Thread by @MouinRabbani

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.

At the conclusion of its statement on the suspension of further captive exchanges, Hamas also pointedly noted that it was issuing its statement on Monday in order to give Israel, its US sponsor, and the Egyptian and Qatari mediators the opportunity to correct Israel’s behavior by Saturday, in which case the exchange would proceed as planned.

Ever ready to distort, deflect, and dissemble at a moment’s notice, Israel, its army of flunkies and apologists, and its stenographers in the Western media immediately put out a very different explanation for Hamas’s decision. According to their interpretation Hamas’s decision had nothing to do with the movement’s allegations about Israeli conduct, but was a response to the criticism and condemnation the movement received on account of the gaunt and weakened appearance of the three Israeli captives released this past weekend.

Fearing that a further release of Israeli captives in similar condition would generate insurmountable political pressure on the Israeli government from an outraged Israeli public to resume its genocidal military campaign in the Gaza Strip, Hamas needed additional time to fatten up the next batch of captives before releasing them.

Readers may recall that these same officials, flunkies, and stenographers previously concluded that earlier releases of captives in seemingly good health could only be explained by Hamas forcing them to ingest mysterious drugs to make them temporarily appear reasonably cared for.

When Netanyahu proclaims the world is flat, avoid the stampede of flunkies rushing to jump over the edge, followed by reporters dutifully measuring the distance to the planet’s rim.

Regarding Netanyahu’s motives for not fulfilling Israel’s obligations under the January agreement, these are varied. As every sentient being who has examined the issue has concluded, not only was Netanyahu dragged kicking and screaming into accepting the January agreement once he lost the unconditional support to reject it previously offered by the Biden administration, but the Israeli leader is and remains determined to avoid concluding the negotiations for the second stage of the agreement, and is even more determined to avoid implementing it. The repeated and growing Israeli violations are therefore first and foremost a campaign to derail an agreement Israel’s leadership accepted only under duress.

Secondly, Israel has a long record of violating agreements it has accepted, including those it is committed to, in order to secure further advantages and where possible alter their terms or implementation in its favor. In this case Israel is seeking to incorporate continued freedom of action within the Gaza Strip into the terms of an agreement that prohibits it, similar to what it has done in Lebanon on the strength of a separate, bilateral US-Israeli understanding provided by Biden that contradicts the terms of the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Lebanon under US auspices.

Additionally, Israel’s leadership and indeed Israeli society has been salivating over the prospect of expelling the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip en masse as proposed by Trump. Making Palestinian lives miserable, particularly by dragging its feet on the humanitarian provisions of the agreement, is seen as important preparatory work in this regard.

Responding to Hamas’s decision, Trump issued his High Noon ultimatum, proclaiming that all hell will break loose not only if the Palestinians fail to release the number of captives previously agreed upon, but also if they fail to release all remaining captives held in the Gaza Strip by noon this Saturday. Less noticed was that his bombastic pronouncement concluded with a caveat that he would leave it up to Israel to decide how to act.

Barely able to suppress his glee, Netanyahu the following day followed up with a series of statements of his own. If the captives were not released by noon Saturday, the genocidal campaign would resume with even greater ferocity and continue until Hamas was fully destroyed. He seemed to waver between a demand for the release of several captives in accordance with the agreement, and all of them. Israel additionally put its military on high alert, cancelled leaves, began intensive overflights of the Gaza Strip, and for good measure conducted a bombing raid on a building in Rafah.

Netanyahu’s agenda was initially unclear. Given what is known about his priorities there was certainly good reason to take his pronouncements at face value. But there was an equally plausible alternative scenario: that Netanyahu fully realized resuming his war would be a fool’s errand, recognized that the Palestinians were not going to be intimidated by either Trump or him and were not going to back down, and therefore understood that Israel had no better option than to improve its compliance with the terms of the January agreement. Seen from this perspective Netanyahu, for whom optics are everything, issued his threats so that a resumption of captive exchanges could be presented as Hamas capitulating to Israel rather than Israel caving in to Hamas’s demands for Israeli compliance.

On Thursday there was a sudden a surge of humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip including, for the first time, delivery of urgently-needed caravans to house refugees whose communities have been systematically reduced to rubble. Several hours later, Hamas capitulated to Israel’s improved compliance and announced the Saturday exchange will proceed according to schedule. According to some reports Hamas additionally oiled the wheels for these deliveries by providing signs of life for some of the captives it holds.

We now know what happened but still need to explain why. In addition to Hamas’s refusal to roll over and play dead, there is most likely a combination of factors at work. Trump’s histrionics notwithstanding, it’s entirely clear a decision was taken in Washington that the agreement should not be derailed at this time, and that for it to continue Israel needed to fulfil more of its obligations.

When Washington passes gas, Israel inhales deeply and politely inquires if it’s wearing Chanel No. 5 or Yves Saint Laurent Opium.

Israel’s security establishment may well also have played a role. Many of its leaders view the retrieval of their captives as a priority at this stage, particularly because male military prisoners are slated for release further into the process. An army that abandons its soldiers because it would rather engage in mass murder will have difficulty motivating its troops in future, particularly so reservists without whom Israel doesn’t have a functioning military. And in this respect the security establishment has repeatedly encouraged Netanyahu to get the deal done on the grounds that Israel can easily manufacture a pretext to resume the slaughter once the captives are brought home.

Whether this establishment has also reached the conclusion that it is unlikely to succeed where fifteen months of its best efforts have failed, and that failing again will not improve its stature domestically, regionally, or internationally, is an open question.

Israeli public opinion may at this stage have also played a role. It appears that Netanyahu will experience more opposition aborting an agreement already being implemented than he previously encountered for refusing to accept one.

Lastly, the role of Arab governments, no longer inert since Trump unveiled his Gaza Riviera proposal, which requires them to commit political suicide, should also be taken into account.

Even Trump must recognize his scheme is stillborn, and he could not but have been taken aback by the explicit, public rejection of his ideas by each of Washington’s most loyal client regimes. After his disastrous White House press event with Jordan’s King Abdallah, Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah Sisi immediately cancelled his planned meeting with the US president in order to avoid being similarly railroaded and ridiculed.

In other words, Trump now recognizes that if he hopes to achieve anything in the Middle East during his second presidency, he will have to make do with no more than pronouncements about the majesty of his proposal and how everyone immediately fell in love with it. For the moment at least – and this moment may only last this coming week – Israel’s sock puppets in the new US administration have been put on the back foot. END