Whither the Israel-Hamas ceasefire?

 

By James M. Dorsey

This column is based on the author’s remarks in a Middle East Insights Platform webinar on 27 March 2023.

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Israelis and Palestinians have moved in diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive cycles for much of the past six decades.

A significant segment of Israeli society favoured until the late 1970s, a compromise solution to the conflict with the Palestinians even if the centre-left Labour Party initiated with broad public support Israeli settlement activity in Palestinian lands conquered during the 1967 Middle East war.

Public support for a compromise began to erode with the 1977 election of Likud leader Menahem Begin, the Israeli right’s first electoral victory since the state’s founding.

By the 1990s, Israel had moved to the right with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the rise of Binyamin Netanyahu.

The mood in the country was becoming more hardline and uncompromising, fuelled by a series of lethal suicide attacks that dampened optimism in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

In addition, Mr. Netanyahu increasingly sought to hollow out the internationally recognised Palestine Authority by abandoning the concept of a two-state solution, undermining the Authority’s credibility, and turning it into a security adjunct of the Israeli state.

If Israel was becoming more hardline, Palestinians were moderating their positions.

 

The Palestine Liberation Organisation or PLO went through a torturous process that started with Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Nayef Hawatmeh in 1974 addressing Israelis directly as Israelis in a major Israeli newspaper.

The process culminated in 1988 with Yasser Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist and disavowal of the armed struggle.

Hamas embarked on a similar, equally torturous process in 2017.

Like the PLO, Hamas marred its endeavour with violence.

In the PLO’s case, it was the Democratic Front’s 1974 attack on a girl’s school in the Israeli town of Maalot.

In Hamas’ case it was the group’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack that provoked a devastating war by an unhinged Israel at an unwarranted cost to Palestinians’ lives and society and Gazan infrastructure.

As a result, Hamas’ popularity has nose-dived in Gaza, even if opinion surveys suggest that the group is doing better in the West Bank.

Nevertheless, it’s too early to draw conclusions from this week’s anti-Hamas protests in the northern Gazan town of Beit Lahia. Being opposed to Hamas does not necessarily translate into support for Israel or the Palestine Authority, or abandonment of the armed struggle.

To be sure, the attack and Israel’s response have moved the Palestinian issue closer to the top of the international agenda but at a horrendous price for Gaza and the Palestinians.

If anything, the attack spotlighted the fact that for Hamas, despite its moves towards endorsement of a two-state solution, and for Israelis, the Israeli Palestinian conflict remains a zero-sum game. Neither recognises the existence of innocent civilians on the other side of the divide.

The refusal to recognise the existence of innocent civilians is but one indication that Hamas and Netanyahu’s Israel are mirror images of each other.

The notion of a zero-sum game weaves through all aspects of the conflict.

 

This is evident in the prioritisation of Israeli security and the dismissal of the notion of Palestinian security for the security of the Palestinians rather than exclusively for the security of Israelis.

That same principle of inequity, coupled with a land grab and dictate, applies to Israel’s recent decimation of the Syrian military following the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad by rebels with discarded jihadist antecedents.

Israel’s approach to negotiations is equally problematic.

Israel demands, as it did with the PLO, that Palestinians play their trump cards -- recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and abandonment of the armed struggle -- before entering a negotiation rather than as part of a negotiation.

Hamas’ refusal to do so is one reason why Gaza has witnessed a cycle of escalating wars since 2008, culminating in Israel’s response to the October 7 attack. It also is part of why Hamas rejects demands that it disarm.

In demanding recognition of Israel as a Jewish state rather than simply as a state, Israel is demanding acceptance of its national narrative rather than acknowledging that Israelis and Palestinians are likely to have rival narratives that challenge one another but can exist next to each other.

Just how far Israel has moved away from accepting the notion of rival narratives is evident in a comparison of Mr. Netanyahu and the late Israeli president, defence minister and air force commander Ezer Weizman, who was a member of the prime minister’s Likud Party during Menahem Begin’s reign.

Ezer Weizman meets Yasser Arafat in South Africa in 1994. Credit: Israel Government Press Office

Standing in front of a Likud map that showed Israel encompassing the West Bank and Jordan after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking 1977 visit to Jerusalem, Mr. Weizman was asked what the difference was between the Likud’s vision and PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s notion of a “secular democratic” state from the river to the sea. “We can dream, so can they,” Mr. Weizman replied.

With this month’s resumption of hostilities in Gaza, Israel has applied its negotiating strategy to the battlefield.

