Thomas Friedman — What Israel Needs to Do Now

[jserraglio]

OPINION
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Israel: Cease-Fire, Get Hostages, Leave Gaza, Rethink Everything

April 10, 2024, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Thomas L. Friedman
NYT Opinion Columnist

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, delegitimizing 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 tunneled 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 delegitimizing, 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.

“Friedman, you mean you would let a militarily decimated Hamas and its murderous leader Yahya Sinwar govern Gaza again?”

Yes, for the near term. As I said, this is not my preferred choice. It’s because Netanyahu has left Israel WITH NO OTHER CHOICE. He refuses to have Israeli troops govern Gaza and won’t bring in the Palestinian Authority. That leaves only two options: Gaza becoming a Somali-like gangland on the Mediterranean; or Gaza being held together with some flimsy Hamas governance.

If I were Israel, I’d take a weakened Hamas over Somalia, for two reasons.

I have no illusions that the morning after a cease-fire commences and Sinwar comes out, some will wildly cheer him for the hurt he inflicted on Israel. But the morning after the morning after, Sinwar will face brutal questioning from Gazans: Where’s my house, where’s my job, who gave you the right to expose my children to death and devastation?

It is the best punishment I can imagine for Sinwar. Let him own all of Gaza’s travails that he so recklessly exacerbated — not Israel. Only Palestinians can delegitimize Hamas, and though it won’t be easy, and Hamas will kill anyone to hold power, this time we won’t be talking about just a handful of dissidents.

Amira Hass, Haaretz’s well-informed reporter on Palestinian affairs, recently wrote a story based on phone interviews with Gazans, with this headline: “‘People Are Constantly Cursing Sinwar’: Gazans Opposing Hamas Are Sure They’re the Majority.”

It read: “The donkey cart full of people and mattresses is one of the sights of the war on Gaza and the current siege. ‘More than once, I’ve heard a cart owner urging his donkey on and saying something like, ‘Move it, Yahya Sinwar, move it,’ says Basel (a pseudonym, as I’ve used for everyone in this article). … Yes, Israel bombs and kills, Basel says, but he refuses to absolve Hamas from responsibility for the catastrophe that has befallen the Gazans ‘People are constantly cursing Sinwar, but this isn’t reflected in the journalists’ reports,’ he says. ‘I know that I speak for a lot of people,’ Basel says. ‘I have the right to speak, if only because I’m one of the millions whose lives Hamas is gambling with for crazy slogans with no basis in reality.’”

For the time, if it happens, when Israel gets out of Gaza and has its hostages back, the Biden team is already talking to Egypt about working closely with the U.S. and Israel to ensure Hamas can never again smuggle in the sorts of arms it did in the past under the Egypt-Gaza border. Israel could say that every ounce of food and medicine that Gazans need will be delivered, as well as the bags of cement for rebuilding from countries that might want to help. But if one ounce is found going to dig new attack tunnels, rebuild rocket factories or restart rocket attacks on Israel, the borders will close. Again, let Sinwar deal with that dilemma: Go back to Hamas’s old ways and starve his people — or keep the cease-fire.

The second reason is that it won’t be just Gazans going after Sinwar and Hamas. Plenty of Palestinians understand that Sinwar cynically launched this war because he was losing influence to both more moderate factions in Hamas and to his archrival, the Fatah political movement, which runs the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. He also feared this possible deal between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians.

As Hussein Ibish, an expert at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, who has provided some of the most clearsighted analyses of this war from the start, argued in a recent essay in The Daily Beast, Hamas wanted to provoke a massive Israeli response to Oct. 7 in part to corner Fatah. “A surge of nationalist sentiment and shared outrage at the mass killing and suffering of the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza muffled nationalist leaders like President Mahmoud Abbas (also the chairman of the P.L.O.) in publicly acknowledging Hamas’ breathtaking cynicism,” he wrote.

But now, Ibish notes, the gloves are coming off: When Hamas complained about the Palestinian Authority’s decision to appoint a new prime minister, without Hamas’s input, Fatah shot back with a statement noting that Hamas consulted no one before launching “an adventure on Oct. 7 that has led to a nakba that is more severe than the 1948 Nakba.” “Nakba” means catastrophe.

Ibish concluded, “If these accusations are repeated — as they certainly should be on a daily, if not hourly, basis — they could create the permission structure for ordinary Palestinians everywhere, and especially in Gaza, to begin honestly asking themselves why Hamas acted on Oct. 7 without regard to the impact on the people of Gaza or making any preparations whatsoever for them.”

This dynamic is the only way to marginalize Hamas and Islamic Jihad — by Palestinians themselves discrediting these groups for what they are: mad and murderous proxies of Iran, whose leadership is ready to sacrifice endless Palestinian lives to pursue its aspiration for regional hegemony. If Palestinians cannot or will not do that, they will never get a state.

