Interesting piece from The New Yorker (excerpts below)
Amid the escalating horror in Gaza, the President will have to go around Benjamin Netanyahu to forge a postwar vision for the region.
“As for his postwar plan for Gaza, Netanyahu offered a laconic mixture of counter-insurgency and Greater Israel fantasies, to which the hostages’ lives seem subordinated. No surprises there, either.“
The hostages were never a primary concern. Not from anything I’ve read or seen. The latest information has Israel killing anywhere from 40-70 of the hostages. Including those 3 men IDF shot and killed as they surrendered. And the few they rescued, most recently, were done so by killing nearly 100 Palestinian civilians including women and children.
Previous coverage
President Joe Biden purports to have other ideas. He told a reporter in New York this week—while eating ice cream with the late-night host Seth Meyers—that he hopes for a ceasefire deal “by next Monday.”
There is an opportunity cost for Israeli politics, too. Netanyahu’s real opposition, now, is Biden. There are secular leaders in Israel positioned to support an alternative vision for Gaza and the region, and, arguably, to bring Netanyahu down. But dread grips the public, and these leaders currently have no real standing in the absence of a U.S. President detailing a plan, proving the support of Arab allies, and warning Israel of the dire consequences of defying him.
Amid the I.D.F.’s proclaimed effort to root out Hamas, an estimated thirty thousand people in Gaza have been killed
As of this morning my understanding is the number of dead has surpassed 30,000. Undoubtedly the number is higher
Seventy per cent of the dead are reportedly women and minors. Tens of thousands more, including many children, have suffered serious injuries and amputations. Rafah is a nearly twenty-five-square-mile area, in which refugees from Gaza City and Khan Younis are now sheltering. There are currently around 1.5 million civilians there, most of whom are living in tents—an almost sixfold increase in the population since the war began. (In all of Gaza, at least half the buildings have been destroyed or damaged.) United Nations agencies warn of famine, and note that there is no drinking water or water for showers in many shelters, and that there are many reported cases of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Medical facilities have been raided. The refugees are utterly dependent on the humanitarian aid that is brought in, on average, by about eighty-five trucks.
On Thursday, i
t was reported that at least a hundred and twelve people were killed, and hundreds more injured, when an aid convoy carrying flour and canned foodthat was escorted by Israeli troops was thronged by starving civilians in the Nabulsi roundabout, quite near the area Hayman spoke of. First eyewitness accounts suggest that Israeli troops fired on the crowd, and although it is not yet clear how many died from gunfire and how many from being trampled or run over—in the local hospital, most of the injuries were said to be bullet wounds—more such horrors seem inevitable if refugees are forced north. (A spokesman for the I.D.F. initially denied that it was responsible for the deaths, and later said that it is “continuing to investigate” the incident.)
IDF has changed it’s story to cover it’s war crime.
Clearly, Netanyahu and his coalition allies—including the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the internal-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir—
are imagining an expansion of the occupation.
Obvious from the start.
Biden’s team, not quite as clearly, is seeking a different endgame. (So why write about this as if it is so?) It vetoed, on February 20th, a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a permanent truce, yet Biden had said on February 12th (with Jordan’s King Abdullah II by his side) that a multi-week pause in the fighting might be used “to build something more enduring.” What he seemed to be alluding to was a plan, sketched in some detail by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Times’s Tom Friedman, at Davos, in January, that would essentially entail the I.D.F. gradually turning over administration of Gazan cities to a “reformed” P.A., reinforced, in effect, by Egyptian troops and by Saudi and Emirati money. The Sunni states would get a defense pact with the U.S. against Iran and a commitment from Israel to accept a “pathway” toward an eventual, demilitarized Palestinian state.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, says that the Palestinian situation must be solved in direct negotiations “without preconditions.” Of course, he has preconditions, which are that the whole Land of Israel—read, the entire West Bank—is Israel’s, and that a Palestinian state, which, notionally had always also included Gaza, is impossible. Netanyahu does still face domestic opposition. Polls show that, if an election were held now, his theocratic coalition would lose badly—by as many as thirty seats in the hundred-and-twenty-seat Knesset—to a coalition of secular centrists led by the former chiefs of staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, who joined the war cabinet in October. They also show that more than seventy per cent of Israelis want early elections, which would otherwise be held in a couple of years.
Netanyahu has played out his political machinations very effectively in this situation-
The disaffection reflects Netanyahu’s ill preparedness on October 7th but also his assault on the judiciary, which prompted several months of divisive demonstrations. A government crisis is already brewing over the exemption of ultra-Orthodox youth from national service, which the Supreme Court has deemed illegal; the issue pits theocrats against secularist generals, including the Likud defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Hostages’ families, growing desperate, have mustered thousands of sympathizers to weekly demonstrations; they’ve broken into Knesset meetings and blocked highways. Six weeks ago, in a widely watched television interview, Eisenkot—who had lost a son and a nephew in the war—insisted that “the hostages will only return alive if there is a deal,” and whoever speaks of the “absolute defeat” of Hamas was “not speaking the truth.” He insisted that the government must “chart a path”—seemingly code for aligning with Biden’s evolving plan.
In this context, Biden must lead: he cannot just telephone his friend Bibi, give counsel, and then, as has been reported, call him “an asshole” behind his back. The Israeli public must be presented with a stark choice: a detailed regional plan with credible American guarantees or Netanyahu’s defiant isolation; Gantz and Eisenkot would thus gain cover for diplomatic realism beyond simple military deterrence. The State Department has already signalled a new toughness, putting four violent West Bank settlers under a sanctions regime. More can be added to that list. Gantz is reportedly travelling to Washington tomorrow, to hold talks with Administration officials, without having coördinated the trip with Netanyahu—and infuriating him. Biden might, as Richard Haass, the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested, give a speech in Israel, “over the prime minister’s head,” that would “clearly show what the U.S. believes,” much the way Netanyahu, in 2015, aimed to bypass President Barack Obama and sway American opinion against the Iran deal by addressing the Republican-led Congress. The former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told me, “If Biden openly pressures Israel to accept his deal, he will gain some of the support that he might be losing in his own country.”
“The Biden Administration believes,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national-security adviser and the author of “Israeli National Security,” told me, “that Bibi has no coherent way of coping with the long term, or fully achieving his government’s military goals. It believes that the fighting must be scaled back in favor of a diplomatic track, whose centerpiece is movement toward a Palestinian state, which is the key to reshaping a new regional order, but a very unpopular idea in Israel right now.” Still, Freilich said, “If Netanyahu pits himself against the U.S., rejects normalization with the Saudis, risks escalation in the north, sacrifices the hostages—after the war’s outbreak, the state of the economy, the judicial overhaul, the endless empty posturing—the streets will explode.” ♦
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