Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

In March 2010, Biden traveled to Jerusalem to push President Barack Obama’s ambitious peace plans on Netanyahu — the prime minister whom the then-vice president, upon landing, called his “close, personal friend of over 33 years.” Obama wanted a freeze on construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to avoid depriving the Palestinians of land for a future state as U.S. special envoy George Mitchell restarted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But upon Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu’s government suddenly announced the construction of 1,600 new Israeli apartments in the disputed territory. This humiliated and enraged Biden, who retaliated by keeping his close personal friend “Bibi” waiting for an hour and a half at dinner that night.

We now understand that at the same time as working to undermine the PA, Netanyahu was working to bolster their mortal enemies in the Islamist Hamas organization, funneling them Qatari funds to help them rule the Gaza Strip as well as they could inside the Israeli-Egyptian blockade. It wasn't a personal thing that got Biden, a matter of his being embarrassed. The Israeli government's not merely allowing new building on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank but openly supporting it was Netanyahu's increasingly brazen defiance of the US policy as it had stood since the Oslo Accords of 1993. 

Although opposition to the idea of a Palestinian state had been a bedrock principle of Netanyahu's Likud Party since its founding with a claim to the whole of Palestine from the river, as they say, to the sea, or as Likud put it from the sea to the river—

The phrase was also used by the Israeli ruling Likud party as part of their 1977 election manifesto which stated "Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." This slogan was repeated by Menachem Begin.

Perhaps it seemed strange to Biden that Netanyahu should cling to this one principle when he never otherwise showed any principles at all. 

Be that as it may, Obama and Biden were seriously committed to and focused on the Palestinian state in 2010, as were Biden and Harris in 2023, but then at this point there was another element, as I've noted, in Netanyahu's legal situation, where if he left the prime ministership he would have to face a corruption trial in which he was certainly guilty, and if he agreed to let go of any West Bank territory, he would likely lose the prime ministership at the hands of his radical religious coalition partners, the Jewish Hamas as you might say, which might well make good on their threats to leave the government and call for a new election that Netanyahu would certainly lose, and Netanyahu, now wholly devoted to staying out of prison at any price, was making the fairly safe bet that he had more to fear from Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich than he did from Biden. 

That is, I think Biden finally realized that this horrible war would never end on terms acceptable to Americans and Palestinians, and more likely never end at all in fewer than 20 years, unless Netanyahu could be removed from office. The Israeli public, in its October 7 trauma, wasn't exactly ready for peace, but it wasn't exactly unready either; it was torn, between its desire to see the complete annihilation of the Hamas organization, as in Netanyahu's proposed war aims, and the return of the hostages, which Netanyahu had pretty clearly given up on by this point. The politicians of the Knesset seemed paralyzed between fear of Netanyahu and hatred of Netanyahu. 

IDF commanders, weary of fighting a whack-a-mole war under a prime minister who was unable to state an achievable war aim or offer any kind of plan for a postwar disposition of the territory, worried about the increasing likelihood that he'd drive them into a second simultaneous war, only this one with a real army, the better-armed and more experienced Hezbollah in Lebanon, and infuriated by his politically driven refusal to call Ultra-Orthodox young men into national service (that was the bribe price the Ultra-Orthodox parties demanded for continuing to support the Netanyahu government), were ready for a change.  The Arab neighbors clearly would love to go back to the negotiations that ended on October 6 (and Iran too). Oh, and nobody wants to talk about this, but the members of Hamas had a very solid motivation to sign on to a deal in which they would return the hostages and IDF would stop trying to kill them. I'm not saying they're not evil, I'm saying that's how hostage crises end, if you really care about the hostages. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody knows it. À la guerre comme à la guerre, war itself is evil and some of the guilty always escape punishment.

Only the corrupt Israeli prime minister—speaking of the guilty escaping punishment—stood implacably in the way of peace, and in late February and early March I began to see a series of signs that Biden saw it the same way and might be trying to do something about it, starting February 26 with the announcement from an ice cream shop Biden was visiting with the comedian Seth Myers that he thought France had succeeded in brokering a 40-day Ramadan ceasefire in Gaza, with exchange of hostages for prisoners, while at the same time the Palestinian prime minister and cabinet had all resigned. I wrote

If you put it together with the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel (who could include politicians captured during the Second Intifada, like Marwan Barghouti), the implication would be that the resignation is making room for the appointment of a new government in which some released prisoners could be serving as ministers. That would be the reason for the Hamas spokesman to sound spiteful ("The priority for us in Hamas is not the exchange of detainees, but the cessation of the war").

