Newsletter

Palestine diplomacy, state of play

Astonishing headline from The Times, as James Fallows notes:

As you see, the article’s reporting is not about Biden. It is mostly about Trump’s lieutenants for Middle East affairs, Jared Kushner (pal and multibillion-dollar beneficiary of the Saudi crown prince) and ex-ambassador David Friedman, openly consorting with the hardest-line settler-movement components of the Netanyahu government in making plans for the thorough ethnic cleansing not just of Gaza but also the West Bank, while their big orange boss seems seriously out of it, with nothing coherent to say:

---

Mr. Friedman has been pushing a Future of Judea & Samaria plan, using the biblical terminology for the West Bank to assert what he says is Israel’s right to annex the territory, which under longstanding American policy is supposed to constitute the lion’s share of an eventual sovereign Palestinian state. The West Bank has been under military occupation since 1967.

Presenting his plan last month at the conference of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, Mr. Friedman called Mr. Biden’s fresh push for a two-state solution — Israel and Palestine existing side by side — a “dead letter.” …

The overall tone of the Trump interview with Israel Hayom was muddled and contradictory. Beyond his call for Israel to “get the job done” in Gaza, he also appeared to criticize Israel’s propaganda efforts. “Every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people,” he said, suggesting such images should not have been disseminated.

While some pro-Palestinian activists are reportedly not “turning their focus” as the headline says, but rather refusing to turn their focus from Biden, in the face of this increasingly scary picture of what another Trump administration would be doing to Palestine (he’ll do whatever Jared says, as he did in the first term; he’ll appoint Jared the Tetrarch).

It seems as if the Times political desk (not the piece’s pretty good author, Jonathan Weisman, but he is a political reporter, not on the Middle East or diplomacy beat, and that’s where his editors and headline writers are), having been forced off its preferred narrative (“Public Concerned Biden Too Old”) by Biden’s performance at the State of the Union address, is now going to turn its focus on an alternative (“Youth Concerned Biden Too Genocidal”). I should have known something like this was going to happen but I’m helplessly enraged.

Honestly, the worst you can truthfully say about Biden is that he seems to have failed so far to achieve his frequently declared aims: an end to the fighting, adequate delivery of food and medical supplies to the Gaza population, massive exchange of hostages for prisoners, and establishment of a Palestinian state. You can feel he could be doing a better job with those, you can argue he should be taking a different approach to it on one issue or the other, but you can’t reasonably suggest, as some fool did in my Bluesky feed yesterday, that Biden is secretly working to realize Binyamin Netanyahu’s goals instead.

I mean, he has declared his aims, consistently, for the past five months, and they’re in diametric conflict with Netanyahu, who keeps denying Israel has any need to do anything in exchange for the release of hostages, putting obstacles in the way of feeding the starving Gazans, rejecting the concept of a ceasefire, and absolutely rejecting the concept of a Palestinian state, as his party has for half a century, calling for unquestioned Jewish-Israeli supremacy “between the sea and the Jordan” (that’s the Likud version of “from the river to the sea”, from the party’s 1977 platform, and thus quite a bit older than the Hamas version). Biden never says he’s in conflict with anybody he might be able to do something with, it’s the habit of a lifetime in the Senate, but Biden is in conflict with Netanyahu (The Hill says Biden regards him as “impossible to work with” and enumerates three occasions on which he has called Netanyahu an “asshole”).

Netanyahu’s chief goal, obviously, is to avoid prison on the counts of fraud, breach of trust, and receiving bribes with which he was charged back in 2019, something he has in common with his multiply indicted US Republican ally Donald Trump; just as Trump thinks his best shot at avoiding prison is to get himself back into the White House, especially in the light of his 2020 coup attempt, so Netanyahu is intent on remaining prime minister at any price, especially since his ability to win elections has been compromised by his “judicial coup” attempt of last year (one of the provisions in the package was the so-called “French law” which would give a sitting prime minister immunity from criminal prosecution and eliminate fraud and breach of trust as crimes), which made him deeply unpopular, and prolonging the Gaza war (which is not at all unpopular with the Israeli public) is the best way he has of holding off an election he would certainly lose. This is at the present moment the biggest obstacle to Biden’s peace efforts.

I couldn’t be sure Biden saw things this way himself until Chuck Schumer’s extraordinary March 11 Senate floor speech calling for Netanyahu to resign and for Israel to hold a general election, following on Benny Gantz’s visits to Washington (with Jake Sullivan, Kamala Harris, and Brett McGurk) and London (David Cameron), unauthorized by Netanyahu and apparently plunging him into a Rumpelstiltskin fury, and the US intelligence community’s assessment of Netanyahu’s ability to lead as “in jeopardy”, all of which I wrote about two weeks ago. Schumer’s speech was certainly planned in concert with Biden, and meant (not that it was in any way insincere) to prepare the way for Biden to make a formal break with Netanyahu, with the blessing as it were of the American Jewish community (which is increasingly divided on the subject of the war and Israel, on somewhat left-right lines, affected by the horrifying suffering in Gaza and the West Bank), and I was sure then that something was coming.