The piecemeal release of hostages serves Mr. Netanyahu’s goal of prolonging the war. It was Israel rather than Hamas that rejected a release of all hostages in one go in exchange for an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. 

The release of the hostages does not only reduce public pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to prioritise their return to Israel.

Hamas’ leverage in the ceasefire negotiations diminishes with every hostage who is exchanged for Palestinians incarcerated in Israel, which is why Israel refuses to engage in the second phase of ceasefire negotiations as long as Hamas holds on to a substantial number of captives.

Today’s battle for Gaza is a battle for Palestine. It’s a battle in a world where the rule of law has been all but abandoned. It’s a world with a critical mass of civilisationalist leaders who define their countries’ borders in civilisational and security terms rather than as defined by international law.

It’s a world in which war crimes are acceptable, and ethnic cleansing is part of polite table conversation. It’s a world in which weaponising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia aids and abets the broader curtailing of freedom of expression and the rolling back of democracy in, among others, the United States, Israel, and Turkey.

An international conference on combatting anti-Semitism that opened in Jerusalem yesterday put on display Mr. Netanyahu’s embrace of the far right at the expense of Israel’s relations with Jewish communities across the globe and countries, particularly in Europe, that still support it.

The conference was the first time far-right groups with a history of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism were invited to an Israeli government event.

The presence of France’s National Rally, Spain’s Vox, the Sweden Democrats, and others prompted American and European Jewish leaders and intellectuals, and senior French and German officials to cancel their participation in the conference.

Finally, it’s a world in which a two-state solution seems more unachievable than ever, not because of Israeli settlement policy, at least not yet, but because of the parties’ zero-sum approach, Netanyahu’s ‘it’s us or them’ policy, and the Palestinian inability to close ranks and formulate a coherent strategy.

So far, the facts on the ground would still allow for a two-state solution facilitated by minor land swaps that would keep the bulk of the 750,000 Israeli settlers under Israeli rather than Palestinian jurisdiction.

However, that could change rapidly with the Israeli assault on West Bank refugee camps, the displacement of tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians, the stepped-up creation of new settlements, and increasing settler vigilantism.

It’s ironic, against this backdrop of gloom and doom, that of all people, US President Donald J. Trump may be Palestinians and Israelis’ main ray of hope, despite his encouragement of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

In their wildest dreams, Mr. Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist coalition partners could not have imagined a better scenario.

In addition, Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, has made clear that the consecration of Palestinian rights in an independent state is not part of the Trump administration’s thinking.

 

Even so, Israel’s problem is that Mr. Trump likes to break eggs, right, left, and centre.

As he propagated his Gaza resettlement scheme, Mr. Trump allowed hostage negotiator Adam Boehler to break another taboo by becoming the first-ever US official to meet with Hamas face-to-face.

Mr. Witkoff subsequently added insult to injury by suggesting in contradiction to Israeli policy that Hamas could remain politically active in Gaza if it disarmed and agreed not to be part of the Strip’s post-war administration.

Similarly, Mr. Witkoff heaped praise on Qatar’s role as a ceasefire mediator at a time when Mr. Netanyahu sought to sully the Gulf state’s reputation by asserting that it was in bed with Hamas.

The prime minister’s campaign was also designed to prevent Mr. Netanyahu from being held accountable for his years-long soliciting of Qatari funding for Hamas to keep the Palestinian polity divided between the Gaza-based group and the Palestine Authority.

To be sure, no love is lost between the Trump administration and Hamas.

But with at least US$2 trillion on the table in potential Saudi and Emirati investment in the United States, Mr. Trump is likely to eventually be more attentive to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s insistence that the kingdom will only establish diplomatic relations with Israel once Israel commits to a credible and irreversible path towards the creation of a Palestinian state, albeit one in which Hamas is not a player or at least not a major player.

If Palestine is one major regional fault line, Iran is another, albeit one that has shifted, at least for some of the players.

Trump and Netanyahu continue to believe that their threats and willingness to use military force are the most effective ways of beating adversaries into submission, even if they differ on whether there still is an opportunity for a negotiated solution of outstanding issues in Iran.

Israel’s decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia and political movement, and the US targeting of the Houthis in Yemen serve as litmus tests.

In all three cases, Israel and/or the United States have successfully diminished their military capabilities but failed to break their political will, let alone bomb them into submission and/or oblivion.

In doing so, Israel and the United States have hollowed out the Iranian-backed Axis of Resistance that included Syria’s Al-Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias that are under increasing pressure to disband and/or integrate into the Iraqi military. Even so, there is no indication that Iran is about to bow to Trump’s maximalist pressure, despite the fact that it would like a return to the negotiating table.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.