Months of US efforts to produce a Gaza War ceasefire are fizzling out and a frustrated President Joe Biden is directly blaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure. Asked by a reporter on Monday (September 2) whether Netanyahu was doing enough to push forward a truce, Biden tersely answered, “No.”
A US administration official added that Netanyahu “keeps adding conditions to straightforward proposals for a ceasefire.” The official predicted that the president will publicize a final ceasefire proposal by the weekend. “You just can’t keep negotiating this,” the official warned the Israeli leader.
A stunned Netanyahu responded quickly. In a televised statement, he said that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Israel’s ceasefire proposals as “extraordinary.”
He went on to explain that his only caveat was to keep troops on the Gaza border with Egypt. Otherwise, he reasoned, Hamas would be able to rearm with weapons smuggled across the frontier – and thereby undermine a main purpose of the retaliatory onslaught that followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel: to make certain such an attack could not occur again.
The back and forth is a tale of erstwhile allies who not only differ on immediate tactics in the brutal Gaza War, which is now in its tenth month, but also harbor different, pressing political needs at home.
Biden is fighting to create a positive foreign policy legacy before he leaves office next January. Last month, key members of his Democratic Party told him he must give up his reelection campaign or risk losing the support of political donors and open the way to victory for his rival, Republican Donald Trump.
Biden is trying to show he still counts as “leader of the free world,” the adulatory self-description of modern American presidents, and is not a hapless lame duck abandoned by his own party. His best chance to display international leadership seemed to be in the Middle East, where the US is regarded as a still-dominant outside power.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, is fighting not to cement a legacy but to stay in power. He has pledged to wipe out Hamas and make it impossible for a repeat October 7-style attack. Less than a month ago, he enjoyed wide popularity in Israel for ordering the assassination of Hamas’s top leader, Ismael Haniyeh, while in Iran.
On Monday, however, tens of thousands of Israelis protested his victory-at-any-cost policy, after soldiers discovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah who had been executed by Hamas.
The protesters demanded Netanyahu reach some sort of ceasefire in exchange for the remaining 97 hostages still in Hamas’s hands. Key members of his war cabinet questioned his leadership. The critique from Biden, Israel’s most important political and military booster, added to the Israeli leader’s woes.
The testy exchange reflected not only a deep Gaza policy division but also long-standing mistrust between the two leaders. The hostility goes back to the administration of president Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice-president.
In front of the US Congress, at the invitation of rival Republicans, Netanyahu had spoken out against Obama’s nuclear weapons control agreement with Iran. The Iran accord had been meant to stand as Obama’s top foreign policy achievement. Instead, it was canceled by Trump, who won the 2016 presidential election.
The current testy relations between Biden and Netanyahu are also bound up in competing domestic political needs of each.
Biden recently quit his candidacy for reelection after top Democratic Party leaders told him he was going to lose. A major foreign policy win would at least show he is something other than a hapless lame duck. Biden is proposing not just a ceasefire but historic peace negotiations.
Shortly after Hamas’s October 7 invasion, Biden proposed talks between Israel and some sort of Gaza-West Bank negotiating team that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a revival of the so-called “two-state solution” that had been official, if lately dormant, US policy for more than three decades.
Shortly after the war in Gaza broke out, Biden declared: “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and, in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.” If he had succeeded in arranging such negotiations, Biden would have vaulted into the pantheon of high-profile Middle East peacemakers joining
- President Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement; and
- President Bill Clinton oversaw the signing of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which were designed to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state (statehood, however, never happened).
Among Biden’s obstacles is Netanyahu, who has staunchly rejected Palestinian statehood over his 40-year political career. Recently, he asserted that such an outcome would “endanger the existence of the State of Israel.” Peace talks will not become a jewel in Biden’s foreign policy crown, and he has dropped mentioning them.
Facts on the ground
But Middle East conflict abhors a vacuum, and Netanyahu has post-war plans of his own, which he has already put into motion. He replaced the defunct Biden project with a mission to establish a permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has advertised the project primarily as a means of deterring any future October 7 recurrence. But it would also create “facts on the ground” that would make a Gaza branch of a two-state solution a physical impossibility.
Though not publicly announced, concrete aspects of the project have already sprouted inside the devastated enclave. Israeli military engineers have leveled trees and buildings in a strip about a half-mile deep inside Gaza’s eastern and northern border with Israel.
The clearing is apparently designed to create a free-fire buffer zone. All told, the operation has consumed about 16% of Gaza territory.
