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Israel’s 54th Day of War – The 6th Day of the “Pause”
By Sherwin Pomerantz
On this, the 54th day of war in Israel, 10 more hostages came home last night and another round of 10 are expected later today as well. As of last night 60 Israelis had been freed from Hamas captivity.
Asto what will happen when the official pause in hostilities officially ends on Thursday morning at 7 AM, Qatar is seeking to mediate a deal that would allow for the release of all the hostages. Qatar and Egypt, are mediating indirect talks between Hamas and Israel in Doha with the help of the US. Israeli officials were in Doha today to take part in the talks. The negotiators are reportedly working on two deals simultaneously with the larger one possibly including an end to the Gaza war that began on October 7th but this has been on hold since Friday.
The first arrangement could see the release of 20 to 30 Israelis over the next two to three days through an extension of an existing deal, leaving slightly less than 150 left in captivity by Sunday. The issue is highly pressurized given tomorrow morning’s deadline for the expiration of the current arrangement.
The second and larger deal under discussion would allow for those 150 Israeli captives yet in Gaza, out of the 240 hostages Hamas seized during its infiltration of southern Israel on October 7, to be freed.
The initial deal which went into effect last Friday sought to secure the release of all 98 women and children in Gaza. To date, there are still some eight Israelis ages 18 and under who are being forcibly held in the enclave.
The initial release was based on three formulas. Ten Israeli hostages are worth 24 hours of a lull in the Gaza War, which has been paused since Friday morning to allow for captive releases. For every day the Gaza war is on hold, at least 200 trucks of humanitarian aid can also enter the Strip.
For every Israeli woman or child captive freed, Israel would release three jailed Palestinian women and minors held on security-related offenses. To date, some 180 such prisoners have been freed and another 30 are set to be released tonight.
An article about the potential deal published in the Washington Post on Wednesday said the new deal would separate the remaining hostages into five categories. This would be men who are too old for reserve duty, male reservists, men serving in the army, the five fable soldiers, and those who have died.
It’s expected that Hamas could support a deal for the release of all the hostages, if it includes the release of Palestinian men jailed for serious terror offenses.
The breaking point is expected to be any inclusion in the deal of an end to the Gaza war. We have been clear about our intention to resume the miliary campaign to oust Hamas from Gaza once the hostages are freed. Hamas, in turn, wants to free hostages in exchange for an end to the war.
Israel has considered Hamas to be an existential threat that must be eliminated since the October 7 attack in which the terror group killed over 1,200 people, burning, dismembering and raping many of them.
In a first violation of the pause by Hamas, a few IEDs were detonated in northern Gaza close to the location of Israeli troops. Fortunately, there we no casualties on our side.
Today, the 16th of the Hebrew month of Kislev (Kaf Tet b’November) marks 76 years since the United Nations vote that established two states for two peoples, one for Jews and one for Arabs. Sadly, had the Arab leadership at the time accepted that decision, today the Palestinians would have been celebrating 75 years of independence. Instead, all of Israel’s neighbors attacked the nascent State of Israel when it was established after the British exited in May 1948 and the rest is history. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Am Yisrael Chai……The People of Israel Live.
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 40 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a international business development consultancy. He is also the Founder and Chair of the American State Offices Association, former National President of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel and a past Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
And:
Now fighting the clock and I would add Biden, The State Department, The CIA and assorted anti-Semites in the Administration.
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The Hostage Deal Means Israel Is Fighting the Clock
With a short cease-fire reportedly going into effect Friday, Hamas has seized control of the war’s timetable.
By Dominic Green
With a four-day cease-fire reportedly going into effect Friday, time isn’t on Israel’s side in its war with Hamas in Gaza. Israel already faces challenges unprecedented in the history of war. A terrorist enemy dedicated to its destruction holds hundreds of hostages in a complex tunnel network and uses civilians as human shields. Israeli society, already riven by political infighting, is traumatized by Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault and divided over how to handle the hostage crisis. Further cease-fires mean the recovery of more hostages, but this will slow and eventually halt Israel’s effort to break Hamas’s control over Gaza. That would be a strategic defeat for both Israel and the U.S.