This could really be happening this spring: an impetus to peace that the Netanyahu government and the Hamas leadership are unable to resist!

It wasn't; the Ramadan ceasefire didn't happen, and President Abbas replaced his departing prime minister in a completely uninteresting way. But then a few days later, some very unusual things happened: a visit to the US from Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz (that was his real title) of the National Unity Party, coming without a green light from Prime Minister Netanyahu (who was said to be enraged, and who ordered Israeli embassy staff not to provide Gantz with any services during his visit) for three days of meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Middle East adviser Brett McGurk; a week later, a startling official statement from the US intelligence community

The US intelligence community assesses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “viability as a leader” to be “in jeopardy,” according to its annual report on the national security threats facing the United States that was presented to Congress on Monday.

“Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” according to the report. “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

and a remarkable speech on the Senate floor by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer asking Netanyahu to resign:

Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.

He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has also weakened Israel’s political and moral fabric through his attempts to co-opt the judiciary. And he has shown zero interest in doing the courageous and visionary work required to pave the way for peace, even before this present conflict.

I was convinced that this was a full-blown plan, godfathered by Biden, to drive Netanyahu out of office: I wrote,

But the necessary precondition [for a peace settlement] (necessary though not sufficient) is, as should now be completely clear, getting rid of Netanyahu and his repulsive allies, who are unalterably opposed to a Palestinian state. Which is obviously not for the US to do, it's for Israeli politicians, such as Benny Gantz (most recently the choice of 48% of poll respondents as opposed to 15% for Netanyahu). That's where the significance of Gantz's visit to the US and of Schumer's speech lies, in the plans for an election—I assume Gantz has been counting votes for a confidence measure in the Knesset to dissolve the government and call for a general election, and telling Sullivan and Harris and McGurk that he's there, or almost there. Schumer's speech would be preparing the US public, and the Jewish community worldwide, for the event, and promising US support for a new government, and the US intelligence committee as well. Biden's readiness to address the Knesset (whether with an invitation from Herzog or perhaps a new prime minister) would be part of it too. (It's been a central part of his own maneuvers, as I've been saying, that he must retain his own popularity among Israelis even as he detaches himself from Netanyahu.)

It's coming, if it's coming, at an unspeakable cost of suffering for the people of Gaza, and, let's face it, for the people of southern Israel as well. Bringing peace—not just "calling" for it—is the only thing that could possibly make it worth while.

Except, of course, as you already know, it didn't happen. 

What I now learn from Foer's Atlantic piece is that I was right about the plan, in some detail: that is exactly what was going on in those weeks. 

Blinken, after firming up the plan for the grand Saudi-Israeli deal with Crown Prince Mohammed (who was interested in working with Democrats, because he thought only Democrats could assemble a Senate majority for a treaty guaranteeing a Palestinian state), began engaging in private talks with Netanyahu's enemies inside the Israeli cabinet, while Biden began publicly hyping versions of the proposed deal in ways that were certain to penetrate to the Israeli public:

Every time Antony Blinken visited Israel, he found himself in endless meetings with politicians who delivered posturing soliloquies, which reporters who hadn’t been in the room somehow managed to quote later in the day. He began arranging private conversations with Benny Gantz and Yoav Gallant.

Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff turned leader of the centrist opposition, was the great hope for a politically viable alternative to Netanyahu. And in the late winter, he privately indicated to the State Department that the premiership might be within his reach.

The administration thought it could see a path to provoking a political crisis within Israel: Present the Saudi deal to the Israeli public, and if Netanyahu rejected it, Biden could explain its wisdom. Voters would be left to choose between Netanyahu and a sunnier alternative vision of Israel’s future.

To boost his standing, Gantz scheduled a trip to the White House. The visit deeply irked Netanyahu. The Israeli embassy was instructed not to arrange meetings on Gantz’s behalf while he was in Washington.