Israeli forces have also constructed an east-west road across the center of the enclave that stretches from Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. The route is meant to slice the Gaza Strip in half and form an internal boundary between the heavily populated city of Gaza in the north and communities in the south on the way to Egypt. Travelers would be inspected by Israeli guards at crossing points and surveilled from tall observation towers built to ease surveillance.
In addition, Netanyahu proposes to occupy a ten-mile-long east-west strip along the border with Egypt. Failure to get approval of that demand, he said in his televised Monday speech, made him reject a ceasefire deal.
Control of the zone, known by the code-name “Philadelphi Corridor,” would allow Israel to inspect goods crossing overland from Egypt as well as allow electronic and physical monitoring and destruction of tunnels underneath. Versions of such tunnels have long been used to smuggle weapons and other contraband to Hamas.
However, Netanyahu did not mention what may be an insurmountable obstacle to occupying the Philadelphi route: Egypt, one of Washington’s interlocutors with Hamas. A 2005 accord between Israel and Egypt put Palestinians in charge of the Gaza side of the border. Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is resisting any change to the agreement.
In effect, Netanyahu is trying to reverse history. Until 2005, Israel had occupied the entire Gaza Strip in the same manner it currently occupies parts of the much larger West Bank. In the Gaza enclave, Israel had installed 21 settlements that housed a population of 8,000 Israelis.
However, steady, if low-intensity, violence aimed at the settlers persuaded the Israeli government to abandon the project, tear down the Gaza settlements and pay off inhabitants to return to Israel. Controls offshore and along the fenced-off border seemed adequate—until October 7.
Military reoccupation would fix something Netanyahu considers a mistaken retreat.
Some Israeli commentators justify Netanyahu’s plan with further embellishments, saying it is needed to persuade Palestinians to cooperate with Israel’s security demands and give up on statehood.
“We must set a goal of de-Hamasification of Gaza,” wrote Gabi Siboni, an Israeli researcher at the Institute for Strategy and Security in Jerusalem. “Just as it took many years to cleanse Germany of the remnants of Nazi rule, we, too, must be ready and willing for this long and arduous task. Achieving this goal will not be easy and will require a years-long military, political, educational, economic and legal struggle.”
Other observers see Netanyahu’s project as a way not only to resolve the conflict with Hamas but also to intensify the pacification of a restive West Bank.
The analysts regard a Gaza military occupation as a pared-down imitation of Israel’s physical dominance of the West Bank, which is a spaghetti-pattern web of roads, walls, fences, trenches and berms that separate scores of Israeli settler communities and military outposts from Palestinian towns, villages and farmland.
But more is being done in the West Bank in tandem with the war in Gaza. Israeli troops are carrying out what they call “preemptive” raids in the major towns of Tulkarem, Jenin and Nablus. The incursions include the construction of wide roads into tightly built-up areas to ease the entry of tanks and other military vehicles — much like the east-west road in Gaza.
The low-intensity West Bank conflict has taken 480 Palestinian and nine Israeli lives, compared with the Gaza death toll of more than 40,000 Palestinian and around 1,500 Israelis.
“Think of it as the West Bank. The idea is that Israel doesn’t need a whole brigade inside a city,” said Eyal Lurie-Pardes, a researcher at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. Instead, “they are stationed outside the central population, but always have the ability to make small incursions,” he explained.
Others take a more apocalyptic view of Netanyahu’s plans for Gaza and the West Bank. “Many of us take the real objective to be the endless Israeli presence and takeover and the liquidation of Palestinian presence there,” said Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Qatar.
At last here is a fair & accurate summary of Israel’s current position. I endorse what Israel is doing fior its own just protection. Just a reminder nobody, even in Germany, calls for Poiland to return East Prussia and the eastern lands to Germany? After all they upon liberation in 1945 were occupied by “Polish settlers” and remain in situ to day. Why should only Israel be castigated when they occupied the West Bank after Jordan began attacking them on June 6, 1967 ?
Final nail for the Israel COFFIN.
WTF is an ILLEGAL WHITE COLONY in the Middle-East. EVERY White Colony ENDS, just how badly. For Israel, it will be the WORST, since there are NO CIVILIANS in Israel.
It is obvious to me that both the US and Israel are just putting up a show with the objective to drag the conflict until the Palestinian completely disappear from this planet or Israel has full control of the area. The US is paying the price and showing the world their true colours. From now onwards, whenever the US wants to lecture others on human rights, genocide, freedom of speech, democracy and etc, they will be speechless when compares to what they are doing now.