater and hospitals often operated without electricity, to say nothing of anesthetic. 

At the same time, in the US, Foer notes,

A backlash against Biden’s support for Israel was growing, not just among pro-Palestinian activists, but within the administration itself. In early December, a group of White House interns published an anonymous letter accusing the president of callously ignoring civilian deaths. A State Department official resigned in protest. Dissent began to filter into the Situation Room. A group that included Jon Finer, the deputy head of the National Security Council, and Phil Gordon, national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, quietly complained about Israeli tactics.

And the Israelis weren't even doing themselves any good. They kept saying, "Israel has a right to defend itself," but they could have done that by pulling out of the Strip and going back to patrolling the border properly, as they'd done for years before October. They clearly had no plan for achieving their vague and implausible declared war aim, to "eliminate Hamas altogether as a political and military force", in abrupt contrast with Netanyahu's strategy as declared in 2019

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy - to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” 

and they had even less of a plan for what to do on the "day after", whenever they were tired enough to declare that the war was over. They were making themselves less safe, with no discernible aim whatever, unless the real aim was to keep Netanyahu safely in the prime minister's seat with the support of his radically anti-Arab partners, and out of the criminal court where he was due to be tried for corruption, with a perpetual war forestalling the parliamentary election he was certain to lose.

And why, the question insistently came back, wasn't the Biden administration doing something to pressure them into doing better? Why, especially, wasn't the US leveraging its role as Israel's number one arms supplier, as the makers of the 2000-pound bunker buster bombs that were leveling Gaza to the ground, to make them stop? Why wouldn't they even abstain on a UN resolution condemning Israel's conduct?

I had two slightly novel ideas about this by mid-December or so.

One was about stopping arms shipments in particular, that it wouldn't save any lives. Israel wouldn't change its behavior. Netanyahu had shown repeatedly since October 8 that he was indifferent to US feelings on these matters. The country has its own massive and sophisticated arms industry (exporting $23 billion worth in 2023), in any case, and the killing would continue with or without US weapons.

That by itself wouldn't be a sufficient reason for cutting off the deliveries (even if we couldn't stop the killing, we'd get something spiritually out of not being directly responsible for it, washing off some of the karma burden), but there was more to it than that. Angry as some potential voters (mostly young and many of color) might be at US complicity with the killing, other voters (mostly older and some with very deep pockets as political donors) would be equally outraged at a halt, and it was really hard to feel sure which would cost the Biden presidential campaign more—I'm afraid you can't expect politicians not to be making those calculations, even if they're called Roosevelt.

Finally, though, and most important of all, Biden had his own favored idea for ending the war, which would please a lot of voters on both sides of the Israel divide, and please future historians as well, that concept of the Saudi-Israel deal and of Palestinian independence with the return of the hostages and the end of the war. The war's victims wouldn't have died in vain if it ended this way! 

The chief obstacle to that was pretty clearly one person. The Israeli population was deeply confused, wanting Hamas punished at any price but longing for the return of the hostages and enraged with Prime Minister Netanyahu for his neglect of that aspect; they were moving in the direction (they're there now) of accepting peace now if it meant the return of the hostages. As I wrote at the time,

Israel's bombing campaign is a recruiting campaign for terrorists. As usual, that's how the cycle works, but somehow seems worse than usual, and more self-defeating.

And in Israel, meanwhile? Hostility in Tel Aviv to the government over the hostage issue has grown to the point where demonstrations rival the ones against Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plans before the massacres.

What's particularly interesting to me is the degree to which US president Joe Biden, who was already pretty popular in Israel—more popular than Netanyahu, anyway—has been nourishing his relationship with the Israeli public, as if he were running for prime minister himself. When he visits Israel, he takes time to meet with the hostage families, something Netanyahu never does, and show them some of that famous Biden empathy, and it gets a response.... 

While the media is focused (with the credulous performative "left") on Biden's public gestures of friendship with the PM ("Bibi, I love you, but I don't agree with a damn thing you had to say"), and missing the implied bless-his-heart dismissal, Biden is determined to undermine him and seek an end to the conflict that keeps Netanyahu politically alive. As with the attempted judicial coup, he avoids criticizing Netanyahu directly, but doesn't hesitate to attack the reactionary cabinet members:

In July, Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Netanyahu’s government has “the most extremist members of cabinets that I’ve seen” in Israel, noting that “I go all the way back to Golda Meir.” This past week, at a campaign event hosted by a former chair of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, Biden went even further, singling out a far-right minister by name. “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” the president said. Itamar “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution.” This was Biden’s approach in action: criticizing Israel during wartime in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and doing so in a way that nonetheless denied Netanyahu any opening.

And he's adopted the same kind of technique with regard to the West Bank settler violence, with some real teeth (he's denying offenders visas, and cutting off shipments of M-16s that might fall into their hands).

Let's add, please, that Biden can't stop the carnage in Gaza by denying Netanyahu weapons, precisely because Netanyahu doesn't care. As Dan Nexon says on Bluesky today, "the idea that Israel would stop fighting without U.S. arms is… I think, a fantasy." What if the US decides to vote for a Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire? Netanyahu has already announced he'll defy the resolution the US did vote for, calling for "extended pauses". Netanyahu doesn't believe rules apply to him. Another psychopath, and Biden knows it well. The only way Biden can really influence the conduct of the war is by going over Netanyahu's head, as it were, to the people (sort of the way Netanyahu did to Obama to shut down talk of a Palestinian state in 2015), and that is what he has been doing, together with Blinken and Sullivan (and Defense Secretary Austin and Vice President Harris), on the two-pronged approach of focusing on the hostages (which requires pausing in the fighting), which he supposes (I hope rightly) is more important to them than the continuing revenge against Hamas, and the pressure for a less "indiscriminate" battle style, by which he hopes not only to save lives, but also to recover his ability to work with Palestinians, and to work toward a much longer-term result.

(And another reason for not cutting off the arms flow would be to avoid freaking out the Israeli public into thinking "OMG even America hates us." Biden's plan was, precisely, to show them he was a more trustworthy friend to Israel than their own selfish and crooked prime minister.)

Such was the situation on January 8 2024, when Secretary of State Blinken met Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in his winter oasis in the Hejaz at Al ‘Ulā, in a tent (Franklin Foer reports) piled with rugs and cushions, to talk about a renewed diplomatic effort for the plan they had temporarily abandoned on October 7. 

Part III coming shortly.