The United States and Israel are about to have their biggest, most consequential disagreement in many years. The dispute is over whether, and for how long, to extend the cease-fire in the war on Hamas.
President Joe Biden helped negotiate the deal in such a way to give Israel and Hamas incentives to prolong the pause in fighting. By contrast, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his emergency war Cabinet say they want to resume the fighting by this weekend.
The truce, which began Friday, was originally to last four days. Over that period, Hamas was to release 50 of the 240 hostages that terrorists took during their Oct. 7 attack; Israel was to free 150 Palestinian prisoners; and Egypt was to let hundreds of trucks brimming with humanitarian supplies cross its border into southern Gaza.
In a key section of the deal, the cease-fire would stretch another 24 hours for every 10 hostages that Hamas freed. As of Wednesday, Hamas has freed more than 100 hostages and expressed a desire to keep the trade going (and keep more bombs from falling).
Israeli officials are leery of extending the cease-fire, fearing that Hamas would use the peace to regroup, relocate, and rearm—and that the Israeli army, which had encircled Gaza City and was preparing to move southward, would lose momentum in its campaign to kill Hamas’ leaders and destroy its military infrastructure.
Biden sympathizes with Israel’s goal of crushing Hamas as a force that continues to rule Gaza and pose further threats. But he and his top aides have also urged Netanyahu, from the beginning of the war, to minimize casualties among Gazan civilians—in part to allow aid to flow in and hostages to be let out, but also for the sake of peace itself.
Many Israelis believe Hamas has released as many hostages as it has only because it was losing on the battlefield and feared a rout. They may be right, but at this point in the war, that view may be beside the point. Israel’s bombing of Hamas targets has killed an estimated 15,000 Gazans—more than 10 times the 1,200 Israelis killed in Hamas’ Oct 7 attack. (This figure comes from Gaza’s health ministry, which is Hamas-controlled, but U.S. intelligence officials agree with the assessment.) The estimate doesn’t distinguish between Gazan civilians and Hamas fighters, but no one doubts that many thousands of civilians were killed, the majority of them women and children. Nor is there doubt that, if the war resumes, thousands more will die.
Even so, there is no guarantee that continuing the war will wipe out Hamas. The Islamic Resistance Movement (for which “Hamas” is an acronym) is a movement as well as a military government. The more Palestinian civilians killed in the crossfire, the more their friends and relatives are likely to join—or at least sympathize—with the movement.
Biden’s ambivalence on the issue of casualties—wanting to support Israel’s right to self-defense but also wanting to avoid complicity in its excesses—is one reason he would prefer to see this war simply stop, at least as long as Hamas keeps up its part of the bargain by releasing all hostages.
Hamas’ leaders will probably play a delay game for as long as they can, releasing a smattering of hostages, to keep Israel’s tanks and bombs at bay, while hanging on to some. They know that as soon as all the hostages are freed, Israel will attack relentlessly, blowing up or flooding all the tunnels. It has stopped short of doing that, in part because many hostages are still in those tunnels.
So, the big questions for Israel are how to get Hamas to release all the hostages while bringing this war to a halt, and how to do that while protecting Israeli security in the long run—i.e., without creating the impression that Hamas has won this war, and that others who mount similar acts of terrorism might also win in the future.
To deal with these problems, two things will have to happen. First, the moderate Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—must get directly involved in Gaza and in Palestinian matters broadly. For more than a half-century, they supported Palestinians in word—as part of their campaign to blame all problems on Israel—but very little in deed.
In the past decade, as tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs came to dominate the region’s politics, these countries sought a modus vivendi, in some cases formal alliances, with Israel, stemming from their shared enmity toward Iran and their desire for trade. As they did so, they shunted Palestinians aside altogether. (This is one reason Hamas attacked on Oct. 7—to preempt emerging Saudi-Israeli talks, to put the Palestinian cause back on the table, and to assert itself as the agent of that cause.) The moderate Arabs need, finally, to take responsibility—which, in the current context, means sharing some of their wealth with Palestinian communities, strengthening the Palestinian Authority (which at least says it supports negotiations with Israel, though its leadership in the West Bank is too weak and corrupt to make any headway), and de-fanging Hamas.