Israel needs time to root out Hamas. But the longer the war goes on, the likelier it is to spiral into a regional conflict drawing in the U.S. Since Oct. 17, Iranian-supplied militias have hit U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria with more than 60 rocket attacks. If a rocket or drone kills American troops, the Biden administration will face a crisis of its own. It could either retaliate against Iran and risk unpredictable military, economic and electoral consequences, or retreat from the Mideast, abandoning Israel and ceding a crucial region in the U.S.’s great-power struggle with China.
Few observers are better placed to understand these dilemmas than Michael Oren. An Israeli-American historian of the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East, Mr. Oren served in Gaza with the Israel Defense Forces, then advised on several rounds of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He was Israel’s ambassador to Washington during the Obama years. He held the Gaza brief as Benjamin Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister.
Mr. Oren praises President Biden’s forthright support of Israel. He agrees with the president’s statement that “a ceasefire is not peace” as long as Hamas “clings to its ideology of destruction.” It is war by other means, allowing the terrorists to “rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again.” Mr. Oren expects U.S. and international pressure for cease-fires to grow “exponentially” in the coming weeks.
A cease-fire deprives Israel of military momentum and transfers the initiative to Hamas. Now that Israel has agreed to a short cease-fire, the Biden administration and its Qatari interlocutors will expect longer cease-fires. Hamas will remain armed and dangerous in Gaza, despite Israel’s war aims and the U.S.’s stated goals, and will use this cease-fire to regroup. The cease-fire’s terms allow Hamas to extend the truce by releasing 10 hostages a day. As the possibility of a permanent truce nears, and as Hamas starts to trade adult, male and military hostages, the group’s demands will rise. The U.S. will pressure Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists.
The partial hostage release also increases pressure inside Israel for further cease-fires. Israeli society, and Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, are already split by a real-life “Sophie’s choice”: Who is returned home, and who is left behind? The Israeli government insists its Gaza campaign will resume once the cease-fire lapses, but a combination of domestic and international pressures may prevent Israel from regaining military momentum. The State Department is already refusing to endorse an Israeli move into southern Gaza, citing humanitarian concerns.
A temporary cease-fire that becomes permanent is incompatible with the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel’s security. More than 200,000 Israelis are internally displaced from the southern regions adjoining Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. This cease-fire with Hamas won’t return those Israelis home. It will, however, embolden Iran and its proxies, none of whom are parties to the cease-fire deal. Hezbollah’s attacks across Israel’s northern border have intensified in recent weeks, as has the pace of rocket attacks by Iranian-sponsored militias on American bases in Iraq and Syria. The Houthis of Yemen, removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list when the Biden administration came into office, have hijacked a cargo ship in the Red Sea and launched ballistic missiles at Israel.
“What’s going to happen when the message gets out that we can be hit more or less with impunity, and when we try to defend ourselves, someone’s going to slap a cease-fire on us?” Mr. Oren asks.
Restoring Israel’s deterrence is a matter of survival for the Jewish state. It’s also an asset that the U.S. is defending by resupplying Israel and sending out two carrier strike groups to the region. Israelis now appreciate the indispensability of American support more than at any time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It’s vital the Biden administration uses its leverage wisely.
Mr. Oren endorses reports that after Oct. 7 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant advised launching a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah before addressing Hamas’s smaller rocket arsenal in Gaza. Mr. Gallant was overruled in the cabinet partly, Mr. Oren believes, because of “tremendous pressure” from the Biden administration. The president’s one-word warning to Iran and its assets—“Don’t”—also applies to Israel.
Mr. Oren hears several clocks ticking at once. A short cease-fire won’t slow any of them, and it will exacerbate some of their pressures. There is the “ammo clock”: The IDF needs to be resupplied consistently with U.S.-made advanced munitions. There is the “reservist clock”: Israel has mobilized an army equivalent to those of Britain and France combined; its young men and women, he says, form “the backbone of our high-tech economy.” There is the “economic clock”: Foreign investment and tourism have collapsed, and Israel is burning money on the war. There is the “humanitarian clock”: Footage continues to show civilian casualties and more than a million displaced Gazans.
Israel needs to stop these clocks to survive. The Biden administration should create time and diplomatic space for Israel’s forces to break Hamas. That means preventing the terrorists from setting the timetable in the Gaza war, letting Israel strike Hezbollah as necessary, and re-establishing American deterrence against Iranian-sponsored rocket attacks. It also means rethinking America’s Iran strategy.
Israel’s leaders, Mr. Oren among them, made the mistake of believing Hamas could be bought off with Qatari cash and work permits. The Obama administration, he says, “made the same mistake” about Iran. The Biden administration, which transferred $6 billion to Iran to secure the release of five American hostages in September and allowed sanctions on Iran’s missile technology to lapse, is under the same delusion. The Democrats’ long campaign to escape the Mideast by placating Iran has “completely boomeranged” in “abject failure,” Mr. Oren says. The U.S. has been dragged back into the region by Iranian-sponsored aggression.
Two other clocks are ticking: the countdown to Iran’s nuclear breakout and the countdown to what Mr. Oren calls the “crunch” moment when an Iranian missile takes American lives or hits a U.S. Navy vessel. That would also be a direct hit on “the contradictions of American policy.” Time is tight for Israel, but the U.S. is approaching a fateful moment too.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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B-2 stealth bombers have become the first aircraft ready to employ the advanced B61-12 nuclear bomb in combat.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/2023/11/29/b-2_spirit_now_operational_with_new_b61-12_nuclear_bombs_995574.html
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Leave The U.N.
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The Disgrace of the United Nations on Israel
The Secretary-General abandons Israel, a state the U.N. helped to create.
By The Editorial Board
In the ever-expanding hall of shame for propagators of global disorder, prepare a special pedestal for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. His disgraceful remarks Tuesday to the Security Council are an example of why the U.N. can’t be counted on to keep the peace anywhere.
Mr. Guterres’s comments amount to nothing less than an apologia for Hamas terrorists, despite a few thin caveats. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said of the Iran-backed terror group’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, which claimed more than 1,400 lives.
Lest anyone miss his point: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”
Although he allowed that these “grievances” don’t justify the “appalling attacks by Hamas,” he warned that “those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” We quote Mr. Guterres at length in case readers assume someone in his position couldn’t really have delivered a speech of this sort. He did.
Mr. Guterres seems to know little about the institution he leads. A U.N. resolution passed in 1947 recommended the partition plan for Palestine that led to the creation of Israel the following year, as our friends at the New York Sun note in a sharp editorial.
Meanwhile, for decades the U.N., under the auspices of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee agency exclusively for Palestinians, has discouraged permanent resettlement by refugees and runs schools that teach children Israeli territory belongs to them.
Far worse is Mr. Guterres’s parroting of what amounts to a modern-day blood libel that Israel is indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians. The Israel Defense Forces more than a week ago tried to warn Gazans to flee the likely path of an invasion; Hamas discouraged civilians from doing so and the U.N. criticized . . . Israel.
Civilians are dying because Hamas deliberately targeted Israelis and now uses Gazans as human shields, as Mr. Guterres had to acknowledge Tuesday. By calling for Israel to accept a cease-fire, Mr. Guterres is effectively rewarding the terrorists’ civilian-killing strategy while denying a U.N.-approved state the same ability to defend itself that every other country enjoys.
