Gaza Genocide: Netanyahu’s Worst Nightmare

The UN Security Council this month passed a US-brokered resolution, providing for a security force to take control of Gaza under a so-called “Board of Peace,” which would be run by Trump himself and Tony Blair.  The latter is, of course, the global fixer worth tens of millions, which he pockets in return for his expertise and status as an international “statesman.”

Despite the International Stabilization Force having an unclear mandate and no states yet sending their troops into harm’s way, it passed with the strong support of Arab and Muslim states.

“The United States, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Türkiye express our joint support for the Security Council Resolution currently under consideration…

I’m mystified why they would welcome this half-baked plan.  It could be out of desperation, while watching Gazans drowning like Pharaoh’s army, in their tents through winter storms and flooding.   It could be out of guilt at their betrayal of these victims in the face of Israel’s genocide.  Whatever the reason, they’ve sold out Gaza for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver.

The ISF mandate calls for:

“Permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups” in Gaza, protect civilians and secure humanitarian aid corridors.

 

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Though an Arab-led force may have some success in achieving these goals, Hamas will never fully give up its weapons unless Israel fully withdraws from Gaza; which Israel refuses to do. That would leave an Arab security force likely battling with Hamas fighters, an outcome any leader would avoid like the plague.  To have Arab fighting against Arab would be a disastrous outcome.  Yet the potential for such a development is very real.  Unless Trump mounts a full-court press on its Middle East ally to honor the terms of his peace plan. So far, it has refused to do so.

Further, humanitarian aid corridors are again dependent on Israeli cooperation. It operates all the major crossings and currently constrains free access to aid convoys and related international NGOs.  What would motivate it to change course, except Trump’s intervention?  Would he?

He cares little for Palestinians or their suffering.  He does care about burnishing his credentials as a global deal-maker.  Palestinians are a means to that end and nothing more.  The president’s eyes are on the prize: Israel-Saudi normalization.  For him, this would be a crowning achievement that inaugurates an era of long-term peace which the region hasn’t seen, as he falsely claims, “for 3,000 years.”

MBS: Boy Prince and the Bromance

To that end, he hosted the Saudi ruling bro, Mohammed bin Salman at the White House this week.  There is something truly icky about the Oval Office photo I feature here.  MBS looks like a fat mobster assassin.  Trump grabs his hands as no Saudi subject would dare do. But the fake gold moldings would be right at home in the decor of the royal court in Riyadh.

They dickered over a few key “gets” for the kingdom: a defense pact, F-35s, and nuclear reactors.  Trump, on the other hand, will make his pitch for normalization and a trillion dollar weapons/trade deal.  MBS will nod in an affirmative but non-committal way, as the train moves down the line toward its eventual destination: mutual recognition (sans Palestinian state) and a trade bonanza for US weapons-makers.

Only a few years after boiling its columnist in a vat of acid, the Washington Post has welcomed to its pages one of the boy prince’s lackeys to sing his boss’ praises, as he is feted with pomp and circumstance on his state visit.  The op-ed is a shallow bit of revisionist history, ignoring the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, devised by MBS and carried out by his assassins. The Post has clearly been transformed by its owner, billionaire oligarch, Jeff Bezos, into a right-wing rag, gussied up in the guise of serious journalism. It marks the death of yet another serious American newspaper.

This will be the crown prince’s first trip to this country since that 2019 murder.  It will serve as a global rehabilitation of his frayed reputation.  And it is a further sign that human rights, including the rights of the Palestinian people, are an afterthought at best.

As the two leaders chum it up at the White House, Netanyahu is left at the window looking in.  He can’t be terribly happy. If Saudi Arabia buys those F-35s it will have military parity with Israel. For decades the US has granted it weapons superiority over any other country in the region.

Why should the IDF worry about the Saudis attaining weapons parity? After all, it is an ostensible ally.  But Israel’s attack on Qatar, which sought unsuccessfully to eliminate Hamas’ entire leadership, has to cause deep concern.  Saudi F-35s could constrain its military options and interests anywhere in the region the kingdom chooses.  The IDF could be forced–in planning its military operations–to ensure they don’t conflict with Saudi interests.  If they do, and Israel acts unilaterally, it will ratchet up tensions in an already overheated region. Even if it is willing to defy Saudi Arabia, the latter’s alliance with the US will bring added, and unwelcome pressure to bear.

