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      Ceasefire talks are on their last legs, and Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame | Mohamad Bazzi

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      Joe Biden is making a last-ditch effort to salvage the Gaza ceasefire agreement he has been pushing for months. The US president, along with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar, have called on Israeli and Hamas negotiators to resume indirect talks on Thursday to hammer out an agreement. But Biden and his administration won’t name and shame the biggest obstacle to reaching a deal: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. For months, Netanyahu has tried to block an agreement by backtracking and adding new conditions, prompting Israeli security officials to accuse him of sabotaging the negotiations to stay in power.Since a week-long truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on 1 December, Biden has invested nearly all of his administration’s efforts into resurrecting a ceasefire. But Biden refuses to impose any cost on Netanyahu for his obstinacy and prolonging the conflict. Since Israel launched its brutal war on Gaza 10 months ago, Biden has failed to use the two most effective levers of power at his disposal: withholding billions of dollars in US weapons shipments, and denying Israel political cover at the United Nations security council and other international bodies.Even as US officials privately leak that Biden is angry at Netanyahu for lying to him about wanting to secure a ceasefire, the Biden administration continues to send massive new transfers of weapons to Israel. On Tuesday, the state department approved $20bn in new arms sales, which include dozens of F-15 fighter jets, tactical vehicles and missiles, as well as tens of thousands of explosive mortar and tank cartridges.This is one of the largest weapons transfers to Israel in US history – and it will be mostly funded by American taxpayers. The biggest part of the deal is nearly $19bn for up to 50 new warplanes, which won’t be delivered for at least five years. But the thousands of rounds of ordnance could be shipped sooner. Washington is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, providing $3.8bn in military aid a year. In April, after intense lobbying by Biden, Congress approved an additional $14bn in military assistance to Israel, which will fund the latest purchases approved this week.With this level of Israeli dependence on US military aid, Biden should have significant leverage over Netanyahu. Instead, Biden is clinging to a failed policy of trying to exert behind-the-scenes influence on the Israeli prime minister and his extremist allies. Netanyahu has consistently defied and humiliated Biden – and yet the US president won’t call out Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire agreement that would lead to the release of more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas after its 7 October attacks on Israel.Biden outlined the parameters of a deal in late May, when he spoke at the White House to publicly endorse a three-phase Israeli plan to end the war. By essentially adopting Israel’s proposal, Biden hoped to break a months-long deadlock in negotiations that were mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar. For months, the Biden administration blamed Hamas for refusing to accept a truce – and rarely mentioned Netanyahu’s intransigence. In early July, the Biden administration called Hamas’s response to the US proposal a “breakthrough”, raising hopes that a deal was imminent.But as talks dragged on, Netanyahu ordered Israeli negotiators to add five new conditions to the outlines of a proposal that Israel had accepted in late May and which formed the basis for Biden’s plan. In a letter sent to mediators in late July, Israel demanded that it maintain military control of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, an area known as the Philadelphi Corridor, which had been a major point of contention during earlier rounds of negotiations.Netanyahu’s attempts at blocking the ceasefire agreement infuriated members of Israel’s security establishment, and they began leaking details of recent high-level security meetings to show the prime minister’s obstinacy and his lack of interest in the fate of the remaining hostages. On 2 August, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on a tense meeting between Netanyahu and his security chiefs days earlier, which devolved into a shouting match as multiple officials accused the premier of torpedoing any ceasefire deal with his latest demands. Netanyahu reportedly accused his top security officials of being “soft” and poor negotiators.The prime minister is trying to prolong the Gaza war to avoid early elections, which his Likud party is likely to lose, and multiple investigations into his government’s security failures leading up to the October attacks. If he’s forced out of power, Netanyahu would also face a long-delayed corruption and bribery trial stemming from an earlier stint as premier. Despite Netanyahu’s interest in clinging to power and criticism of his negotiating tactics by Israeli security officials, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to avoid blaming Netanyahu for obstructing a ceasefire.Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation, as the Israeli military continues to block aid deliveries. Researchers fear the death toll could eventually reach 186,000 – due to “indirect casualties” of war, such as food shortages, a widespread cholera epidemic and the destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure.With the US and other western allies continuing to provide the weapons that sustain Israel’s war machine, Netanyahu has had little incentive to stop the bloodshed. Instead, he has escalated the conflict in recent weeks, risking a wider regional war that could involve Israel and the US against Iran and its network of allied militias in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.Late last month, two assassinations in Beirut and Tehran revived fears that the Gaza war could spiral into a regional conflagration. On 30 July, an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut killed a senior commander in Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported by Iran that has been fighting a low-level conflict with Israel since October. The next day, an explosion in Tehran killed the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. While Israel did not claim responsibility for that assassination, it’s widely assumed to be behind the attack that humiliated the Iranian leadership, which was hosting Haniyeh and dozens of other foreign officials for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Iran vowed to retaliate for Haniyeh’s killing on its soil, and US and western officials have been scrambling to avoid an escalating series of attacks and reprisals.A ceasefire is the only way to stop the bloodshed in Gaza and to ensure that the conflict won’t expand into a regional war that could entangle Iran and the US. But since Netanyahu has not faced the loss of US support or other consequences for his belligerence, he has little incentive to agree to a truce or to refrain from attacks that destabilize the region.Already, there are signs that Biden’s ceasefire summit on Thursday will end in yet another deadlock: Hamas has not committed to participating in the talks, while a member of Israel’s negotiating team told Israeli media that there was no point in traveling to the summit unless Netanyahu expands the team’s mandate. In other words, Netanyahu can continue to obstruct the negotiations – and pay no price for it.So far, the Israeli prime minister has gotten everything he’s wanted by prolonging the war and escaping blame from the Biden administration for stalling a ceasefire deal. After the administration approved $20bn in new arms deals this week, Biden is signaling that he will continue sending weapons to Israel no matter what Netanyahu does.It doesn’t have to be this way: since Biden dropped out of the US presidential race last month, he no longer risks paying a political cost for restraining Netanyahu and Israel. The president can finally stand up to Netanyahu – and salvage a ceasefire plan that ends 10 months of American complicity.

      Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) More

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      Assassination again shows Netanyahu’s disregard for US-Israel relations

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      Standing alongside Donald Trump in Florida a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was vague on the latest prospect of a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.“I hope we are going to have a deal. Time will tell,” the Israeli prime minister said, two days after his controversial address to a joint session of the US Congress.Throughout his three-day visit to the US, Netanyahu was careful to avoid making any commitment to the deal Biden unveiled on 31 May. While the US insisted publicly that the onus was on Hamas to accept the plan, the administration knew it also needed to pin down Netanyahu personally over his reluctance to commit to a permanent ceasefire.Yet, according to US reports, it now appears that at the very time Netanyahu was publicly speculating about a deal, a remote-controlled bomb had already been smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, awaiting its intended target: Ismail Haniyeh, the senior Hamas leader who was assassinated on Wednesday night.Haniyeh, reported the New York Times and CNN, was killed by an explosive device placed in the guesthouse, where he was known to stay while visiting Iran and was under the protection of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the attack, which Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. It fits a pattern of previous Israeli targeted killings on Iranian soil.If the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is to be believed, Netanyahu never divulged any such plan to his American allies. The first Blinken knew of the assassination was when he was told in Singapore, after the event. Later that day he insisted he had been left blind-sided, almost as badly as Iranian intelligence.In Netanyahu’s defence, Israel has not confirmed the US media accounts, nor has it ever made any secret of its intention to kill the senior Hamas leadership as a reprisal for the 7 October attacks. And even as he spoke to Congress, the prime minister could not have known that the reported plan would work so well, or have such a devastating impact.However, the potential consequences of such an assassination were clear to all. It took the frustrated Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, to accuse Netanyahu of sabotage. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” he asked.In Washington, the national security council spokesperson John Kirby put on a brave face, claiming the ceasefire process had not been “completely torpedoed”, and insisting: “We still believe the deal on the table is worth pursuing”.The assassination underlines how the US is often left looking like the junior partner in the relationship with Israel, observers say. Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, said: “It is another case of Netanyahu putting up two fingers to Biden. There has been month after month after month of these just repeated affronts and humiliations from Netanyahu, culminating in this ridiculous moment last week, where he came and spoke in front of the Congress yet again, to undermine Biden’s ceasefire proposal. Yet Biden, who sets such store by personal relations, refuses to change course.”Duss has said that by refusing to control the supply of US weapons as a means of leverage with Israel, Biden has left Netanyahu free to pursue the war. Biden was left to ring Netanyahu two days after the assassination, and to promise to defend Israel from any threats from Iran and its proxy groups. If there was any private admonition or disapproval, the public read-out of the call concealed it.Biden later expressed his frustration, telling reporters: “We have the basis for a ceasefire. They should move on it now.” Asked if Haniyeh’s death had ruined the prospect of a deal, the president said: “It has not helped.”The killing is a further indicator of how the Biden administration cannot capitalise on a security relationship with a politician whose methods and objectives it does not share, and who it suspects wants its political rival to triumph in November’s US election. Moreover, both Trump and Netanyahu share a common goal – having political power to stave off criminal proceedings against themselves.At issue, too, is the effectiveness of Israel’s long-term military strategy for dismantling Hamas, including the use of assassinations on foreign soil.Haniyeh is the third prominent member of Iran-backed military groups to be killed in recent weeks, after the killing last month of the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza and the strike on the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, in turn a response to the killing of 12 children and teenagers in the Druze village of Majdal Shams.In total, according to ACLED, a US-based NGO, Israel has mounted 34 attacks that have led to the death of at least 39 commanders and senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran in the past 10 months.Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, describes the killings as a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat. “Haniyeh was a proponent of Palestinian reconciliation, and of a ceasefire. So taking him out of the equation has an impact on the internal power dynamics within the group by strengthening the hardliners, at least in the current term,” he said.Netanyahu, Lovatt added, was undermining Haniyeh “by going back on agreed positions and by being very vocal in saying as soon as the hostages were released we recommence fighting Hamas”.Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Tehran, said he feared the assassination was part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the hopes of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to rebuild relations with the west.“You can overstate what a reformer means in Iran – he went to the parliament wearing an IRGC uniform – but he was going to give relations with the west a go,” Hopton said. “I think the supreme leader is deeply sceptical it will lead anywhere but thought it was worth an attempt. Pezeshkian may now be stymied right away, and I think that’s what the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was partly designed to do.”Inside Iran, Mohammad Salari, the secretary general of the Islamic Solidarity party, said the killing should be seen as more than the removal of one political figure. The hidden purpose was to overshadow the new government’s policy of engagement and de-escalation, he said.“Netanyahu will use all his efforts to lay stones in the path of realising Iran’s balanced foreign policy, improving relations with European countries, and managing tension with the United States, just like during the nuclear negotiations.”So when the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah,threatened an open battle on all fronts, he probably meant, according to Lovatt, a multi-pronged response designed not to trigger a regional war, but to go further than the retaliation mounted by Iran alone in April. It was notable that Nasrallah added a plea to the White House: “If anybody in the world genuinely wants to prevent a more serious regional war, they must pressure Israel to stop its aggression on Gaza.”At the moment that plea lies unanswered. More

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      Trump calls Harris remarks on Gaza war ‘disrespectful’ as he meets Netanyahu

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      Donald Trump has called Kamala Harris’s statement on the Gaza war “disrespectful” before a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Florida to discuss the conflict.Harris, the US vice-president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had seemed to mark a change of tone on the Israel-Gaza war on Thursday after her own meeting with Netanyahu, when she declared she would “not be silent” about the suffering of Palestinians.Trump criticised Harris on Friday before his meeting at his Mar-a-Lago home, calling her remarks “disrespectful” as he targeted her over an issue that has split the Democratic party.“They weren’t very nice pertaining to Israel,” Trump said. “I actually don’t know how a person who is Jewish could vote for her, but that’s up to them.”Right-wing Israeli politicians attacked Harris and anonymous officials have suggested the remarks could make it more difficult to conclude a ceasefire deal.“I think to the extent that Hamas understands there’s no daylight between Israel and the United States, that expedites the deal,” said Netanyahu to reporters at his meeting with Trump. “And I would hope that those comments don’t change that.”A Harris aide rejected a report in the Times of Israel that a senior official had said that Harris’ criticism would hinder the conclusion of a deal.“I don’t know what they’re talking about,” a Harris aide told CNN.Photographs showed Trump warmly greeting Netanyahu, who is concluding a one-week visit to the US that has been marked by large protests against the war. People stood along the route used by Netanyahu’s motorcade to visit Trump, holding up signs that read: “Ceasefire now” and “Convicted fellon [sic] invites a war criminal”.View image in fullscreenBefore the meeting, Netanyahu said he believed military pressure on Hamas had created “movement” in ceasefire talks, and that he would send a team to an upcoming round of negotiations in Rome. “Time will tell if we’re closer to a ceasefire deal,” he said.The meeting is their first since Trump left the White House in 2020. The men have had a strained relationship in the past after Netanyahu congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the 2020 election, a vote that Trump has claimed, without evidence, was manipulated. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump said at the time. “Fuck him.”On Friday, the two appeared to have reconciled. “We’ve always had a good relationship,” Trump told reporters before the meeting.The two were political allies in the past. Trump largely gave Netanyahu carte blanche during his first term in office, ADD moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. . He told Fox News this week that Israel should finish the war and bring back the hostages “fast”. “They are getting decimated with this publicity, and you know Israel is not very good at public relations,” Trump told the broadcaster.Harris has tried to thread the needle of continuing the Biden administration’s policy of support for Israel while assuaging growing anger among Democrats about the humanitarian toll of the conflict that has killed 39,000 Palestinians. Nearly half the Democrats in Congress skipped Netanyahu’s speech in the House of Representatives, and dozens openly said they were boycotting it because of the war.Harris met Netanyahu on Thursday at the White House shortly after the prime minister had sat down with Joe Biden. The separate meetings highlighted how the presumptive Democratic nominee has become increasingly independent since launching her presidential campaign.At the same time, aides tried to play down the potential for change between Biden and Harris on Israel. “[Biden’s] and [Harris’s] message to PM Netanyahu was the same: it’s time to get the hostage and ceasefire deal done,” wrote Phil Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser.Harris called the meeting “frank and constructive”, and said “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters”. She indicated that she would not halt military aid to Israel because she would “always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself”.But she went further than other administration officials in criticising how Israel has prosecuted the war in Gaza, bolstering hopes she may, at least rhetorically, give more voice to the humanitarian concerns of Palestinians.She said she had expressed her “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians, and I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there”.“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating – the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”Harris did not say how Netanyahu responded to the Biden administration’s offer of a three-part ceasefire that would begin with a withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from population centres and some hostages being released. She did not take questions from reporters following the remarks.“There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal,” Harris said. “And as I just told prime minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done. So, to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”The Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, said in an interview with Michigan public radio: “Many of us are waiting to see what policy platform Harris puts forward.” Hammoud has been outspoken on Gaza in a state where 13.2% voted “uncommitted” in this year’s Democratic primary in a protest against Biden’s policy towards Israel.“In the conversations that we have had I have found her to be sympathetic and empathetic,” he said. “I’ve found her to be someone that wants to listen … obviously there’s much that remains to be seen.”A senior administration official said before the meetings with Biden and Harris that the “framework of the deal is basically there” but that there are “some very serious implementation issues that still have to be resolved”.“There are some things we need from Hamas, and there are some things we need from the Israeli side, and I think you’ll see that play out here over the course of the coming week,” the official said. 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      Harris navigates Netanyahu visit and stance on Israel – podcast

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      Kamala Harris enjoyed a brief period of excitement as Democrats rallied behind her presidential bid ahead of November’s election. Only a few days in, however, she is being asked questions over her stance on Israel and the war in Gaza.
      With fewer than 100 days left, Joan Greve speaks to the former adviser to Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save The World, Ben Rhodes, about the state of play for November 2024

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      Harris navigates Netanyahu visit – podcast

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      Kamala Harris enjoyed a brief period of excitement as Democrats rallied behind her presidential bid ahead of November’s election. Only a few days in, however, she is being asked questions over her stance on Israel and the war in Gaza.
      With fewer than 100 days left, Joan Greve speaks to the former adviser to Barack Obama and co-host of Pod Save The World, Ben Rhodes, about the state of play for November 2024

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Netanyahu is presiding over a sharp decline in the US’s pro-Israel consensus

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      Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of the House and Senate may look like a political victory: the prime minister of a foreign country speaking before Congress, only interrupted by multiple standing ovations. But the political events serving as a backdrop for the speech reveal Netanyahu’s political career, and the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the US, in sharp decline.At home in Israel, it’s virtually unthinkable that Netanyahu could have found such a supportive audience. A staggering 72% of Israelis want him to resign over failures that permitted the 7 October attacks by Hamas to succeed.And 72% of Israelis also support a deal to release hostages over the destruction of Hamas. Despite saying he is doing everything he can to “bring all our hostages home”, Netanyahu appeared to outright reject a hostage deal in his speech to Congress, declaring Israel “must retain overriding security control [in Gaza] to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel”, a war goal the Israeli military says is unachievable and terms to which Hamas will not agree.Indeed, blatant falsehoods were scattered throughout his speech. He claimed “practically no civilians were killed in Rafah” (daily reporting shows women and children dead from Israeli air strikes on Rafah and surrounding areas), downplayed the role of Israel in creating famine conditions for much of Gaza’s population, and claimed that Israel helps “keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East”, conveniently omitting the 4,492 US service members who died in the Iraq war, a war Netanyahu lobbied Congress to undertake in 2002.While the speech was Netanyahu’s fourth address to Congress, the political landscape in Washington has shifted beneath his feet, creating a far less welcoming American public than the applause might suggest. Around half of House and Senate Democrats boycotted the speech while thousands of protesters demonstrated outside the Capitol building, revealing the steep drop in support for Israel’s war on Gaza over the past nine months.Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, 38% of voters said they were less likely to vote for him due to his handling of the war on Gaza. “Many core constituencies – including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic party activists – are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza,” said a report from the Century Foundation, the thinktank that commissioned the poll.While sentiments towards Israel are warmer within the Republican party – Israeli flags were visible on the floor of the Republican convention last week and Republican members of Congress led many of the standing ovations for Netanyahu’s speech – that support has increasingly coincided with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Republicans by the world’s richest Israeli, Israeli-US dual national Miriam Adelson, who alongside her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, topped the list of Republican donors since the late 2000s, raising questions about whether support for Israel is an issue of deep concern to the Republican base or simply a transaction required for campaign contributions.The election wins of Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky and Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from West Virginia (both Republican critics of US aid to Israel), suggest an appetite, or at least an acceptance, of a more balanced US-Israel relationship within Republican voters.Netanyahu’s trip to Washington, planned before Biden ended his campaign for re-election, is now set against the political uncertainty of how Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will approach the relationship with Israel. The administration of which she is still a part of bled dangerous levels of support from its own base, particularly in vital swing states like Michigan, where 100,000 Arab and Muslim voters expressed their dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza by submitting “uncommitted” ballots in their Democratic primary.Pressure is building on the vice-president to distance herself from Biden’s “bearhug” strategy of Netanyahu and utilize the leverage the US holds over Israel: threatening to turn off the spigot of munitions necessary for Israel’s war to drag on.The speech may have looked like a victory for an embattled Israeli prime minister but the real test of Netanyahu’s political gambit will only become clear as Harris sets the foreign policy agenda for her presidential campaign.If the boycott of the speech by Democrats, polling showing dissatisfaction with ongoing support for the war on Gaza, and protesters outside the Capitol were any sign of the political tides within the Democratic party, Harris may conclude that the time has come for greater daylight between the US and Netanyahu, distancing the US from the nearly 40,000 casualties suffered by Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military, and a conditioning of US military aid to Israel on an end to the war on Gaza and Israeli participation in a deal to release hostages held by Hamas. Such a move would cast Netanyahu’s speech as a symbolic, and highly visible, breaking point in the bipartisan US support he has enjoyed for his entire political career.

      Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and investigative journalist at large at Responsible Statecraft More