Just a brief word about Iran. As I feared, Israel has played into its hands beautifully from Tehran’s point of view. By invading Gaza with no morning-after plan, while also occupying the West Bank, Israel is now overstretched militarily, economically and morally — while deflecting attention from the fact that Iran is accelerating its nuclear program and expanding its influence as the biggest occupying power in the Middle East today.

Iran indirectly controls large swaths of five Arab states or territory (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and part of Gaza) using local proxies ready to sell out their own people for Iran’s benefit. Iran has helped to keep each Arab entity war torn or failing. Put me down as opposed to both the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Iranian occupations of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. To decry Israeli settler “colonialism” in the West Bank and ignore Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps “colonialism” in five Arab power centers is utterly dishonest. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards leader who Israel killed in Syria last week was not there on a tourist visa.

President Biden has a plan: Get to a six-week cease-fire and hostage release. After which, as part of the Saudi-normalization package, the president will come out with a bold peace initiative, what Israeli peace process expert Gidi Grinstein has called “more for more” — more security and normalization with Arab states than Israel was ever offered and more Arab and U.S. help for Palestinians to achieve statehood than they’ve ever experienced. Hopefully, such an initiative can induce everyone to make the cease-fire permanent, and further marginalize Hamas and Iran.

I have read all the articles about how a two-state solution is now impossible. I think they are 95 percent correct. But I am going to focus on the 5-percent chance that they are wrong, and the chance that courageous leadership can make them wrong. Because the alternative is a 100-percent certain forever war, with bigger and more precise weapons that will destroy both societies.

[Rach3]

Thanks for this. Friedman was correct in his pre-Gaza invasion advice and is again correct. Too bad Israel is Right.

[Belle]

Our idiot Foreign Minister in Australia, fulfilling the Labor left's ideology of the "Two State Solution" - which has been in place for decades. NOW she want to do this????

[jserraglio]

Our idiot … in Australia … NOW she want to do this????

Bigotry richly deserves a home of its own:

[Rach3]

Our idiot Foreign Minister in Australia, fulfilling the Labor left's ideology of the "Two State Solution" - which has been in place for decades.

Of course, that solution envisions no role for Hamas ,quite the contrary,which fact the cartoon ignores,misrepresents.

[Rach3]

And not just Israel. As usual, an insightful op ed from New Yorker's David Remnick today:


The War Games of Israel and Iran

While Netanyahu and the Islamic Republic exchange ballistic “messages,” the question of Palestine demands the moral and strategic courage of actual statesmen.

By David Remnick
April 19, 2024


“What stands between Iranians and a better future is not Israel or America but their own leadership,” the Iranian American analyst Karim Sadjadpour said.

Not long before Israel launched a decidedly limited attack on an Iranian airbase near the city of Isfahan on Friday morning, Nahum Barnea, a well-connected columnist for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, called on a source who, he told me, “is way up in the government, one of the people who ordered the strike.” By way of explaining the strategic and tactical rationale of what was about to happen, the source resorted to a common frame of reference: the story of King Saul’s robe.

In the Book of Samuel, Chapter 24, Saul and his soldiers are hunting David, the man who will eventually replace him. Along the way, Saul pauses near a cave and goes in “to relieve himself.” David, who happens to be hiding in the very same cave, sneaks up on the urinating sovereign, takes out a knife and, rather than kill him, stealthily slices off a piece of Saul’s robe. Later, when they encounter each other openly, David bows to Saul and asks why the king is pursuing him. Saul sees the patch of his robe in David’s grip and realizes that, while David means him no immediate harm, he is vulnerable.

There is no way to know whether another volley will be coming in the short term, but what is clear is that the decades-long shadow war between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer confined to the shadows. A line was crossed when Israel carried out a lethal air strike on Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a leading commander in Iran’s Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and six of his associates, who were meeting in a consular building in Damascus. That strike, as precise as it was deadly, was followed by Iran’s massive launch of drones and ballistic missiles on Israeli territory—an attack that was thoroughly repelled by a coördinated effort involving Israel, the United States, Britain, Jordan, the U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia.

By deploying such a relatively mild response near Isfahan, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seemingly attempted to thread a kind of political needle, at once mollifying the Biden Administration and the Sunni Arab leaders to avoid a regional escalation and yet satisfying his domestic political allies who demanded that he “do something.” Indeed, the Iranian leadership decided to absorb the latest attack with theatrical cool. State television showed “life as usual” footage in the area and insisted that the regime’s nuclear and military sites in the region were undamaged.

On Friday, I spoke to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian American analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was travelling in Dubai. When I relayed the Israeli official’s comparison of the attack to the strategic subtlety on display in the Book of Samuel, Sadjadpour laughed and said, “That’s about right. That actually captures it. It’s a clear Israeli signal to Iran that they have the ability to penetrate Iranian airspace and strike at will.” Israel, Sadjadpour went on, had already demonstrated this in various ways—most notably, with the assassination of the chief Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was shot to death in his car four years ago in the city of Absard. The weapon used to carry out the operation is believed to have been a satellite-operated machine gun imported, piece by piece, into Iran.

