Hopes for a Grand Bargain in the Middle East Are a Mirage
Biden is deaf to the intractable nature of the situation.
Everybody wants a happy ending, and that seemed to come into view with Joe Biden’s surprise announcement at the end of May of a plan for a ceasefire.
“After intensive diplomacy carried out by my team and my many conversations with leaders of Israel, Qatar, and Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries Israel has offered a comprehensive new proposal,” Biden said. “It’s a roadmap to an enduring ceasefire and the release of all hostages.”
Which should be great news, and a welcome seizure of the initiative by the United States in the process of breaking the war’s deadlock, but… there are still, uh, a few problems with the ceasefire plan as outlined by Biden.
One is that Israel has declined to explicitly endorse the plan, which—contra Biden—does not seem to have originated with Israel. Although Israel appears to have accepted the framework of the proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Biden’s announcement with notable coldness, saying “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities.”
If Israel seemed to be neglected in the outward presentation of the cease-fire agreement, so too were the Palestinians. Once Hamas returned their notes on the ceasefire, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was compelled to report that many of their demands were “unworkable” and called into question whether Hamas was negotiating “in good faith.”
And the more salient issue was an illogic at the heart of the ceasefire proposal. In his remarks, Biden described a path to “a durable end to this war… that brings all the hostages home, ensures Israel’s security, creates a better ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and sets the stage for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
All well and good but it’s the “without Hamas in power” clause that seems like a sticking-point in a proposal transmitted… to Hamas. The negotiation, in other words, is to ask Hamas to vacate power in Gaza, which, needless to say, it has no intention of doing.
The somewhat wild-eyed optimism of Biden’s proposal is reminiscent of another head-scratching piece of American diplomacy—the push towards a grand bargain in the Middle East that seemed to consume American policymakers especially in the early part of this year. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it in February, “There is a very powerful path that we can see before us to actually get to lasting peace and security, and it’s coming ever more sharply into focus.” Which sounds wonderful and transformational but, oh by the way, would also include Israel taking, in Blinken’s words, an “irreversible path to a Palestinian state”—something that Israel is not remotely considering so soon after October 7. “Should the Palestinians have an army? Can they sign a military pact with Iran? Can they import rockets from North Korea? … Of course, I say, of course not,” said Netanyahu when asked about the two-state solution in February. And: so much for the United States’ grand bargain.
I certainly can understand the desire of the Biden administration to try to change the narrative, and out of this horrible war to either revive the moribund peace process or at the very least to broker a ceasefire… and just in time for the November election. But everything that the United States has proposed so far appears to be a dramatic departure from reality and a failure to understand the mood either of Israel or of Hamas. Sooner or later, a different, less fantasy-driven sensibility will have to sink in for policymakers.
The unfortunate reality is that the path Israel was pursuing in Gaza before 10/7 was something like a best-fit option under difficult geopolitical circumstances—“an imperfect yet viable peace process,” as the Gazan writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib put it in the UAE’s National News. There are those who have criticized Netanyahu for playing divide-and-conquer in Palestine, using Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority, but Hamas was the political force to deal with in Gaza, and Israeli policy at the very least bowed to that reality. “The Israelis believed that Hamas was in a different mode now: focused on a long-term cease-fire in which each side benefited from a live-and-let-live arrangement,” said Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Except, of course, it was all a setup. Hamas had been planning the October 7 attack for years—and, with the attack, any sort of modus vivendi between Israel and Hamas vanished.
What is left, then, is the land of bad options. Hamas remains politically entrenched in Gaza—and Israel’s campaign, for all its brutality, has done very little to remove it. And Hamas, for its part, clearly remains committed to a vision of struggle with Israel. A cache of messages from Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, recently reported on by The Wall Street Journal, gives an unsettling glimpse into Hamas’ sensibility, with Sinwar calling civilian casualties “necessary sacrifices” and, in December, describing post-war planning as “shameful and outrageous.” Negotiations with Hamas are also further complicated by the uncertainty in whom exactly one is negotiating with. Hamas’ political leadership, sitting in Qatar, may be more likely to cut a deal, but it is very much an open question to what extent they control the military organization. It has been credibly suggested that the political leadership may not have been aware of October 7 in advance, and Sinwar and the military leadership have nothing to gain from a ceasefire. They know that Israel will assassinate them the first chance it gets, ceasefire or no.
Analysis of the conflict, then, must take its intractability into account. Israel cannot accept the continued power of Hamas anymore than anyone can expect Hamas to just step aside. And those of us watching from a distance must recognize that the Oslo accords of the 1990s won’t simply return, that grand bargains won’t just be struck or Palestinian statehood obtained as the credits roll at the end of the film. We have to get used to a tragic sense of the world in which adversaries are stuck in asymmetric conflict for a long time to come.
That is not to say that outside parties like the United States are incapable of doing anything. The Biden administration has consistently been working to rein Israel in—offering constant (often unheeded reminders) that destruction of Hamas’ infrastructure may not be worth Israel’s isolation from the international community. In the wider picture, even if a ceasefire does not last and only gives Hamas a chance to regroup and rearm, it still may help Israel avert its slide towards pariahdom. But it is important to be very realistic about what a ceasefire can and can’t accomplish.
The best that can be hoped for is something like the relatively quiescent state of affairs between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or between Israel and Hezbollah in the north (which is, however, at the moment in danger of collapsing). It’s not peace or resolution, more like a managed conflict. To the extent that the United States focuses on humanitarian aid and on reducing civilian casualties, it is a helpful broker. To the extent that the United States peddles fantasies of Middle Eastern grand bargains, less so.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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Nothing can be done with Hamas. It has to die.
This is very strange. On the one hand, the author correctly points out something that should get much more attention: The fact that the Biden Administration -- and this is something that goes back through many administration, excepting Trump's -- is pursuing diplomacy based on Israelis and Palestinians who exist only in their desires.
But describing Israel's prosecution of the war as "brutal" is false by any comparison to how such asymmetric war is waged by Western democracies and he seems oblivious to the possibility that the Administration could simply 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 Israel's efforts, rather than trying to rein them in. It's hard to become an international pariah with the US promoting the idea that you're the good guy, which is what the US should be doing because it's the truth.