Israelis Respond to Ceasefire Plan
American Bearhug Highlights Israeli Divisions
The American Administration has made up its mind to put a stop to the war in Gaza, at least temporarily. This may be for American domestic political reasons or out of genuine concern for the impact of the war on non-combatants in Gaza. The proposal being advanced may be a looming disaster for Israel or it may be the beginning of better days. Regardless of whether it’s a good plan or a bad one, the Biden administration is throwing the diplomatic weight of the United States into trying to make it happen. They are working to put a resolution in front of the UN Security Counsel that will contain the language of the latest Israeli proposal, for a ceasefire and an exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Spokespeople for the Biden administration are calling on Qatar and Egypt to put pressure on Hamas to agree to the deal. Today they announced the signing of a deal to sell 25 F-35 fighters to Israel. Biden also praised Prime Minister Netanyahu, saying that in his opinion he will go to great lengths to free Israeli hostages.
The language of Biden’s televised speech on May 31 anticipated much of what is happening now in Israel. He acknowledged that the Israeli government would come under intense pressure to repudiate the proposal and urged Israeli leaders to resist that pressure and stand behind their proposal. That pressure emerged promptly in the form of threats from Otzma Yehudit leader Betzalel Smotrich and Religious Zionism leader Itamar Ben Gvir to bring down the government if the deal goes ahead. It seems certain that Prime Minister Netanyahu warned President Biden that this would happen in their discussions before Biden made his address.
Understanding Israeli Divisions after Eight months of War
To understand what we are seeing in Israel in response to Biden’s speech it helps to look at the different segments and factions that have emerged in Israeli society in the wake of the disaster and trauma of the October 7th invasion, and the genocidal pogrom which took place on Israeli territory in the days that followed.
War Cabinet
Starting at the very center of power, we have the Israeli war cabinet. This body was created on October 12 and has sole authority over all decisions affecting the conduct of the war. The war cabinet has three voting members. They are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, both members of the Likud party and Minister without portfolio and leader of the National Unity party, Benny Gantz. Gantz was the Leader of the Opposition when the war began. National unity joined the emergency wartime government, and Gantz became part of the war cabinet when it was formed, five days after the beginning of the war. In addition to the three voting members, there are three observers. They are Minister without portfolio and National Unity member Gadi Eisenkot, Minister of Strategic Affairs and close associate of Netanyahu, Ron Dermer and Shas party leader Aryeh Deri.
Image: Voting members of Israeli War Cabinet (L-R) Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz. —— Source: Livemint.com
The war cabinet evidently approved the proposal that President Biden is promoting, likely under American pressure. That is what makes it an Israeli proposal. Members of the war cabinet have acknowledged that Israel agreed to it, although Prime Minister Netanyahu has spoken of “gaps” in what President Biden presented in his speech. Today, Aryeh Deri’s Shas party formally came out in favour, along with United Torah Judaism, the other ultra-orthodox faction that is part of the governing coalition that took power in 2022.
Prime Minister Netanyahu spent much of the weekend insisting that the proposal is consistent with Israel’s war aims of eradicating Hamas and returning all of the hostages and reiterating that, while the government is willing to stop fighting temporarily in order to achieve the liberation of some of the hostages, the war will not end until Israel achieves its twin war aims of eradicating Hamas and returning all of the hostages.
Divisions in the war cabinet in recent weeks have been very public. Gantz has threatened to leave the government over the lack of any Israeli plan for the future of Gaza after Hamas has been removed from power. He set a deadline of June 8, which is this coming Shabbat. Gallant has also criticized the conduct of the war by the government of which he is a part. In the middle of May, he went on Israeli television to demand that the government state that it has no intention of governing Gaza once the war aims have been achieved. He said that as defense minister he “would not allow it”. This Times of Israel article: Gallant to Netanyahu: You must publicly reject Israeli civil or military governance of Gaza after Hamas; I won’t allow it, reported that:
In a televised address, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tells Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he must take “tough decisions” to advance non-Hamas governance of Gaza, because the gains of the war are being eroded and Israel’s long-term security is at stake.
He also warns that he will not consent to Israeli civil or military governance of Gaza, and that governance by local, non-Hamas Palestinians there is in Israel’s interest. Netanyahu, he says, must publicly rule out the notion of ongoing Israeli governance in the Strip.
The article also cites Netanyahu’s opinion that any plan for the day after is meaningless until Hamas is defeated. This may be so, but with Ben Gvir and coalition members openly calling for the resettlement of Gaza, it seems clear that this ambiguity has also been essential to the survival of Netanyahu’s coalition.
So the three members of the war cabinet may be united on the importance of Israel’s war aims, but they each have their own publicly stated positions on what Israel should be doing now about the war’s aftermath.
Since the ceasefire plan is ostensibly about the aftermath as well as the hostages, it is not surprising that there is ambiguity in the plan about what will happen when the six week first phase of the plan comes to an end.
The Coalition
As already discussed above, there are deep divisions within the Israeli government on what should happen to Gaza after the war. The Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionist parties are opposed to any territorial compromise with the Palestinians for ideological and religious reasons. This has made any talk of Palestinian governance in Gaza after the war potentially fatal to the coalition government assembled by Netanyahu after the 2022 election.
