Why Israel and Hamas Still Do Not Have a Cease-Fire

War Stories

There are only three ways out of the war.

A smoke plume from an explosion in the Gaza Strip on Monday.
Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

The problem with all the peace plans for Gaza that U.S., Egyptian, and other foreign diplomats have offered in the past few months is that the parties fighting the war—Israel and Hamas—have very different requirements for stopping it, and therefore they won’t stop it unless and until some allied power forces them to do so.

The question is whether those allies have the leverage and the will to make them stop. Seven months into this war, it doesn’t seem that they do. The horrible irony is that neither Israel nor Hamas could keep fighting for long without the material support of their allies. The allies—some of whom are the ones tirelessly but fruitlessly negotiating the terms of a cease-fire—clearly want the war to stop. So, what’s the hang-up?

Many news reports have focused on the disputes over how many Israeli hostages will be freed for how many Palestinian prisoners, during a cease-fire lasting how many days. But these matters are trivial. The crucial, much harder issue to resolve is what happens next.

Hamas is demanding that, in tandem with the exchange of hostages and prisoners, Israeli troops pull out of Gaza entirely and that the cease-fire turns into a permanent truce. Israel is saying it will resume the war after the hostages come home until Hamas is destroyed as a political and military force. Meanwhile, some of the outside powers—mainly the U.S., Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, as well as vocal observers in Europe and the United Nations—are pushing for a peaceful settlement of the wider, long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preferably through the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will never stand for such a state. The leaders of Hamas don’t want one, either; they want to keep fighting their “war of resistance” until Israel and its 7 million Jews are wiped out.

That’s the problem in a nutshell. Hamas and Israel have opposing war aims. (This is why most wars throughout history begin and keep raging, despite unspeakable carnage and destruction.) And neither side, for different reasons, has any interest in the outside would-be peacemakers’ vision of a postwar settlement.

There are only three ways out of this impasse. One side wins; both sides, exhausted, limp to an armistice; or outside powers impose a peace upon them.

In this case, each combatant thinks it can win, so neither is inclined to make concessions. In this sense they share a delusional frame of mind. Hamas’ delusion is rooted in millenarian fantasy, bolstered by the fervent wish that their fellow jihadists in the region will join the war. When Hamas plowed across Israel’s southern border on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 Jews, most of them civilians, its leaders hoped—perhaps they’d been led to expect—that Hezbollah would simultaneously launch massive missile strikes from the north and Iran would do the same from the east. Israel would thus be enveloped in a three-front war far more perilous than the last such war, in 1973, which Israel just barely won.

For various reasons, Hamas’ dream didn’t materialize. But what did happen served Hamas’ interests nearly as well. Israel’s leaders, in their understandable rage, overreacted, razed whole neighborhoods all across Gaza, mainly with 2,000-pound bombs, before collecting intelligence on the precise whereabouts of Hamas leaders. In a bigger failure still, they sent tanks and infantry rolling into Gaza without first devising a plan on how to pacify the area after the war is over. (In recent days, Israeli military officers have begun to criticize Netanyahu openly about this failure.) Finally, the Israelis neglected to reach out diplomatically to their Sunni Arab allies, especially the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who want to pursue good relations with Israel (which they see as a potent ally in their struggle against Iran and its Shiite militias) but who also have to worry about alienating radicals in their own countries.

And so, as Palestinian casualties inevitably mounted (the Gazan health ministry puts the death toll now at 35,000; Israel estimates that a third of them were armed militiamen, not civilians), world opinion turned against Israel. Some of the more vocal Western protesters not only assailed Israel’s excesses, but also hailed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis (who were shelling commercial vessels in the Mediterranean) as heroes.

The more extreme protesters are driven by propaganda, antisemitism, and ignorance of Middle East history, but many others are motivated by Israel’s insensitivity to the plight of Palestinian civilians. And the Israeli government has done itself no favors by waving off all its critics. Israelis have long had a problem with hasbara, the Hebrew word for public diplomacy. They are aware that much of the world is hostile toward their country and their religion, but rather than try to deal with the hatred, they tend to sneer at it, defy it, and proudly proclaim a determination to go it alone, bolstered by a pride in how they transformed their land into an economic powerhouse and improbably won a series of multifront wars. A widespread attitude emerged: If the world can’t sympathize with us after Oct. 7, when more Jews were killed in a single day than any time since the Holocaust, then to hell with what the world thinks.