This false equivalence elevates Mr. Guterres’s comments to the destructive from merely foolish. His message to the world’s rogues is that if you go on a killing spree, the U.N. will help justify your depredations. Will Mr. Guterres concoct some excuse if Beijing invades Taiwan—or Philippine territory? This is how the U.N. makes itself a fellow traveler in the advancing march of global disorder
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Don’t Give Gaza to the Palestinian Authority
Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party is no better than Hamas. It has celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks.
By Eugene Kontorovich and Itamar Marcus
The Biden administration wants Israel to bring in Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party to rule Gaza when the war is over. Fatah controls the Palestinian Authority, which governs much of the West Bank. Uniting Gaza and the West Bank under a common government is a necessary step in the Biden administration’s seemingly unshakable goal of creating a Palestinian state sandwiching Israel.
The idea behind the strategy has a long history. Fatah is a secular, Arab nationalist party that occasionally claims to want peace with Israel, albeit on terms that would make Israel’s existence as a Jewish state untenable. Yet for many diplomats this makes it an attractive alternative to the terrorists who perpetrated the Oct. 7 attacks. But Fatah is a junior-varsity version of Hamas. Both have lethal policies when it comes to Israel. The Palestinian Authority sponsors the “pay to slay” salary program that provides financial rewards to terrorists, who get more lavish payouts for crimes that result in longer imprisonment. As recently as Oct. 2, an official Palestinian Authority TV broadcast showed Mr. Abbas saying: “Our martyrs, prisoners and wounded are the most sanctified that we have. . . . Our martyrs have a right to this money.”
Fatah has celebrated and glorified the Oct. 7 orgy of torture and murder. The party has boasted that its members directly participated in the invasion, crossing into Israel and brutalizing civilians. A video shown on a West Bank-based Telegram channel that has been repeatedly cited by official Fatah sources shows terrorists with the yellow headbands of Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade firing Kalashnikovs while assaulting an Israeli kibbutz. One terrorist proclaims, “Today we broke in the military post Nahal Oz [a civilian kibbutz] and we hit what we hit.” The terrorists brag that they “stepped on their heads,” and shows footage of them stomping a dead Israeli.
Other videos on Fatah channels boast of their participation, proclaiming that Fatah is “fighting with the rest of the resistance groups in ‘the Al Aqsa Flood’ battle,” using Hamas’s operational name for the massacre. On Oct. 7, death notices appeared on Telegram announcing the funerals (or “weddings,” as they put it) of Fatah members who died that morning in the attack on Israel.
One such post shows a coffin draped with the yellow Fatah flag adorned with the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades logo, which includes crossed rifles and a grenade above Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. The photo’s caption says the deceased had “ascended” to heaven as a martyr “during his armed confrontation together with his brothers against the Zionist occupation soldiers in our occupied lands.”
These death notices also reveal the involvement of other Palestinian factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Fatah and the other factions didn’t plan or lead the operation, since they lack the resources in Gaza to do so. But, based on their own claims, they piggybacked on the atrocity. Reports began circling on Nov. 19 that the Al Aqsa Brigade had taken and held hostages from Israel but transferred them to Hamas.
The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah hasn’t responded the way a government might when armed gangs under its ruling party’s banner cross a border, kill civilians and boast about doing so. Fatah officials haven’t disavowed the terrorists. Instead they’ve celebrated their dirty work. The official Palestinian Authority news agency described the attack as a “heroic battle” and called on Palestinians to escalate “confrontation in all arenas.” A senior Fatah official proclaimed on Palestinian television on Oct. 10 that “our brothers in the Gaza Strip . . . are a source of pride, heroism, and honor.” Mr. Abbas responded immediately on Oct. 7 by declaring Palestinian “right to self-defense.”
Mr. Abbas hasn’t even denounced the holding of innocent hostages by members of his faction. His adviser Mahmoud Al-Habbash made this clear: “Has anyone heard from President Mahmoud Abbas . . . one word against the Hamas Movement?” Many see senior Palestinian Authority official Hussein Al-Sheikh as a possible successor to Mr. Abbas. Mr. Al-Sheikh went further, announcing that now is the time for Palestinian unity with the terrorists.
The evidence of actual participation by Fatah members, combined with the endorsement by official Fatah organs, should disqualify Fatah and any government of which it is a part from any leadership role in Gaza. The difference between Fatah and Hamas is one of degree, not kind. They are both evil.
One of Hamas’s top leaders, Khalil al-Hayya, has said the broader goal of the attack was “putting the Palestinian issue back on the table.” When his terrorists invaded on Oct. 7, the plan was to race across the narrow waist of Israel and hook up with their comrades in the West Bank. Hamas wanted to cut the Jewish state in two. The Biden administration’s vision is a diplomatic version of this, connecting Gaza administratively to the West Bank.
Israel will win this war. Hamas will be defeated. The international community can’t expect a victorious Israel to implement any version of its adversaries’ aims. Handing Gaza to the Palestinian Authority would do just that.
Mr. Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a scholar at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum. Mr. Marcus is director of Palestinian Media Watch.
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More corruption?
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The Biden Energy Slush Fund
A $400 billion pile of cash dwarfing most private green investment vehicles.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Washington’s return from Thanksgiving break will feature another go-round on whether to provide vital aid to Israel and Ukraine, and how to pay for it. Here’s a thought: Ask Jigar Shah for a couple hundred billion. He’s got that and more—and is otherwise using it for political “investment.”
Mr. Shah isn’t a household name—unless your household includes lobbyists, financiers or crony capitalists. Those are the clients of Mr. Shah’s fief, the revived Energy Department Loan Programs Office. Last humiliated a decade ago, it’s part of that crack DOE bureaucracy that bet on such green tech ventures as Abound (the failed solar company), Fisker Automotive (the failed electric-car maker) and A123 (the failed battery maker). “This announcement today” is about “investing in the infrastructure and technology of the future,” crowed Vice President Biden in 2009, unveiling a $535 million DOE loan for a solar outfit he promised would power 500,000 homes and create 1,000 jobs. That outfit was Solyndra.
As if to prove that anything Mr. Biden could botch 10 years ago he can botch bigger and better now, the loan office is back, baby. Americans gasped at the audacity of Barack Obama’s $814 billion stimulus bill in 2009—and of gambling some $80 billion on clean energy—but that’s peanuts. The Biden spending rampage has bestowed on Mr. Shah, director of the loan department, a stunning $400 billion to hand out to green companies too risky for traditional lenders, or too politically powerful to turn down. According to a July Journal story, the “pile of cash is at least 20 times as big as most private green-energy funds.”
With that kind of funny money, Mr. Shah and DOE aren’t restricting themselves to small-time bets. The agency agreed to a $1 billion loan for Monolith, a company that promises to make hydrogen out of natural gas. Sunnova, a solar company, landed a $3 billion loan guarantee. Then there are all the real paupers. General Motors and LG scooped up $2.5 billion to build electric-vehicle battery plants. Ford landed a record $9.2 billion battery commitment. The Ford loan would be $3.3 billion larger than what the company borrowed during the Detroit meltdown of 2008-09.
The Obama-era loan office was tarred by accusations of cronyism; dollars had a way of going to the politically connected. Now Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have sent a letter to Mr. Shah demanding answers about an October report in the Washington Free Beacon. It claimed a private trade association Mr. Shah founded as a “networking hub” in 2017 has “become a gatekeeper for companies seeking billions of dollars in financing from Shah’s office.”
The report explains that the Cleantech Leaders Roundtable didn’t even “have a website until three years ago,” though in the year after Mr. Shah left its revenue “more than tripled.” It says Cleantech “hosts sold-out receptions featuring Shah for its paying members.” In September Cleantech and the loans office “co-hosted an invitation-only conference” in D.C. “for companies looking for loans—and Cleantech Leaders was in charge of the invite list and ticket sales.”
