The Deal?

Most any discussion of Israel-Palestine in the United States these days boils down to intra-coalitional warfare. Unsurprisingly, the ceasefire that began yesterday is being weaponized for conflict with the Democratic coalition:

There are a great many people who are deeply invested in the argument that Biden could have ended the war by applying even the mildest of pressure to Bibi. That Trump has already seen one ceasefire collapse of his watch should have served to dispel this impression, but here we are. To pass over briefly, to believe the idea that the American political system was capable of putting pressure on Bibi in October 2024 is to not faintly understand the American political system; any pressure would have resulted in Bibi squealing to Trump and Trump thundering about Biden’s weakness in the face of Islamist terror, so that’s basically a no go. With respect to the broader argument on pressure, it’s really a question of how Israel has evaluated its success in achieving its war aims over the last two years. In my experience the Israeli national security bureaucracy does not compartmentalize the Hamas/Hezbollah/Syria/Iran problems, but rather views them as integrally linked. As Israeli military successes have piled up, Israel has become more satisfied with the situation and more willing to accede to US pressure. For my part, I very much doubt that there was any way to produce a ceasefire deal that Israel would accept and maintain before the end of the 12 Day War, but people of good faith may disagree on that. But braying about how “there was exactly this deal on the table on x/xx/202x!” is to miss the point; the security situation was evolving rapidly across the entire conflict and applying pressure at different times would not necessarily have the same result. I of course yield to Abigail with respect to Israel’s domestic politics, as she’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know.

It is also worth noting that the outlines of the agreement that we’re seeing today are NOT the same that was on offer previously. Believe it or not, Hamas was not ready to agree to Gaza becoming a protectorate under the management of Viceroy Tony Blair in October 2024 or January 2025. If the Biden administration had achieved a ceasefire under the terms that we’re seeing now, pro-Palestinian activists would have greeted it with howls of rage about the return of colonialism and the lack of justice for the victims of Israeli aggression. This is only a good deal for Palestinians in light of the ongoing horror of the offensive and of the terms that Trump himself set forth in January regarding the complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

Now let’s offer an important caveat; October 7 created for the Biden administration a fiendishly difficult problem that linked an intractable foreign conflict to complex domestic coalitional politics. I have no patience for anyone who doesn’t take that problem seriously, and pretends that it was possible for Biden to do things that Biden quite obviously could not have done. However, it is also worth noting that in the final analysis Biden FAILED on both the domestic and international sides. He failed to meaningfully constrain Israel, and he failed to keep his coalition in the shape it needed to be in to win the 2024 election. That failure will be his legacy as President.

With respect to Trump, I’m not averse to giving a bit of credit (assuming the ceasefire doesn’t collapse in the next week) but I’m quite averse to the tongue-bath he’s receiving from the mainstream media. Far from doing the impossible, he managed to succeed at accomplishing a task that had become progressively easier over the course of the year as the dividends from Israeli military action steadily declined. Now, that’s not nothing and it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Trump fuck it up. It’s also not Camp David, so let’s try to calibrate our enthusiasm.