Two of Blinken’s top deputies, Barbara Leaf and Derek Chollet, met Gantz in his suite at the Willard hotel. It was the former general’s first trip outside Israel since October 7, his first time emerging into a world that had largely shifted its sympathy from Israeli hostages to Palestinian children. As Gantz sipped his coffee, Chollet and Leaf took turns excoriating him for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It wasn’t hard to read the surprise on his face; he wasn’t prepared for how differently Americans had come to see the war.

Though I don't know why Blinken hadn't managed to give Gantz an inkling of that earlier.

Why did the plan fail? Foer suggests that Gantz just dithered too long, and the record seems to bear that out; it took him until May 18, some days after Gallant issued his own denunciation, to make a move (threatening to leave the government if Netanyahu had not presented a "day after" plan by June 8, to which of course Netanyahu did not bother to respond, and he resigned on June 9. 

Biden himself had moved on by then to trying the preferred strategy of the left, a halt in arms shipments, in early May, but Netanyahu cheerfully exploited that to win back some of the Israeli public:

Over the course of his career, Netanyahu had always excelled at picking fights with Democratic presidents as a means of boosting his standing with right-wing Israeli voters. Now Biden had given him the pretext for the same comfortably familiar play once more.

Netanyahu began to publicly argue that Biden’s caution, his hand-wringing about civilian casualties, was preventing Israel from winning the war. Republican members of Congress were leveling the same accusation, only without any pretense of diplomatic niceties. Senator Tom Cotton told Face the Nation, “Joe Biden’s position is de facto for Hamas victory at this point.”

Biden then returned to hyping his peace plan—

Biden intended to stuff Netanyahu in a box by insisting publicly that Israel had agreed to his proposal—even though he knew that the right-wing members of the Israeli government would likely reject it, and that Netanyahu had made a habit of pushing for better terms even after he’d committed to a deal. But with its invasion of Rafah advancing, and as it gained control of the smuggling tunnels in the south, Israel was on the brink of ending the most intensive phase of the war.

But I think the moment had passed. IDF had some success in driving Hamas out of Rafah, then went back to the north to drive them out of there, and managed to assassinate quite a lot of people (though in Lebanon and Iran, hardly in Gaza: they killed Yahya Sinwar, but by accident, with no idea who he was). The war expanded, to Lebanon and maybe Yemen. The Knesset has passed a law outlawing the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNWRA), employer of 30,000 Palestinians who act as the effective government, providing services in everything from utilities and road repair to health care and education while Hamas and and the PA sit on their asses, because 5 or so of those employees are rumored to have been among the maniacs who invaded Israel on October 7, thus increasing suffering, if they follow through on this, that is already almost inconceivable.

Just posted in The Guardian:

The unfolding situation in the northern Gaza Strip is “apocalyptic”, United Nations chiefs said Friday, warning that its entire population was at “imminent risk” of death.

They said the entire Middle East region was now on a precipice and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

“The situation unfolding in North Gaza is apocalyptic,” said the joint statement from heads of organisations that form the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.

“The area has been under siege for almost a month, denied basic aid and life-saving supplies while bombardment and other attacks continue. Just in the past few days, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, and thousands have once again been forcibly displaced.

“The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.”

I don't like using the "genocide" word either, but what else can you call it?

As I write, Biden is still trying, this time with another threat to apply Leahy law sanctions on IDF if they continue preventing food and other supplies from getting to Gazans, with a deadline of November 18 or 19, after election day in the US. 

Perhaps he feels he'll be freer, as a lame duck, to take strong action. I do want to insist, as I've done all along, that Biden's intentions have always been to stop genocide with the methods he knows, as a traditional foreign policy master; that the actions he hasn't taken are actions that he thinks wouldn't have worked (and he's probably right), and that the course of action he chose at the beginning of this year, as described here, starting with helping the Israelis to push Netanyahu out so they could adopt a better strategy, was a more hopeful one than any other, and almost worked. And I called it right in March.

Perhaps whatever action he takes will depend on what happens in our elections—not just in the presidency, either. Let's give him a president Harris, and a House and a filibuster-bashing Senate.  

Bob Woodward on Morning Joe, recounting a bit from his new book that hasn't been widely publicized, in the context of reporting on the vice president's intense involvement with foreign policy decision-making in the Biden White House: