As the war in Gaza enters what may be its final phase, Joe Biden has been unable or unwilling to restrain his Israeli ally
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the October 7 attack by Hamas with months of devastating collective punishment for Gaza. It troubles me to report that he has emerged as a far more formidable leader than President Joe Biden, who, after months of indecision, has finally ordered a delay of delivery of US bombs to Israel. That delay has yet to take place and it will have no impact on the final stages of the Israeli army’s hunt for the Hamas leadership in Rafah.
Bibi has shrewdly turned Biden’s public cold shoulder into a rallying cry, telling the audience at a televised Memorial Day ceremony last week: “If we need to stand alone, then we will stand alone . . . if necessary, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than our fingernails”—Israel is known to have a significant nuclear arsenal—“and with that same strength of spirit, with God’s help, together, we will win.”
The last phase of the Israeli war—it is now little more than a manhunt—is underway in the maze of tunnels under Rafah. I’ve been told that five of the twelve tunnels have been flooded and a few battle-hardened Israeli battalions, whose ranks include many combat engineers skilled in demolition, are working their way in the dark and booby-trapped tunnels toward Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who is Netanyahu’s ultimate target. One day’s fighting, I was told, produced twelve Hamas casualties. The Israeli military has so far released no information about its combat deaths.
Netanyahu has made few public statements since the underground attack began, but he has promised, an informed American official told me, that “all” in the tunnels “are going to die.” The official, who has followed events in Israel and in Washington closely since October 7, added this blunt assessment: “You may not like Bibi but you don’t get a vote. The Israeli citizens call the shots and they want and have a leader and right now their priority is security. Analysts may consider his uncompromising strategy versus the Palestinians, both in the West Bank and Gaza, counterproductive in the long term but this is now and the Hamas threat was real and struck the heart and confidence of every Israeli. They wanted and got someone who not only said what they wanted to hear, but did what they wanted done.”
The official, who has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, added: “The contrast in his [Bibi’s] leadership [and Biden’s] is striking, and painfully obvious to Democrats though not publicly acknowledged. You may not like Trump either, but once again the voters count—not the press, try as they might. As the timeline narrows, Americans are turning their attention to the reality of Biden’s foreign policy decisions that end in failure.” He was also referring to the ongoing American support for Ukraine in a war against Russia that many experts believe cannot be won.
Netanyahu is no longer talking about the Israeli hostages, about whom little has been learned since their capture by Hamas and its supporters last October. The recent wave of renewed talks with Hamas, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Director William Burns, produced optimistic talk from the White House and weeks of headlines in the American press but little else. It is not known how many hostages remain alive or the conditions of those who have survived after more than six months of captivity.
The White House’s official accounts of the talks have been wildly optimistic. In what seemed to be a last-ditch effort to avoid a final assault in the tunnels of Rafah, Hamas produced a video of two hostages who appeared to be in reasonably good health. All of these supposedly secret discussions were briefed to selected American reporters, and it was suggested that Hamas was willing to surrender its more than thirty hostages in return for a ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Netanyahu’s position throughout, the American official told me, was that the surviving prisoners had to be turned over before a ceasefire could go into effect; he also insisted “on proof of health” of those in captivity. Another factor was Sinwar’s absence from the discussion, despite efforts by Burns to urge that his views be brought to the negotiating table.
A significant complication has been the American intelligence community’s dire estimates of the chances of survival for the hostages who were in the Israel Defense Forces as the months rolled by. My view was that it is not for a reporter to tell mothers and fathers that there is little hope. I was told months ago about the American estimate—was it more than a guess?—was that as few as ten IDF members, perhaps all women, were still alive. The latest American estimate of IDF survivors—acknowledged by the American official to be little more than an educated guess—was three out of sixty IDF active-duty members who were seized by Hamas on October 7.
Last week the New York Times published an analysis by Peter Baker of the underlying issues that made success improbable in the ceasefire talks. Baker quoted Aaron David Miller, who was involved in a series of Middle East peace talks in 1991 led by then Secretary of States James Baker, that came close to success. “Much of it is performative between Israel and Hamas,” Miller said, shrewdly. “Part of the motivation is less to reach a deal and more to blame the other guy if it fails. The only party that’s really in a hurry is Biden.”
Netanyahu may emerge triumphant in the short run—by killing Sinwar and his senior aides—but he has failed to rescue the hostages, even if a few are safely recovered in the tunnels. He has yet to achieve the most important goal of his murderous bombing campaign in Gaza: to defeat Hamas. Hamas remains in control of ravaged northern Gaza, as the IDF focuses on Sinwar’s tunnel redoubt under Rafah.
An Israeli expert, who has worked on sensitive activities in Tel Aviv, recently provided me with a caustic assessment of Bibi’s war. “The manner of the war Israel has pursued”—the constant bombing throughout Gaza—“has aroused unprecedented waves of criticism manifested in pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses in the United States and other countries . . . that pose long-term risks for Israel. It changes the grammar of politics and legitimizes future measures, such as conditioning additional military aid to Israel based on changes in Israeli conduct, economic boycott, and more. . . . The fundamental problem for Israel was the government’s unwillingness to declare what the war’s goal was beyond punishing Hamas and to plan for that goal.”
At this point, the Israeli expert said, Bibi cannot stray from the policy preferences of the political parties in Israel who represent “the extremist settlers and racist Kahanists. Because he cannot do so, he cannot offer a governing alternative to Hamas in Gaza.
“Allowing a revived Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza”—which has been a goal of Israeli moderates and leftists—“would contradict Bibi’s longtime policies of the last fourteen years by allowing a moderate secular entity to govern all of the Palestinian people, thus bringing closer the day of a moderate security entity to govern all of the Palestinian people.” The expert said that finding an alternative to Hamas’s control of Gaza could lead “Saudi Arabia and a host of moderate Sunni Arab states to normalize their relations with Israel and, in effect, put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Much has recently been written in the American press about the Saudi eagerness to deal with a postwar Israel and, in the process, get Washington’s approval to spend billions in America for the construction of nuclear reactors to provide cheap energy. What has not been written is the Saudi understanding that its support for a stronger and more effective Palestinian Authority would be rewarded, the expert explained, by gaining American permission to seek full control of the nuclear cycle, so that its reactors would be allowed to produce weapons-grade uranium for warheads, with its unpredictable reaction elsewhere in the Middle East.
As of today, the expert added, Hamas remains in effective control of northern Gaza, although the IDF is again engaged in sporadic fighting there. “Its operatives,” he told me, referring to Hamas, “are responsible for distributing the international humanitarian aid and openly threaten anyone even thinking of offering a governing alternative to Hamas.”
Netanyahu has tacitly acknowledged the failure of the war, the expert told me, by ordering IDF demolition experts to build a fortified dividing wall to separate the north and south of Gaza. The wall would run from the border of Israel to the Mediterranean Sea and is apparently aimed at limiting Hamas’s control to the north.
The only way forward, the Israeli expert told me, “is to replace Bibi and his extremist government”—his term as prime minister extends beyond two more years—“with a centrist, pragmatic government. There are two ways to do so: an election, which current polls show Bibi would lose badly, or a constructive no-confidence vote” in the Knesset.
Don’t bet on it. Bibi may stay in office longer than Biden, whose reluctance to denounce or even discuss the widespread Israeli bombing, and the thousands of deaths, in Gaza may keep him from being able to campaign on any college campus this fall.
Biden’s standing with those who deplore his Gaza policy took another hit today when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the White House is sending a new package of more than $1 billion dollars in tank rounds, mortars, and tactical vehicles for Israel to Congress.
Bad timing. Bad luck. Bad war.
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