What Ceasefire?
What Ceasefire?
The administration gave Bibi a wide berth to destroy Hamas, and he will flatten Gaza before any agreement is signed, say experts.
The short video captured it all: Well-dressed and coiffed Democratic National Convention delegates and attendees, covering their ears and making exaggerated faces as they ran the gantlet of Gaza demonstrators outside.
“The protesters, they’re not all that welcome at the DNC,” remarked Sagaar Enjeti in Wednesday’s Breaking Points coverage of the Chicago confab. “I noted whenever you see someone wearing a keffiyeh, there’s a lot of side-eye. Their presence is not welcome.”
“Skunk at the garden party” is how The American Conservative’s contributing editor James Carden, also in attendance, described it to us.
Given both parties’ experience and treatment of antiwar protesters outside their conventions (this writer covered them in 2004 and 2008 at the height of the post-9/11 wars), it should be no surprise that the demonstrators this week—mostly demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and a U.S. arms embargo to Israel—would be marginalized, if not mocked by the Democratic faithful and accompanying elite corps of donors, lobbyists, media, and courtiers inside.
But that doesn’t mean that the Harris/Walz campaign doesn’t have a real problem on its hands, one that will persist long after the signs and confetti are swept up from the United Center hall in Chicago.
As Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday night, she and President Joe Biden are “working around the clock, because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.” They would absolutely love to get that signed before the election, if only to kick the can and keep the attention off of the ongoing horrors in Gaza, which stand as a testament to their own failures over the last 10 months.
“We’ve heard the Biden administration tell us over and over that they’ve been working very hard for a ceasefire, but the factual record—from the quashing of multiple [UN Security Council] ceasefire resolutions, to billions of endless weapons replenishments, and even deploying U.S. military muscle on Israel’s behalf—shows the Biden administration has done everything to enable Israel to continue its catastrophic assault on Gaza,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN.
Therein lies the fly in the ointment: The two sides are no closer to an agreement than they were the week before, or the week before that. After a while, “working tirelessly” starts to lose meaning. When the Democratic platform insists “our commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself, and the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding is ironclad,” and that’s backed up by the candidate’s own remarks at the convention, it starts to sound to people that one side has an awful wide berth to do whatever it wants in the meantime.
“For the first months, Biden et al. did give Israel space to do as they wished. Their advice to Hamas for months was to simply ‘surrender,’” the writer and analyst Geoff Aronson tells TAC. “Since the spring or thereabouts, Biden has indeed preferred that Israel simply declare victory and stop shooting, but by that time Bibi (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) had taken the measure of Biden’s inability to wield U.S. influence in that direction. Nothing has changed since then. The talks have long been stalemated notwithstanding rosy U.S. statements that continue to this very day.”
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has not been able to report about the ceasefire process with any clarity because Washington officials insist on making premature declarations about the near-success of the talks that are later discredited by conflicting public statements by both Israel and Hamas.
Like this week, when the administration insisted it was aligned with Netanyahu on “bridging agreements” to push forward on the first phase (the release of hostages), but it was Hamas that was holding it up. That was Tuesday. Hamas then retorted by saying Israel was killing the agreement with unacceptable amendments. Meanwhile, Netanyahu appeared to contradict Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s hopeful statements by saying Israeli troops would not leave the Philadelphi Corridor, the border with Gaza and Egypt, supposedly a condition in the latest package.
“Israel will insist on the achievement of all of its objectives for the war, as they have been defined by the Security Cabinet, including that Gaza never again constitutes a security threat to Israel. This requires securing the southern border,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on Wednesday.
With Blinken and co. shuttling back and forth for talks this week and making declarations about the “closeness” of the deal with no real evidence to back it up, it has started to smell like spin-doctoring for domestic consumption—something one Israeli paper said smacked of desperation and warned was already backfiring.
To gauge how bad the diplomatic situation is this week, one needs only to read David Ignatius, whose Washington Post columns serve as a reliable inside wire to administration strategy and thinking. He tries his best to assist his White House sources by writing that an agreement is “tantalizingly close” but then proceeds to detail what seem to be impenetrable differences and “stalled” talks.
Steve Simon, who served in the Clinton and Obama National Security Councils, tells TAC that when stripped down, the dynamics are pretty intractable.
“There are only two protagonists, Netanyahu and [Hamas chief Yahya] Sinwar, and they’re both playing a zero-sum game,” says Simon. “Sinwar can’t kill Netanyahu, but his interests are still met if he’s still alive and he has forced the IDF to withdraw in the absence of Netanyahu’s ‘absolute victory.’ Netanyahu on the other hand can’t stop until Sinwar is dead, or he is forced to hand over hostages even as the IDF continues to chew through Gaza and the remaining Hamas battalions.”
“This was obvious from day one of the conflict and indicated that if a ceasefire were arranged, it wouldn’t be until very near to the end game.”
But not everyone is convinced that Washington has no agency, particularly as it continues to fuel Israel’s ability to “chew through Gaza” with a dizzying array of armaments while the talks stumble on unsuccessfully. Since October 7, the United States has transferred at least 14,000 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions, according to U.S. officials in late June. At least $20 billion in new, future shipments were announced by the Biden administration this month.
As a result of this steady stream of weaponry, nearly two-thirds of all the buildings on the two-mile Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed, most of the healthcare system inoperative, 80 percent of the population displaced and more than 40,000 dead. There is virtually no food or medicine getting inside, and the first case of polio was discovered this week.
But not even Bernie Sanders would use the words “arms embargo” at the convention this week, showing that as a political force, the Democratic party establishment is not going to put Gaza before the election in November. It simply can’t. Like the Republican Party it relies on pro-Israel donors and support. It cannot be seen as “weak” in regards to Hamas and its Iranian backers. It wants to distance itself from the campus protests and charges of antisemitism.
It wants, frankly, for the issue to just go away. But at what cost?
“To the eyes of billions of people around the world who daily see the horrors of U.S. bombs falling on Palestinian men, women and children, the U.S. is as responsible for the slaughter as Israel,” charged Whitson. “Americans will spend an eternity paying the bills to U.S. standing and credibility, and the erosion of international law, on a thankless Israel’s behalf.”
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