Since 2021, when Mr. Shah was named loan-office head, “companies connected to the trade association have raked in cash from Shah’s office.” The report quoted an “energy industry insider” who griped that the event was “a slap in the face to all the companies following the rules.” (The Energy Department told the Free Beacon that the conference was a “nonfinancial partnership and not a government-led event.”)
One recipient of DOE largess, Sunnova, shares a board member with Cleantech—an executive also married to a former Democratic National Committee chair. Several of the conference’s financial sponsors were also seeking or had received DOE loans. Questioned about conflicts by Sen. Barrasso in an October hearing, Mr. Shah said “federal staff” make decisions and he has “no role to play.”
Then again, the Journal story related details of Mr. Shah pitching loans and recruiting a firm (battery recycler Li-Cycle), while making clear “White House officials” weigh in on potential loans. In a statement after the committee hearing, Cleantech said it “is proud of the role it has played in bringing together thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors” and that as a “nonpartisan nonprofit” its “networking events” are “open to non-members.”
Ford announced recently it is putting on hold production at one of three massive EV plants to be financed by its DOE loan. In October, Li-Cycle (with a $375 million loan commitment) suspended construction of its flagship Rochester, N.Y., facility citing costs, a development that Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle called “frankly shocking.”
Defenders will no doubt justify future failures as a cost of business as they creatively suggest that DOE’s “investments” over the years have cumulatively produced a “return.” These analyses fail to account for the far greater wreckage—economically and in foregone innovation—that results from government distortion of markets.
It also ignores that money isn’t limitless and $400 billion is a shocking misappropriation of funds while Congress is struggling for basic national security dollars. Clawing back this Energy Department slush fund is a no-brainer.
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When Israel’s Great Nemesis Accepted Peace
Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to destroy the Jewish state in the 1960s, before endorsing a negotiated settlement. Could a defeated Hamas make the same turn?
Nasser is cheered in Cairo after his 1956 decision to nationalize the Suez Canal, leading Israel, Britain and France to try to topple him by force later that year.
By Alex Rowell
With Israeli and Palestinian forces likely to resume hostilities after a four-day pause, the prospects for a more lasting peace in the Middle East remain dim. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to utterly defeat Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that governs the coastal enclave and stunned the world with its killing spree on Oct. 7. For their part, Hamas officials have said they will conduct similar attacks again, as many times as is necessary to achieve the complete destruction of Israel.
It is tempting to conclude that, after this, Israelis and Palestinians simply will never be able to agree on a political settlement capable of bringing an end to more than a century of conflict. Yet history is replete with examples of apparently implacable enemies tiring, eventually, of war and coming to the table—including in the Arab-Israeli context.
The late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, once seen by Israel as the arch-terrorist, signed the Oslo Accords with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in consequence. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein both led their countries to war against Israel before signing full peace treaties that have held to this day.
Like Hamas’s leaders today, and Arafat before them, Nasser was once regarded as the ultimate menace to Israel. The Jewish state’s first premier, David Ben-Gurion, loathed him and compared him to Hitler (much as Netanyahu now calls Hamas “the new Nazis”). In 1956, Ben-Gurion invaded Egypt in tandem with Britain and France—colonial powers aghast at Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company—in an unsuccessful bid to topple Nasser by force.
Nasser’s survival of that onslaught made him a hero to millions of Arabs, not least to Palestinians, many of whom saw him as the man of destiny who would recover their lost homeland. It was Nasser who, in 1964, summoned the Arab heads of state to Egypt to approve the establishment of the PLO, whose declared aim was the liberation of all of historic Palestine from the Israeli state. Nasser provided the PLO with funding, training and equipment and hosted its main radio station, “The Voice of Palestine.”
Three years later, Nasser put Egypt on a war footing, expelling U.N. peacekeepers from his border with Israel and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels, blockading Israel’s port of Eilat. “The Jews threaten war,” he said in a speech on May 22, 1967. “We tell them, ‘You’re most welcome. We’re ready for war.’” Four days later, he pledged that, in the event Israel were to attack Egypt, “The battle will be a comprehensive one and our main objective will be to destroy Israel.”