“In my view, these two countries are unnatural adversaries,” Sadjadpour told me. “This isn’t like Russia-Ukraine or China-Taiwan or Israel-Palestine with their territorial, bilateral disputes. This is not a conflict that is geopolitical but ideological.” Since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979, he said, the three ideological pillars of the Islamic regime have been opposition to Israel, opposition to the United States, and the wearing of the hijab: “If you were to ask Israeli leaders, civilian or military, ‘What would be your ideal outcome or relationship with Iran?’ they would say, ‘We would love to restore relations with an Iranian government, though not with the Islamic Republic.’ But the Iranian leaders want to abolish Israel. For Iran, this is a war of choice. For Israel, this is a war of necessity.”

In Sadjadpour’s view, which is echoed by polling results in Iran, there is a distinct gulf between the mullahs and the general population. “The Iranian government is more dedicated to abolishing one nation than advancing its own,” he said. “You never hear an Iranian leader saying, ‘Long live Iran!’ You hear, ‘Death to Israel!’ There is a difference between being anti-Israel and being pro-Palestine. They don’t do anything to improve Palestinian welfare. The resources are dedicated to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.” He noted a Persian expression: “The bowl is hotter than the soup. Meaning, that people question why the Iranian leaders are more anti-Israel—not pro-Palestinian, but anti-Israel—than most Arab countries. They ask, ‘Why are we forsaking our own national interests for this cause?’ What stands between Iranians and a better future is not Israel or America but their own leadership. You hear examples of this in the anti-regime protest slogans. People chant, ‘Our enemy is right here! They lie that it’s America!’ ”

The constituency that seems the most vexed by Israel’s limited strike near Isfahan resides not in Tehran but in Jerusalem. The ultraconservatives in Netanyahu’s cabinet and in the Knesset have spoken out loudly and often in favor of something dramatic, even an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities or its civilian population.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national-security minister and a notoriously reactionary religious nationalist, posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the strike on the Iranian base was dardale—like a weak kick easily blocked by the goalie. (Anshel Pfeffer helpfully pointed out in the liberal Haaretz that “this might have been Ben-Gvir’s son Shovael, an amateur soccer player who runs his father’s social media accounts.”) Ben-Gvir and his far-right compatriots are sure to use this event as evidence of weakness, both in the conflict with Iran and in the prosecution of the war in Gaza. For them, the deaths of thirty-three thousand Gazans is insufficient, thousands short of “complete victory.” Indeed, many in Ben-Gvir’s camp have talked openly about reëstablishing Jewish settlements in Gaza and evicting Palestinians entirely.

Sadly, if predictably, the Netanyahu government seems not to have considered a more strategic and morally courageous path, one built upon its impressive deflection of Iran’s massive drone attack with the following goals in mind: a ceasefire in Gaza; a settlement regarding the Lebanon border; the return of the Israeli hostages; additional agreements and alliances with the Sunni Arab states; and forward movement, despite everything, toward a secure and just arrangement with the Palestinians.

That kind of political will or imagination is not only beyond Netanyahu. It does not take into account what he values most—his own future, his intense desire to stay in office and out of court. And yet, as horrific as Netanyahu’s leadership is, it is a mistake, an incomplete assessment, to put the focus, and the onus, completely on him.

“It is true: the Israeli government has no interest in ending the war in Gaza anytime soon, much less in declaring the revival of the peace process,” Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz, told me. “But what’s also important to notice is that no one—not the Sunni Arab powers, not the West, not even Iran itself—was trying to extract anything from Israel on the question of Gaza and the Palestinians. The Arab states did not condition their participation in the regional air defenses on a withdrawal from Gaza or any other Palestinian demand. Neither did Iran. The same is true of Biden. It was totally de-linked from the Palestinian issue. None of them said, ‘We won’t defend you unless you withdraw from Gaza or release Palestinians from prisons.’ Based on what we know now, no one tried to extract anything from Israel.”

Perhaps there is something ugly about trying to search for a hopeful historic parallel after all the cruelty that’s been committed from October 7th onward. And yet such an example comes not from a Biblical episode but from a diplomatic one. Following the first intifada, which erupted in 1987, the United States began to bring together leaders from the Middle East and the rest of the world to collaborate on a peace process. This did not involve an assemblage of saints. But it did lead to the Madrid Conference, in 1991, and that event ultimately led to the Oslo peace accords. That process, after years of elevating expectations, ended in ruins. We can debate the reasons forever. We can go on shedding blood and deepening hatreds forever. But what is the choice? Is there any sane path other than beginning again? ♦


David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of seven books; the most recent is “Holding the Note,” a collection of his profiles of musicians.