Mouin Rabbani Profile picture
May 6, 2024 33 tweets 5 min read Read on X
THREAD: On Tuesday evening it appeared the end was finally in sight. Hamas formally accepted the ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, and spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets Rafah and other Palestinian towns in the Gaza Strip.
Given that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other US officials have repeatedly insisted that Hamas forms the sole obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, Palestinians could be forgiven for believing that day 213 of this genocidal ordeal would be the last.
The euphoria however proved short-lived. Several hours later the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s war cabinet had unanimously agreed that the proposal “is far from Israel’s necessary requirements”,
and that its latest offensive on the southern town of Rafah abutting the Palestinian-Egyptian border would continue as planned.
Indeed, Israel’s Western-supplied and supported military launched intensive air and artillery strikes to support an incursion into Rafah that commenced shortly after Netanyahu’s announcement.
Ceasefire negotiations have been going on for some time, led by Egypt and Qatar, both of whom maintain working relationships with both Israel and Hamas. Egypt additionally has a close alliance with Israel, while Qatar hosts the Hamas leadership on its territory.
The United States is often identified as a mediator as well, but this is not quite accurate. Not only is it Israel’s chief sponsor in every sense of the word, but it also openly demands the destruction and elimination of Hamas, with whom it has neither contact nor communication.
Although it participates in the negotiations, as Blinken’s statements attest Washington serves primarily as a proxy for Israel rather than as what any reasonable observer would characterise as a mediator.
Given US power and US President Joe Biden’s unqualified support for Israel and its far-right government, the working assumption in Cairo and Doha has been that whatever Washington accepts will be translated into an Israeli endorsement.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and the main reason is that Biden and Blinken’s unmatched embrace of Israel and Israeli impunity in its dealings with the Palestinian people has extended to permitting Netanyahu to ride roughshod over US policy preferences without consequence.
So long as Blinken takes center stage in US Middle East diplomacy it can safely be ignored. Clueless as ever, on his most recent trip to the Middle East he once again prioritised a Saudi-Israeli normalisation agreement, which he appears to genuinely believe is imminent.
As for a ceasefire, he couldn’t restrain himself from praising Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” offer to pause its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip for a few weeks, with mass killings resuming only after Israel safely retrieved its captives.
It was only after the hapless Secretary returned to DC to shred further dissent memos from State Department staff and issue additional certificates of good conduct to his favorite genocidaires in order to enable further weapons deliveries to them, that things began to change.
Once again, Blinken was replaced by CIA Director William Burns, a serious diplomat who knows the Middle East well, and who unlike his boss in the White House can distinguish between US and Israeli interests.
Among the key sticking points in the negotiations is that Hamas demanded an end to Israel’s war while Israel insisted on continuing it.
Given this contradiction the mediators could not incorporate explicit wording that either ended or failed to end the war and still clinch the deal. What appears to have happened is that a sufficiently vague formula was included in the proposal,
paired with informal American assurances that if Hamas implemented the first stages of the three-stage deal, Washington would guarantee an Israeli cessation of hostilities by the end of its final stage.
For the record, US assurances to the Palestinians over the years have been honoured mainly in the breach.
This was most prominently the case in 1982, when the Reagan administration guaranteed the protection of civilians remaining in Beirut after the PLO withdrawal from the Lebanese capital, but did nothing to stop the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
Against this background, and given Hamas’s insistence on an end to Israel’s war, Netanyahu was confident no deal would be achieved, and for good measure informed the mediators that Israel would only send representatives to Cairo if Hamas formally accepted the latest proposal.
To Israel’s great consternation, it emerged that the Hamas delegation despatched to Cairo had instructions to engage positively with the proposal and secure a deal. Netanyahu went ballistic.
He responded with a series of statements that Israel was determined to invade Rafah even if a ceasefire agreement was concluded, and that it would only end its campaign after achieving the total victory that has systematically eluded it from the outset.
For good measure Israel also banned Al-Jazeera from operating in Israel in a move deliberately calculated to anger the Qatari government and provoke its withdrawal from the negotiations.
Hamas interpreted Israel’s latest antics as making a mockery of the proposal and, more importantly, of the US role in its implementation, and the movement’s delegation duly returned to Doha.
Similarly incensed the Egyptians and Qataris refined their proposal (and presumably the US guarantees as well) to make these more palatable to Hamas, which this time accepted them.
Presented as an Egyptian-Qatari initiative, it is inconceivable that even a punctuation mark within it was not first cleared with Burns, who is also in Doha, or that Burns did not similarly consult with Washington before signing off on it.
Hamas claims it was assured by the Egyptians and Qataris that Biden would ensure the agreement’s implementation if the movement accepted it. We’ll probably find out the reality behind this assertion in the coming days.
Same for any statements Burns or officials in Washington may make that they had no role in crafting the latest proposal.
In a different world one might think this would mean Israel would also be forced to accept the agreement, particularly since Biden has publicly identified an Israeli invasion of Rafah as a “red line”. But that different world does not exist.
Netanyahu is confident he can cross Washington’s red lines at will, because it will continue to refrain from imposing any consequences on him for doing so. Indeed, Washington is already backing off, now claiming it only opposes a “major” Israeli ground operation into Rafah.
The coming days will reveal if Israel’s calculations are sound, or if there is a limit beyond which the Biden administration is unwilling to be led by its far-right Israeli allies.
As for the idea that this is all Netanyahu’s doing, and solely motivated by his desire to remain in power to evade trial for corruption, this doesn’t agree particularly well with a war cabinet that unanimously endorsed rejected the proposal on the table and the invasion of Rafah.
What is happening in Gaza, and in Palestine more generally, far transcends the determination of one politician to cling to power. END