And so, as even President Joe Biden—the most pro-Israel occupant of the White House ever—steps up his criticism of Israel’s war policy, threatening to suspend the shipment of certain weapons if it mounts an all-out offensive against the southern Gazan town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Gazan refugees have settled and as many of them starve, Netanyahu gives him the finger. Israel will go into Rafah, he declares, no matter what the world says or how many civilians are killed in the process. And, if America pulls back its support, Israel will “stand alone” and “fight with fingernails,” if necessary.

This sort of rhetoric helps nobody. It is particularly inappropriate, even preposterous, coming just weeks after a massive Iranian air strike—more than 300 missiles and drones, including 110 ballistic missiles, all in the air at the same time, headed toward Israeli targets—was staved off, thanks to a combined, coordinated air-defense campaign mounted by Israel, the U.S., England, France, and Jordan. If Israel had tried to repel the attack on its own, many—well over 100—of those Iranian weapons would have pierced the shields and wreaked a lot of damage.

The fact is, Israel cannot fight alone, and has never been able to do so. In the 1948 war, it depended heavily on weapons provided by Czechoslovakia. And in all the wars since, it depended heavily on weapons—and intelligence—provided by the United States.

Similarly, Hamas cannot fight alone. It receives weapons, training, and technical assistance from Iran and its proxy militias. It also receives economic and political support from Qatar, which also hosts many of its political leaders in luxury. The Qatari connection is strange, since the tiny, oil-rich Gulf state also hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, as a result of which it has been declared “a major non-NATO ally.”

In any case, neither side in this war can achieve the “total victory” that its leaders say they seek. Hamas can’t drive Jews out of Israel, especially if Iran is unwilling to join in. Israelis can’t destroy Palestinian militancy, even if they wipe out Hamas’ last battalion, especially if they keep killing civilians and have no plan to rebuild Gaza—or reform Palestinian political authority—after the war is over. (Even as troops close in on Rafah, hoping to kill Hamas’ last holdouts, Israeli officials told the Times of Israel that Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, isn’t in Rafah, as the government has publicly claimed, but is still hiding in Khan Younis, which was heavily bombarded, apparently to little strategic effect.)

One lesson of history is that all of the Israeli-Arab wars over the past 76 years—since Israel’s founding as a state—have been ended by pressure from outside powers. In some cases, it was the U.S. pressuring Israel; in other cases, during the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union pressuring Syria or Egypt; in some cases, it was the United Nations pressuring all the combatants.

In those earlier wars, at least one outside power—in some cases all of them, working jointly—had the leverage and legitimacy to exert that pressure. But in crucial ways, they no longer do. The Soviet Union and its empire folded long ago. Some thought that the U.S. would thus emerge as “the sole superpower,” but in fact, it lost influence; some countries felt they could go their own way, no longer needing to tie their fates to the U.S. in exchange for protection from the Red Bear across the horizon. Israel, meanwhile, built up a powerful lobbying organization that made it much harder for American presidents to apply pressure. (President Ronald Reagan’s administration, hardly anti-Israel, cut off weapons to Israel on a few occasions and voted in favor of seven U.N. resolutions condemning Israel for some action or another. Reagan was never accused of being anti-Israel or antisemitic. Now presidents are lambasted on the few occasions they abstain from, rather than veto, critical resolutions.)

Meanwhile, the Sunni Arab leaders in the region have never stepped up to a leadership role in creating or preserving peace—though it’s time they do so. The Saudi royals very much want to “normalize” relations with Israel, but fear the response from their own people if they get too close while Israel is still bombing Gaza and refusing even to pay lip service to the idea of resuming negotiations toward a Palestinian state. Egypt tries to play it both ways. Its leaders never wanted any part in dealing with Palestinians; they have erected a wall on Egypt’s border with southern Gaza much higher than the wall Israel built on the northern border. They allowed Israeli troops to enter the Gaza–Egypt border on their way to Rafah—the troops couldn’t have crossed the border without Egypt’s active cooperation. And yet Egyptian officials now say they might rip up their peace treaty with Israel—which has been in effect for 50 years—if those same troops invade the town of Rafah outright.

“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” as the old saw has it. This goes to the nth degree when it comes to war in this region, where illusion, hypocrisy, and mendacity reign as in few others. The players that have the power to exercise leadership need to start acting like leaders.

Israel

Middle East

Palestine

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