This week has been similar, starting with Monday’s amazing vote in the United Nations Security Council calling for a ceasefire, with the US abstaining (after the US’s own resolution lost to vetoes from Russia and China), allowing the resolution to pass, which I think must be the sharpest rebuke by the US of Israel since December 2016, when the Obama administration abstained from a resolution condemning illegal Jewish settlements in the Jerusalem area (Netanyahu responded to that one, "But, my friends, we are entering a new era that, as President-elect Trump said yesterday, is coming much sooner than most think….").

The new abstention brought on an announcement that Israel would not abide by the UN demands (which Hamas welcomed, declaring it was ready to proceed to an immediate exchange of prisoners), and another fit from Netanyahu, which Laura Rozen’s White House source characterized as “hysterical”—

The White House suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to hysterically overreact to a U.S. abstention today on a UN Security Council resolution that calls for a pause in fighting in Gaza during Ramadan as well as for the unconditional release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Netanyahu in response abruptly canceled the planned visit of two top advisors to Washington this week to discuss alternative options than a ground invasion for targeting Hamas battalions in the southern Gazan city of Rafah.

—though he’s now asked to have the meeting rescheduled. And there was yet another visit to Washington from an Israeli cabinet minister who may not care what Netanyahu thinks, defense minister Yoav Gallant:

“Direct dialogue with the American administration is essential, and must not be abandoned, even when there are challenges and disputes,” Gallant said on Monday in an apparent swipe at Netanyahu for canceling the planned visit by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and National Security Council chairman Tzachi Hanegbi.

Though he agrees with Netanyahu’s contention that there has to be a battle of Rafah, and does it in some really unfortunate language:

And one last thing, not exactly related, is a possible reason why the Israeli government might fall of its own accord, forcing a new election: on the longstanding controversy over Israel’s forever policy of allowing ultra-Orthodox men to evade military service and indeed paying them to do it (that is, to study Torah and procreate, while their wives hold jobs and care for the ever-increasing children), which is now officially understood to be unconstitutional:

The Attorney General’s Office tells the High Court that come Monday morning, the state will be legally obligated to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and there will no longer be a legal basis for the state to pay such students’ monthly stipends.

Since Netanyahu’s extreme-right government depends, among other things, on ultra-Orthodox parties for which this is a non-negotiable essential, the attorney general’s move could break the Netanyahu coalition (which is why Netanyahu has been trying to preserve the exemption in 30-day installments, always looking for delay). I’m not saying this is going to bring down the Israeli government, but it certainly should, because it’s a minoritarian position that a democracy shouldn’t institute without a better sense of where it might go.

Biden has been consistent on knowing what he’s doing and what the limits of his power are. He begged the Israeli government not to make the mistake the Bush administration made in Afghanistan and seek revenge for the horrors of October 7 without a strategic plan. They didn’t listen, and that wasn’t a surprise, but Biden understood he couldn’t stop it from happening (I think the magnitude of the slaughter of civilians in Gaza probably was quite a bit worse than he expected), not with a UN resolution, not with a cutoff of funds (which rich Israel can live with); he stepped up his complaints. His people worked with Qataris to exchange Hamas hostages with Israeli prisoners as long as they could make it work around the Hamas and Likud factions (which had been working together for decades against their various Arab and Israeli leftwing rivals). Those negotiations are still going on.

He has also set the wheels in motion for a cutoff of (offensive) arms shipments to Israel, though you can say he started kind of late and it’s taking a lot of time. But keep in mind that he’s a Democrat, and can’t just break the law (Impoundment Act of 1974) the way Trump and Mick Mulvaney did in 2019 with Ukraine’s Javelins when he was trying to blackmail Zelensky to stage a bogus investigation of Biden, for which Trump was impeached. Biden has to follow the rules.

So in early February, and I don’t know if this has gotten as much attention as it deserves, Biden issued a “National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability With Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services” directing the State Department to obtain written assurances from countries that receive US military aid that

in any area of armed conflict where the recipient country uses such defense articles, consistent with applicable international law, the recipient country will facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance and United States Government-supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.

and to determine whether the country is in fact in compliance with US law—if not, it may face consequences such as a cutoff of weapons supplies, like the 2000-pound bombs Israel has been dropping on Gaza.

The Israeli government apparently got such a request immediately, with a 45-day deadline, because last Monday State Department spokesman Matthew Miller announced that they’d received the assurances, and that

“We have not found [Israel] to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance,” Miller told reporters, adding a key caveat: “These assurances are prospective … our view on them is informed by our ongoing assessments.”

His remarks left some natsec lawmakers scratching their heads: First of all, Israel was required to send written assurances by the day before Miller’s remarks, on March 24. That happened, Miller confirmed, but Congress won’t receive a final assessment from State until May 8.

The lawmakers in question are a group led by Senators Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen, who are confident that Israel is indeed in violation of international law, impeding US and international efforts to protect Gazans from starvation. I think they (and Politico) are overreading the announcement if they think Miller said State has found that Israel is in compliance; “we have not found” simply means they haven’t made a decision—yet.

So we’ll see. Meanwhile, The New York Times is really not helping us achieve any clarity.