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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