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More from @MouinRabbani

Apr 2
THREAD: I have on several occasions pointed out that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fraudster who invented her origin story out of thin air. Like other immigrants who embrace far-right politics, she is motivated by a combination of opportunism, self-promotion, and callous, gratuitous contempt for those who genuinely experience the challenges she falsely claims as her own. Combine with the requisite insecurity, identity crisis, and burning desire to be accepted by the dominant culture, add a hefty dose of insufferable narcissism, et voila, the far-right immigrant template is complete.
I wrote the below in 2006, in response to a disingenuous defence of Hirsi Ali by the unlamented Christopher Hitchens. At the end of this thread I provide a link to the documentary that I reference in this thread. The link is to a copy of the Dutch documentary with (accurate) English subtitles, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for those unfamiliar with the sheer scale and brazen nature of Hirsi Ali’s fraud. Here’s my 2006 text:
Christopher Hitchens's most recent defence of Ayaan Hirsi Magan (aka Ayaan Hirsi Ali), "Dutch Courage", published in Slate on 22 May 2006, was – judging by the reference to a 19 May 2006 New York Times op-ed by Ian Buruma, completed on or after that date. Yet it fails to account for a slew of facts that were by then public knowledge. Together with other facts that have been in the public record for considerably longer, these collectively either undermine or reverse many of Hitchens’s assertions:
Read 22 tweets
Mar 18
THREAD: As of this writing, intensive Israeli air raids and shelling throughout the Gaza Strip has killed more than 350 Palestinians, and wounded hundreds more, in the space of several hours. How did we get here?
In January the incoming Trump administration forced Israel to accept a ceasefire proposal that had been largely formulated by the Israeli government and unveiled in late May 2024 by US President Joe Biden.
At Israel’s insistence it was not a comprehensive agreement that would see each party simultaneously implement all of its obligations in reciprocal fashion, but rather a process consisting of three stages.
Read 25 tweets
Mar 6
THREAD: After absorbing the unwelcome news Wednesday morning that their American idol, Donald Trump, is negotiating directly with Hamas, Israel flunkies became positively ecstatic when the US president later that day issued an apocalyptic and indeed genocidal threat against “the People of Gaza”: If Hamas does not immediately, and presumably unconditionally, release all the remaining captives in the Gaza Strip along with the corpses it holds, “you are DEAD”. What are we to make of these very contradictory developments?
To its credit, the Trump administration has ventured where its Democratic predecessor never contemplated going: negotiating with not only its Israeli proxy but also its Palestinian adversary in order to achieve an agreement.
Speaking to all parties involved in a dispute is of course standard diplomatic practice, particularly where resolution of a crisis that has consumed tens of thousands of lives is concerned. Palestine has been one of the rare exceptions to this template. Washington for decades refused to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) until it jumped through a succession of increasingly narrow hoops, and in fact recognized the PLO only after Israel did so in 1993.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 13
THREAD: It seems the Israeli-Palestinian exchange of captives that had been scheduled for this weekend but was suspended by Hamas this past Monday is now back on track. What happened? The short answer: Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, caved.
As I noted in my previous thread, Hamas on Monday stated that it was indefinitely suspending the further exchange of captives in response to repeated and escalating Israeli violations of the January agreement between the two parties. Israeli officials, cited in the Israeli press and at the tail end of a NYT article, confirmed the validity of Hamas’s accusations.
I had earlier also noted that Hamas was responding to Israel’s refusal to engage in negotiations on the second stage of the three-part January agreement, to new proposals put forward by the Israeli prime minister that sought to comprehensively revise what had already been negotiated and concluded between the two parties, as well as to US President Donald Trump’s harebrained scheme to permanently expel the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip to the Arab world. The latter scheme, needless to say, renders the entire agreement meaningless and irrelevant.
Read 23 tweets
Feb 11
THREAD: On Monday 10 February Abu Ubaida, spokesperson of the Martyr Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced that the movement was indefinitely suspending further Israeli-Palestinian exchanges of captives on account of repeated and continued Israeli violations of the agreement reached between the two in January of this year.
While Israel has indeed been violating the agreement in various ways, there is also more to the story. Most importantly this concerns Israel’s refusal to commence negotiations on the the agreement’s second phase, and US President Donald Trump’s recent proposal for the forcible mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the Arab world.
The January agreement between Israel and Hamas is about more than an exchange of captives. At Israel’s insistence, it comprises three phases rather than one. During the first phase, scheduled to last 42 days (until the beginning of March) a limited exchange of captives and suspension of hostilities will be accompanied by a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, freedom of movement within the territory for displaced Palestinians, and surge of urgently-needed humanitarian supplies.
Read 19 tweets
Feb 8
THREAD: The three Israeli captives released on 8 February appeared emaciated, pallid, and in need of medical attention. The Palestinian organizations that held them were under an absolute obligation to treat them in accordance with international law. That includes a prohibition – also absolute – on taking captive civilian non-combatants, because such individuals are considered hostages rather than prisoners-of-war.
The primary responsibility for any harm to civilian hostages rests with those who took them hostage and did not comply with their obligation to release them, immediately and unconditionally. They should never have been placed in a situation that exposed them to prolonged confinement, or to the deliberate attempts by Israel to murder them to prevent their captivity, or to the hunger, thirst, and lack of medical care resulting from Israel’s comprehensive, genocidal siege of the Gaza Strip, or to Israel’s efforts to kill them during their captivity to reduce Hamas’s bargaining power.
Whatever culpability Israel and its Western sponsors have for the suffering and killings of civilian hostages in the Gaza Strip – and that culpability is very considerable – it does not absolve those who took them hostage from their own responsibilities, or exempt them from accountability.
Read 12 tweets

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