Contrary to what the Israeli public believes, it is the political sphere that will determine the results of the Gaza War
The Israeli public is facing an optical illusion. The endless television panels and discussions, which have been taking place on the hour, every day since the Hamas attack, give the Israeli public the impression that they are receiving information about what is happening. On the military level, we receive comprehensive live information and uptodate television footage from the IDF Spokesman. But this is not the complete picture. The fog of battle prevents us from seeing what three divisions are doing in northern Gaza. Unlike other areas in the world, we do not have international media coverage, and so the picture we receive is incomplete.
Take for example, an issue that is being ignored: what will happen to the 900,000 Palestinians who have been moved, according to the IDF Spokesman’s “humanitarian corridors” map, from the north of the Gaza Strip and the densely populated Gaza City to the southern area of the Strip? The movement of citizens on such a wide scale to a limited area unable to absorb them is beyond belief. It is also not clear how they would be able to return to the devastated areas after the military operation has been completed and the north of Gaza has been demilitarized. This is apparently the reason that some Israeli politicians have put forward an absurd proposal for a “willing” transfer of almost 2 million Palestinian civilians from the Gaza Strip. Such a proposal would be totally unacceptable to the international community.
When it comes to the political coverage being presented to the Israeli public, the situation is even worse. Political reporters dominate the television panels. To a certain extent, they have been transformed from reporters on political affairs to reporters on “the Prime Minister’s Office affairs” who compete among themselves as to who will be the first to present the PMO’s talking points of the hour. Netanyahu exploits the situation with his skilled clandestine digital team that works behind the scenes in his bureau. The television viewers do not see and are not aware of the consciousness engineering disinformation campaign to which they are being subjected.
It is the political sphere that will determine the results of the war. To decipher the political picture as realistically as possible, the political analyst needs to separate the background noise from Netanyahu’s talking points, to distance them from the discussion, and to identify the true signals in the political field.
In contrast to the impression prevalent in Israel, the “day after” is already here. At the end of the G7 meeting in Tokyo last week, US Secretary of State Blinken outlined it in detail: The Two Stage US Roadmap to End the War. The US and its strategic partners are committed to Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself. Gaza cannot serve as a platform for terrorism. But there is also a list of principles and conditions some of which are red lines for Israel in the Gaza War: no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza now or after the war, no reoccupation of Gaza at the end of the war, no blockade or siege (land or sea) of Gaza, no reduction in the territory of Gaza.
Blinken’s list of red lines puts Israel on a collision course with the Biden administration. Blinken’s conditions are in contradiction to the proposals that Israel raised for “security zones” within Gazan territory based on the past south Lebanon model. In particular, as can be seen in an answer that Blinken gave to a journalist in Tokyo, the US opposes Netanyahu’s demand to “maintain security control for an indefinite period” of Gaza. Unsurprisingly, Blinken’s list of red lines did not receive a lot of attention in the Israeli TV panel discussions. Furthermore, these days Israelis do not generally read serious commentaries in print newspapers. So the general public has remained unaware of these red lines. During her visit to Israel last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the US’s senior NATO partner, used Blinken’s exact words.
And there is more. As a second stage, the US put on the table, a plan of action for the end of the Gaza War and for the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Palestinian governance of Gaza (as noted, this means the complete territory) in the framework of one single political unit with the West Bank and under the Palestinian Authority. The new element in Blinken’s roadmap is double in scope. No longer amorphous US statements on the need for a two state solution, but a concrete reference to an independent Palestinian state as one independent unit next to Israel (he left open the issue of “safe passage” between the two parts of the Palestinian territory). And he put the emphasis on immediacy and the need for urgent action: “not tomorrow, not after the war, but now”.
The Blinken road map is evidence, to anyone who needed it, of US displeasure with Netanyahu’s boastful speech at the UN last September – just a month before the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel’s Gaza border envelope – whose main point was peace on earth without the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s speech focused on removing the Palestinian issue from the global agenda with an arrogant emphasis on Israel’s veto of any two state solution, including in the framework of normalization with Saudi Arabia which was then the focus of global discourse. The time element is crucial for Blinken. We do not have details of what is happening in the corridors of the White House and the State Department. But my understanding is that in the US view the war in the Middle East is creating an urgent window of opportunity of just a few weeks to advance political processes that had been taboo for years. This is an American diplomatic modus operandi. Thus Secretary of State Kissinger broke the deadlock at the height of the Yom Kippur war and led to the interim agreements that prepared the way for a peace agreement with Egypt. This required both a diplomacy of “reassessment” and collision with Israel. But our issue is closer to Secretary of State James Baker’s model who used the shock of the 1991 first Gulf War to overcome Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir’s refusal to engage in a peace process. Through his frequent journeys to the region immediately following the end of the war, Secretary of State Baker succeeded in forcing all sides to participate in an international peace conference. This was the Madrid Conference from which, in history’s wonderful way, branched out to the Oslo Accords and to Israeli and PLO mutual recognition. The mutual recognition agreement which is a central part of the Oslo agreements continues to this day.
And the question that is before us: will Secretary of State Blinken be able to repeat Secretary of State Baker’s diplomatic achievements, strike the iron while it is hot, and force the two sides within the immediate time frame, and convene an international conference for a solution to the Gaza issue including massive economic aid within proposed framework of a unified Palestinian state that includes Gaza and the West Bank. In the Biden administration’s view, the moderate counties in the Middle East together with the EU countries and Japan must act together with the US to achieve this aim.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst
This is so valuable, thank you. Among many other important things is an item about the media — crucial and easily missed — the great limitations of “access journalism.” I am reminded of a couple of things. 1. Peter Baker, New York Times White House bureau chief, when asked the simple question of what he knows about something or other, replied, “I don’t know anything, I can only tell you what my sources tell me.” 2. A corollary or related I think is the following: “nearly as important as what newspapers print is what they do not print.” (Credit for this is my late teacher at Yale Charles Hill, a career diplomat who had been Secretary Shultz’s executive assistant and chief of staff at the State Department, and as it happens political minister-counselor at the Tel Aviv embassy in the late 1970s/early 80s.)