Mouin Rabbani is a non-resident fellow at DAWN. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
On Monday, May 6, it appeared that an end to the bloodbath in the Gaza Strip was finally in sight. Hamas accepted the latest cease-fire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, as senior Hamas officials announced in various media interviews. In the process, they provided key details of the three-stage plan, which would include the release of all Israeli hostages and captives in Gaza, along with an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails. An initial halt to hostilities would, under the proposed cease-fire, lead to the end of Israel's military operations and the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
Almost immediately, spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets Rafah, Deir El Balah and other besieged Palestinian cities and towns in Gaza. Given that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other American officials have repeatedly insisted that Hamas forms the sole obstacle to a cease-fire—"The only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas," Blinken said just days ago—Palestinians could be forgiven for believing that day 213 of this genocidal ordeal would be the last.
The euphoria, however, proved painfully short-lived. Several hours later, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel's war cabinet had unanimously agreed that the proposal "is far from Israel's necessary requirements," and that its looming offensive on Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza have sought shelter, would continue as planned. Israel's Western-supplied and -supported military launched intensive air and artillery strikes to support an incursion into Rafah, along the border with Egypt, that commenced shortly after Netanyahu's announcement.
The Biden administration's unmatched embrace of Israel and Israeli impunity in its dealings with the Palestinians has become the primary obstacle to an end to the war in Gaza.
- Mouin Rabbani
Cease-fire negotiations have been going on for some time in both Cairo and Doha. Egypt and Qatar have been obvious mediators, as they maintain working relationships with both Israel and Hamas. Egypt also has close ties with Israel, while Qatar hosts the Hamas leadership on its territory.
The United States is often identified in most reporting on the cease-fire negotiations as a mediator as well, but this is not quite accurate. Not only is it Israel's chief sponsor in every sense of the word, but the U.S. also shares Israel's maximalist goal in Gaza, openly demanding the destruction and elimination of Hamas, with whom it has neither contact nor communication. Although it participates in the cease-fire talks, as Blinken's statements attest, Washington serves primarily as a proxy for Israel rather than as what any reasonable observer would characterize as a mediator. Given U.S. power and President Joe Biden's unqualified support for Israel and its far-right government, the working assumption in Cairo and Doha has been that whatever Washington accepts will be translated into an Israeli endorsement. This, rather than diplomatic creativity or expert mediation, is the main reason the U.S. has been closely involved in the negotiations.
But things haven't quite worked out as planned regarding the U.S. role. The main reason is that the Biden administration's unmatched embrace of Israel and Israeli impunity in its dealings with the Palestinians has become the primary obstacle to an end to the war in Gaza, as Washington has allowed Israel to ride roughshod over U.S. policy preferences without consequence—repeatedly.
So long as Blinken occupies center stage in America's Middle East diplomacy, that diplomacy is largely performative and can safely be ignored. On his most recent trip to the region in late April, Blinken once again prioritized a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement, which despite all the available evidence he appears to genuinely believe is imminent. As for an end to the war that is further complicating any such normalization deal, Blinken couldn't restrain himself from praising Israel's "extraordinarily generous" offer to "pause" its onslaught on Gaza for a few weeks, in order to free Israeli hostages and captives from the besieged territory, with no agreement on an actual end to the war.
It was only after Blinken returned to Washington, where he has steadily ignored more dissent memos from State Department staff while issuing certificates of good conduct to Israel's military to enable further U.S. weapons transfers, that things began to change. Once again, it came not from the Secretary of State but from CIA Director William Burns—by all accounts a serious diplomat, one who knows the Middle East well, and who unlike his boss in the White House can distinguish between U.S. and Israeli interests. His presence in the region also sent a signal that Washington wanted an agreement to be reached and was prepared to go beyond lavishing unstinting praise on Israel to achieve one.
With issues regarding a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to what remains of their homes in northern Gaza apparently resolved, the key sticking point was Hamas's demand for an end to Israel's military campaign, which Israel has insisted on continuing. Given this contradiction, the mediators could not incorporate explicit wording that either ended or failed to end the war, and still clinch the deal. What appears to have happened is that a sufficiently vague formula was included in the proposal, paired with informal American assurances that if Hamas implemented the first stages of the three-stage deal, Washington would guarantee an Israeli cessation of hostilities by the end of its final stage.