Netanyahu is already under pressure to advance some sort of post-war plan from the other members of the war cabinet troika and, with the proposal now on the table, he has agreed to negotiate with Hamas over the future. The exact parameters of those negotiations are not publicly known, but in his speech on May 31 Biden spoke of an American role in putting pressure on Israel to reach a successful conclusion to those negotiations. Egypt and Qatar are supposed to put similar pressure on Hamas.
As I wrote in my previous article it is hard to imagine an outcome of Israel-Hamas negotiations in which Hamas agrees to be removed as the government of Gaza. But that must be a possible outcome if Israel has committed itself to participate in these talks to a successful conclusion and, at the same time Israel has reserved the right to pursue the war until it achieves its war aims.
It is in this ambiguity that compatibility of American assurances (in Biden’s speech on Friday) that Israel can resume fighting if Hamas fails to keep up its side of the agreement; and Netanyahu’s claims in his statements over the weekend, that Israel has retained its right to pursue the war to a successful conclusion, must lie. With the greatest good will in the world, it is hard to imagine a real life negotiation in which these two statements turn out to have the same meaning.
The Israeli Public
Last summer when we began writing this blog, the issue that was uppermost in Israeli minds was sharp national division over the government’s proposed legislation to change the role of the judiciary and the legal system in Israeli society.
A very large public movement had protested weekly for many months in opposition to these measures. Supporters of the government’s plans saw the protest movement as the voice of an entitled elite whose power was threatened. Israelis were worried about the implications for their future of these divisions.
When the war began, the profound national dispute was set aside. The protest movement morphed into a movement to help displaced Israelis and the families of people held hostage in Gaza. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum emerged as both a support system and a voice for the families of the hostages. They have raised large amounts of money for the families of those killed and kidnapped on October 7. The group has filed a war crimes complaint against Hamas at the International Court of Justice.
The Hostages and Missing Families forum and some of the relatives of the hostages have become advocates for keeping the return of the hostages as the focus of the government’s efforts in Gaza. In the process they have often supported the various proposals for hostage release that have emerged from indirect talks with Hamas fostered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar. Some have been highly critical of the government when it rejected conditions demanded by Hamas.
Some of the hostage families have been involved with a renewed movement calling for the end of the Netanyahu government and early elections. Over the weekend demonstrators demanding an immediate hostage deal blocked the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv. They were reacting to the news that four hostages who have been held in Gaza since October 7 have been confirmed dead by the IDF. The dead include three of the most elderly hostages who had been expected to be returned as part of any new hostage release.
Image: Chaim Peri, Amiram Cooper, Yoram Metzger and Nadav Popplewell (from L to R), whose deaths in Hamas captivity were confirmed by Israel on June 3, 2024. —————- Source: Times of Israel
Not all hostage families are opposed to government policy on the war. A group called the Tikvah Forum has opposed releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages, arguing that releasing Palestinians in the past has led to the death of more Israelis when those prisoners returned to terrorism. You can read more about them in this article: An ideological minority of parents of hostages held by Hamas oppose negotiations.
What will Hamas Do?
Hamas is reported by some sources in the Arab world to be favorably disposed toward the latest proposal. As mentioned above, the US has called on those with influence over Hamas to pressure them to accept the deal. As we have written in the past, Hamas has been offered better terms every time it has rejected a deal. So it would seem to make sense that Hamas would again say no. However, it may be that Hamas’ allies are threatening that it will lose something it cares about. Or it may be that the steady advance of Israeli forces in Rafah would now make a pause in the fighting more urgent if Hamas is to preserve any leverage for the upcoming negotiations that are part of the first phase of the deal.
If Hamas rejects this deal, with all the American prestige that has been invested in it, it may also put an end to American efforts to help broker a truce and leave Israel with a freer hand to operate against them in Gaza. Whatever the outcome, it seems like the next few days will be a turning point in the war.
In this article we have turned our attention to divisions within Israeli society in a way that we have avoided doing since the beginning of the war. It is our view that understanding these divisions is important to appreciating the impact of the war on Israel and in particular to understanding the Israeli response to the current American pressure to achieve a truce with Hamas.
While our views on the righteousness of Israel’s position vis-a-vis Hamas are well known, it is nevertheless important to understand how the issue of those held captive, as well as the issue of planning for the aftermath of the war, have sown internal division. Both issues are of the gravest importance and both impose difficult choices on Israel’s leaders.
In today’s article we haven’t addressed other momentous challenges, the most urgent being the rapid escalation of the war with Hezbollah in the north. Israel may soon face the prospect of full scale fighting on two fronts. A truce in Gaza might give Israel freedom of action for a full scale war with Hezbollah on the ground in Lebanon.
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The choices we have been posed with have never been easy.
Saul, was commanded by the prophet Samuel to finally wipe out Amalek. Saul was victorious against the Amalekites, but spared the choicest of their flocks and the Amalekite king, Agag.
When Samuel found out about Saul’s disobedience, Saul lost his right to kingship. Samuel then killed Agag himself.12
However, before he was killed, Agag sired a child who would keep Amalek’s lineage alive. Some 500 years later, one of this child’s descendants was Haman the Agagite, of Purim fame.
So I (we?) sit, hardly breathing, deeply concerned about the hostages, the IDF troops, their families. I'm taken aback, by the glee among the right wing religious. Is anyone still talking about a 2 state solution? And I can't imagine what the Israeli coalition government will look like several months from now, or even what the map of Israel could look like! Thank you for once again setting out the facts and some of the possibilities.