Middle-east quagmire: Israel: Ceasefire, get hostages, leave Gaza

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Israel today is at a strategic point in its war in Gaza, and there is every indication that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to choose the wrong path — and take the Biden administration along for a very dangerous and troubling ride. It is so dangerous and troubling that Israel’s best option, when all is said and done, might be to leave a rump Hamas leadership in power in Gaza. Yes, you read that right.

To understand why, let’s look back a bit. I argued in October that Israel was making a terrible mistake by rushing headlong into invading Gaza, the way America did in Afghanistan after 9/11. I thought Israel should have focused first on getting back its hostages, delegitimising Hamas for its murderous and rapacious Oct. 7 rampage, and going after Hamas’s leadership in a targeted way — more Munich, less Dresden. That is, a military response akin to how Israel tracked down the killers of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and not how the U.S. turned Dresden into a pile of rubble in World War II.

But I understood that many Israelis felt they had a moral and strategic right and necessity to go into Gaza and remove Hamas “once and for all.” In which case, I argued, Israel would need three things — time, legitimacy, and military and other resources from the U.S. The reason: The ambitious goal of wiping out Hamas could not be completed quickly (if at all); the military operation would end up killing innocent civilians, given how Hamas had tunnelled under them; and it would leave a security and government vacuum in Gaza that would have to be filled by the non-Hamas Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which would have to be upgraded and transformed to take on that task.

In short, Israel would need to fight this war with the least collateral damage for Palestinian civilians and accompany it with a political horizon for a new relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, built around two nation-states for two indigenous peoples. Doing so would give Israel a chance to say to the world that this was not a war of vengeance or occupation, but a war to eliminate the Palestinian entity that was out to destroy any two-state solution — Hamas — and create the political space for a deal with the Palestinian Authority, which is still committed to a two-state deal. That approach would have won the support, funding and, I think, even peacekeeping troops of moderate Arab states like the U.A.E.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu and his military did not pursue that course. They opted for the worst strategic combination: Militarily they opted for the Dresden approach, which, though it may have ended up killing some 13,000 Hamas fighters, also killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, leaving hundreds of thousands of others injured, displaced or homeless — and delegitimising, for many around the world, what Israel thought was a just war.

And diplomatically, instead of accompanying this war strategy with an initiative that would buy Israel at least some time, legitimacy and resources to dismantle Hamas, Netanyahu refused to offer any political horizon or exit strategy and expressly ruled out any collaboration with the Palestinian Authority under orders from the Jewish supremacists in his governing coalition. That is an utterly insane strategy.

It has locked Israel into a politically unwinnable war, and it has ended up isolating America, imperiling our regional and global interests, compromising Israel’s support in the U.S. and fracturing the base of President Biden’s Democratic Party.

And the timing is truly awful. The Biden foreign policy team, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have just finished working out the draft of a new strategic deal with Saudi Arabia — including a civil nuclear program, advanced arms and much deeper security ties. The deal, a senior Biden administration official told me, could be wrapped up in a matter of weeks — but for one element. It hinges on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel in return for Israel ending the war in Gaza, getting out of the Strip and agreeing to a defined “pathway” for a two-state outcome — with clear metrics in terms of what both Israel and the Palestinian Authority would have to do and in what time frames.

We are talking about a game-changing deal — precisely the deal that an Iran-backed Hamas launched this war on Oct. 7 to undermine, because it would have isolated Iran and Hamas. But the war in Gaza has to end first and Israel needs a government ready to embark on a two-state pathway.

Which takes us to this fork in the road. My preference is that Israel immediately change course. That is, join with the Biden administration in embracing that pathway to a two-state deal that would open the way for Saudi normalization and also give cover for the Palestinian Authority and moderate Arab states to try to establish non-Hamas governance in Gaza in Israel’s place. And — as the Biden team urged Netanyahu privately — forget entirely about invading Rafah and instead use a targeted approach to take out the rest of the Hamas leadership.

Even if Israel is intent on ignoring the U.S. advice, I pray it doesn’t try to invade Rafah and reject Palestinian Authority involvement in Gaza’s future. Because that would be an invitation for a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and a permanent Hamas insurgency. It would bleed Israel economically, militarily and diplomatically in very dangerous ways.

So dangerous that I believe Israel would actually be better off agreeing to Hamas’s demand for a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a cease-fire and an all-for-all deal — all Israeli hostages in return for all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. In other words, if Israel is not going to partner with the Palestinian Authority and moderate Arab states to create different governance in Gaza, and create conditions for normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, Israel needs to get its hostages back, end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, get out of Gaza, have a new election and do a deep rethink. Please, Israel, do not get sucked into Rafah and permanently occupy Gaza. It will be a disaster.