The moderate Arab leaders privately condemn Hamas’ attack, but they can’t say so without stirring protests and possibly rebellions among their own people, who tend to be more radical than they are. In fact, except for the leaders of Bahrain and the UAE, they have stopped short of criticizing Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack and have suspended all visible contact with Israel.
Well, they can no longer have it both ways. They can’t reap the benefits of an alliance with Israel while sitting by as the Islamist terrorists murder Israelis. Hamas has fired off most of its rockets in the present war. Qatar, which has funneled money and other forms of aid to Hamas for many years, must make sure that new armaments don’t get into Gaza. (Besides being a supporter of Hamas, Qatar is a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States. Biden should use his leverage to bring Qatar in line.)
Biden has said that he hopes responsible parties in the region can use an extended cease-fire as the opportunity to begin a fervent hunt for a diplomatic settlement to the conflict. I don’t know this for a fact, but it’s likely that, in the course of their incessant shuttle diplomacy in the region, senior U.S. officials have been discussing a possible long-term peace track with the moderate Arab leaders—who would very much like to resume “normalization” with Israel.
This leads us to the second step in settling the conflict: Netanyahu and his far-right-wing government must go. He almost certainly will be ousted from power the instant that the war is over. Besides his deeply unpopular proposals for judicial reforms, which roused massive weekly protests up until Oct. 7, most Israelis blame him for allowing the Hamas attack to happen.
His departure is key because no Arab leader is going to get involved in Palestinian matters unless Israel’s leader at least expresses an interest in addressing the basic question—in negotiating some way for Israelis and Palestinians to share or divide the small chunk of land that both sides claim. Netanyahu has no interest in doing this, and the coalition partners that keep him in power have less interest still; in fact, they have expanded the number of settlements in the West Bank, and they have done nothing to arrest or prosecute the most radical settlers who have killed or looted Palestinian residents in recent months. These settlers’ violent actions have made more and more of these Palestinians supportive of Hamas—which makes a peaceful solution all the more difficult.
Meanwhile, what to do about Hamas? If it can’t be wiped out, can it be diminished and contained? In an online event hosted by the Times of Israel on Wednesday, Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, noted that Hamas’ attack couldn’t have taken place if 200 Israeli troops had been where they should have been—the terrorists wouldn’t have advanced beyond the border fence. In the short run, if the border were rebuilt and adequately manned, if intelligence on Hamas’ activities was taken more seriously, and if moderate Arab leaders reduce Hamas’ strength, would that be enough to make Israelis secure? Again, in the short run, they may have no choice.
There is another reason to stop this war, as long as Hamas frees the hostages and stops shelling Israel: the steep rise in antisemitic incidents throughout the United States and Europe. There have been troubling displays of antisemitism in many protests against the war; many of these protesters seem to know little about Israel’s history and ignore the reactionary ideas of Islamist militants. Nonetheless, the steep rise is a fact of life. It is endangering Jews around the world—which should concern Israeli officials, just as violence against Israel concerns Jews around the world.
The consequences extend well beyond Jews. There are reports of an “extremist domino effect” of the war, with al-Qaida emphasizing its ties to radical Palestinians as a way of attracting recruits. Germany’s domestic intelligence chief warned this week that the risk of Islamist attacks in the West is “real and higher than it has been for a long time” because of the Israel-Hamas war. “We see calls in jihadist spectrums for attacks and for al-Qaida and Islamic State [ISIS] to tag on to the Middle East conflict,” the chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said.
The war is threatening to spread. If Israel’s excesses are seen as the cause for the war’s perpetuation, then the more the rest of the world suffers, the more the rest of the world will blame Israel—rightly or wrongly. It’s time for Israel and its allies to calculate the costs and benefits—and to find other ways to solve their very real problems.
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Israel-Hamas war: Why it's a good idea to extend the cease-fire. - Slate
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