Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the Middle East this week to “shore up the ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas and to “lay the preliminary groundwork for a return to peace talks,” his office said.
Peace talks? With whom? Certainly not the moribund leadership on both sides of the conflict. Neither side in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has shown much interest in peace for a very long time, and prospects for change are dim.
Let’s face it. There is no imminent danger of peace breaking out in the Middle East with these guys. The current ceasefire is really another pause before the next round of fighting, since neither side has shown any inclination toward resolving their differences and even less in compromise.
In fact, the Palestinians can’t make peace with each other, so how can they be expected to make peace with Israel? Hamas’s 11-day missile barrage was not in response to any Israeli shots fired, but was actually initiated by Hamas to answer Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s latest cancellation of elections, and to show voters who’s protecting them.
Abbas, now in the 16th year of his four-year term, saw that his secular Fatah Party was very likely to lose to the Islamist Hamas, so he pulled the plug. The 85-year-old heir to Yasser Arafat has presided over an unpopular, inept, corrupt and dysfunctional government, and the stench of a loser filled the air.
The Abraham Accords between Israel and moderate Gulf Arabs states are largely based on mutual economic interests, but they also are a recognition that pro-Western Arab leaders have given up on the Palestinians making peace with Israel in the foreseeable future. The Palestinians have lost their veto that kept other Arab states from cutting deals with the Jewish state until they had a deal of their own. They are paying a big price for their maximalist demands, unwillingness to compromise and bitter divisions.
If and when Palestinian elections are held, Hamas is considered very likely to win, which will be untenable for the United States, Israel and the European Union, all of which classify the group a terrorist organization and refuse to deal directly with it.
Blinken said, “Hamas has brought nothing but ruin to the Palestinian people,” and he is offering humanitarian aid to rebuild and repair Gaza. But he admits there is no way to assure the money won’t go, as it has so often before, to rebuild and rearm Hamas instead of to house and help civilians.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN reaffirmed his career-long support for Israel and for the two-state process, but it is far from the top of his foreign policy agenda. It’s closer to former Secretary of State Jim Baker’s oft-quoted position: “When you’re ready call me.” We can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and nothing can happen until all sides are ready, willing and able to get serious. Biden is not about to play Don Quixote and tilt at Mideastern windmills when he has more urgent concerns elsewhere.
For now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a corrupt, failed leader who clings to power as tenaciously as Abbas, with a similar willingness to stir up a new conflict to help with that effort – wants to see a Palestinian state about as much as Hamas wants a Jewish state. Each side calls the other terrorists, murderers, human-rights abusers, international outlaws and war criminals, and each has loyal choruses to agree. Nothing can even begin to happen until there is new leadership all around.
While Palestinians await their first election since 2006, Israelis have gone to the polls four times in the past two years, and are likely to return for a fifth inconclusive round by the end of this year in a frustrating search for stable government.
Present leadership on sides of the conflict has shown scant interest in finding peace. The Israelis are willing to tolerate the present level of low-intensity warfare, with periodic flareups of intense violence. The death toll in Gaza was about 230 compared to 12 in Israel, according to USA Today. Hamas fired thousands of missiles at Israel and about 90% either landed in Gaza or were shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. In addition, Israel’s security fence along its borders plus new anti-tunnel technology have dramatically diminished the threat of terrorist infiltration.
Neither side poses an existential threat to the other. Hamas’s rocket technology is improving, but it remains mostly a terror – not a strategic – weapon. Israel could destroy Hamas but at a prohibitive price. Netanyahu’s threats to re-occupy the enclave which Israel left in 2005 (over his objections) are a bluff. He faces a force more powerful than Hamas: Israeli mothers. They don’t want their sons and daughters sent to be cops and targets on Gaza’s mean streets and returning home in body bags.
“Israel doesn’t have any practical reasons to make a deal with the Palestinians,” wrote columnist Fareed Zakaria. It is “the superpower of the Middle East” with a “strong, diversified and advanced” economy, tech sector and military that dwarfs the entire neighborhood.
If there are to be serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, it won’t be because the United States or other powers forced it. It will have to be when the parties themselves are ready and ask for help. As with Camp David, the Oslo Accords and the Abraham Accords, America is at its best as closer, not initiator.
With no diplomatic or military solution in sight, a bit of benign neglect from Washington might be in order.
More urgently, the real peace process that needs attention is inside Israel, between its Jewish and Arab citizens. More than Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran combined, that is a greater threat to the stability, security and success of the State of Israel.