For the record, U.S. assurances to the Palestinians have over the years been honored mainly in the breach. This was most notoriously the case in 1982 during Israel's invasion of Lebanon, when the Reagan administration guaranteed the protection of Palestinian civilians remaining in Beirut after the PLO's withdrawal from the Lebanese capital, but subsequently did nothing to stop the Sabra and Shatila massacres.
The coming days will reveal if Israel's calculations about U.S. "red lines" are right, or if there is indeed a limit for the Biden administration in how far it will be led by its far-right Israeli allies.
- Mouin Rabbani
Against this background, and given Hamas's repeated insistence that any cease-fire must lead to an explicit end to Israel's war, Netanyahu was confident no deal would be achieved, and for good measure informed the mediators and the U.S. that Israel would only send representatives to Cairo if and when Hamas formally accepted the latest proposal that Blinken had called so generous. Having failed to achieve any of its declared objectives in Gaza during the past seven months, to either "eliminate" the Hamas leadership or retrieve Israeli hostages and captives, Israel was determined to invade Rafah in the hope of salvaging a "victory" from its strategic failures.
But then it emerged that the Hamas delegation dispatched to Cairo had instructions to engage positively with the cease-fire proposal and secure a deal. Netanyahu, seemingly cornered, went ballistic. He issued a series of statements that Israel was determined to invade Rafah whether or not a cease-fire was reached, and that it would only end its campaign after achieving the "total victory" he has promised and failed to achieve. Meanwhile, Israel's cabinet—here too, unanimously—banned Al Jazeera from operating in Israel, acting on a new law passed by the Knesset last month. While obviously an assault on press freedom, this seemed like a deliberately calculated move to anger the Qatari government and provoke it to suspend it involvement in mediating a cease-fire.
Hamas interpreted these moves as Israel making a mockery of the cease-fire proposal on the table and, more importantly, of the U.S. role in its implementation. The Hamas delegation duly returned to Doha for further consultations. Similarly incensed, the Egyptians and Qataris refined their proposal—and presumably the U.S. guarantees as well—to make it more palatable to Hamas. Contrary to expectations and reports about the talks collapsing, Hamas this time accepted the deal. Presented as an Egyptian-Qatari initiative, it is inconceivable that even a punctuation mark within the cease-fire proposal was not first cleared with Burns, who is also in Doha, or that Burns did not similarly consult with Washington before signing off on it.
Hamas claims it was assured by the Egyptians and Qataris that Biden would guarantee the cease-fire's implementation if Hamas accepted it. We'll probably soon find out the reality behind this assertion. Either Hamas is making it up to cover its acceptance of a cease-fire that in some respects falls short of its demands, or the Arab mediators made unauthorized commitments to the Palestinians, or—in my view the most likely scenario—Qatar and Egypt acted with U.S. authorization. It's entirely possible that Burns or officials in Washington will deny they played a role in crafting the latest truce proposal in order to legitimize Israel's rejection of it, but here too the details can be expected to be leaked and revealed before long.
Israel is already trying to control the narrative, blaming the collapse of this cease-fire on the U.S., which it claims kept it in the dark about the terms being negotiated in Cairo (even though Netanyahu, of course, refused to send an Israeli delegation to take part in those talks). But once you peel away the spin, this account just confirms that the U.S. was deeply involved in crafting the latest cease-fire proposal, which Hamas accepted and Israel rejected.
In a different world, one might think this all means that Washington would now compel Israel to accept this deal to end the war in Gaza—since the U.S. helped negotiate it, and because Biden has publicly identified an Israeli invasion of Rafah as a "red line." But that is a world that doesn't exist. Netanyahu is confident he can cross Washington's red lines at will, because the U.S. has proven time and again that it won't actually impose any consequences on him when he does. Indeed, Washington is already backing off, now claiming it only opposes a "major" Israeli ground operation into Rafah as Israel launches just that.
The coming days will reveal if Israel's calculations about U.S. "red lines" are right, or if there is indeed a limit for the Biden administration in how far it will be led by its far-right Israeli allies. As for the idea that this is all Netanyahu's doing, and solely motivated by his desire to remain in power in order to evade trial for corruption, this doesn't square with a war cabinet that unanimously rejected the cease-fire on the table and endorsed the invasion of Rafah instead. What is happening in Gaza, and against all Palestinians, transcends the determination of one Israeli politician to cling to power.