It was a calamitous misjudgment. Ten days later, Israeli bombers obliterated the Egyptian air force in a matter of hours. Over the course of six days, Israel routed not just the Egyptian but also the Syrian and Jordanian armies. In the process, it seized vast swaths of new territory, including the Gaza Strip (occupied until then by Egypt), the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
The humiliating defeat prompted a sea change in Nasser’s position. In the war’s aftermath, Egypt approved U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which acknowledged Israel’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence,” as well as its “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” The resolution also called on Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and facilitate “a just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee issue. Establishing what became known as the “land-for-peace” formula, whereby Israel would return the land occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Arab states, the resolution has been the basis of negotiations for a political settlement of the conflict ever since.
The PLO rejected Resolution 242, being unwilling at the time to recognize Israeli sovereignty of any kind. This marked a rift between Nasser and the Palestinians, which widened in 1970, when Nasser reiterated his support for a two-state solution, publicly endorsing a proposal by President Nixon’s secretary of state, William P. Rogers, to cease hostilities with Israel and resume peace talks in line with Resolution 242. “We have declared before the whole world that we seek peace,” proclaimed Nasser on July 24, 1970.
This time, Nasser was openly denounced by several PLO factions, who staged turbulent street protests outside Egyptian embassies in Lebanon and Jordan, in which Nasser was branded a traitor, “coward” and “agent of imperialism.” The furious Nasser responded by closing two PLO radio stations in Cairo that had broadcast stinging criticisms of his policy. He also suspended the funding and equipping of militants in Gaza.
The breach polarized the Arab world, with rejectionist states such as Iraq and Algeria backing the Palestinian position, while the likes of Jordan, Lebanon and Sudan sided with Nasser. The man who had lived for so many years as the iconic symbol of Arab revolution would end his days condemned by his own disciples as a sellout. Two months later, the 52-year-old Nasser died of a heart attack.
Looking back on this episode today, it is striking to reflect how far opinions have moved away from centrist positions to what were once fringe views. While even Nasser could once endorse a two-state solution—and a peace initiative proposed by a Republican administration in Washington—it is de rigueur today in many pro-Palestine circles and among the hard-liners who populate Netanyahu’s cabinet to reject the two-state formula as unworkable, undesirable or both.
To be sure, several factors complicate any comparison between Nasser’s time and our own. One is the construction of hundreds of Israeli settlements, housing some 700,000 people, in the Palestinian West Bank since Israel’s occupation began in 1967, which has done much to undermine the feasibility of a Palestinian state. Another is Hamas’s uncompromising Islamist ideology, which differs in important respects from Nasser’s self-styled “Arab socialism.” (Indeed, Nasser vigorously repressed Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a Palestinian offshoot.) Where Nasser, Arafat, Sadat and Hussein were all ideologically agile, moving with the winds and changing with the times, the same can hardly be said of Hamas, especially after Oct. 7.
Is it conceivable, nonetheless, that some yet-unseen future iteration of Hamas—assuming it survives the current war—might, in the fullness of time, seek a settlement? It is nearly impossible to imagine today, but it was also once nearly impossible to imagine of Nasser and Arafat. In the end, as Rabin said, one makes peace with one’s enemies, not with one’s friends.
And that, above all, must be the outcome sought most urgently by responsible actors and stakeholders in Israel-Palestine today—with or without Hamas. If there is one lesson that can be drawn with very high confidence from history, it is that military action alone can bring neither security to Israelis nor liberation to Palestinians. Both Hamas and Israel’s own extremists live and breathe to sabotage all meaningful efforts toward a just and sustainable political resolution of this conflict. It is precisely for that reason that the rest of us must redouble our resolve to achieve it.
Alex Rowell’s new book is “We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World,” published by W.W. Norton.
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