Netanyahu: odd man out

He also cannot be happy with either the Gaza ceasefire or Trump’s 20-point peace plan.  Both were forced upon him by Trump’s unrelenting pressure.  As soon as the fighting subsided, he knew he would face demands for a state commission of inquiry into the failures of 10/7. It would hold him responsible for one of the greatest security failures in the nation’s history.  This would threaten his rule.  Separately, a prolonged war would distract from the four year-old corruption trial he’s facing. That too threatens his political demise.

Thus, Trump’s intervention puts him in jeopardy, and the president could give a damn.  The Israeli prime minister has no one to blame but himself:

…Netanyahu’s diplomatic cul-de-sac and defeat [in the UNSC] was on full display…He is out of antics, out of maneuvering room, out of effective levers, and out of clout, and he suffers from acute credibility deficit. It is self-inflicted, and he eminently earned it.

…This new reality is… a direct result of Netanyahu’s reckless mismanagement of relations with the United States. He consistently and crudely alienated Democrats for years, confronted and defied American presidents, managed to upset Republican voters and provoke harsh criticism from major MAGA influencers. Now he has no allies in Washington, no levers to pull, no sway of the kind Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Qatar have.

His military strategy after 10/7 relied on two assumptions: that the world would share Israel’s outrage and accept the need to teach the Palestinians a punishing lesson and death blow to Hamas. In the eventuality that the nations of the world wearied of such support for Israel as the carnage mounted, he bet that the world could never unite to stop it. He was wrong (though the jury’s still out).

He never saw it coming

But the Israeli premier never foresaw that France and Saudi Arabia would join to threaten Israel’s domination of the Gaza narrative.  They hosted an international conference demanding creation of a Palestinian state, which is an Israeli red line. This event internationalized the war. It was no longer Israel’s prerogative to bomb what it wanted and kill who it wanted.  Now, the world was watching.  Then Trump proposed his peace plan and obtained the endorsement of all the key Arab players.  That further boxed Netanyahu in.

He either believed that the normalization project was such an inevitability, offering such a range of benefits to all parties, that genocide in Gaza could not derail it; or he anticipated that it would be derailed and, weighing the odds, chose to protect himself over relations with Saudi Arabia.  Despite his failure to anticipate the Saudis rejection of normalization, he has retained his sense of chutzpah: the belief that he is entitled to demand, and get whatever he wants, despite what anyone else thinks.  For example:

Israel, according to “senior diplomatic defense sources will consent to such a U.S.-Saudi [arms] deal only if Saudi Arabia normalizes relations with Israel.”

Why would Trump and MBS attach any significance to such an outrageous demand?  Trump has a trillion dollar arms and trade deal on the table, and Bibi is going to be a spoiler?  In what universe is he living?  Why would he assume the president would permit that?  It’s yet another example of the Israeli leader overplaying his hand.  Something he has gotten away with for decades.  Now, it has led him to a dead end.

Bibi didn’t see MAGA’s revolt against Israel coming

Even MAGA has come to detest America’s involvement in a war they want no part of. It was highlighted by US Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s secret meeting at the embassy with America’s most notorious spy, Jonathan Pollard. It sent Trump’s most loyal supporters into a tailspin:

Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s meeting with an American convicted of spying for Israel is adding to MAGA’s festering divide over the United States’ ties to Jerusalem…MAGA activists tore into Huckabee, a devout evangelical and Israel supporter, accusing him of putting support for Israel over U.S. national security.

Pollard hasn’t helped himself or Huckabee with chestnuts like this one, which stuck a finger into a hornet’s nest:

Pollard’s comments…have been cited by conspiracy theorists since 2021, when he said that American Jews “consider themselves more American than they do Jews,” and claimed “we will always have dual loyalty.”

Netanyahu has long lost Democrats.  He tried to replace them with evangelical Christians, and that’s worked for him.  But Israeli apartheid and genocide, relying as it does on massive levels of US armaments, are driving a stake into the evangelical romance with Israel.

Similarly, Bibi has thrown up more roadblocks to Trump’s peace plan, which contains provisions the Israeli leader has rejected outright: no Palestinian state; no Palestinian Authority; no Gaza withdrawal.  All these and more are key provisions of the document. Leaving them unfulfilled renders the plan toothless.

Faced with such intransigence, how will Trump respond?  Will he force the issue and put the screws to Netanyahu?  Or will the Israeli leader wriggle his way out of this with his usual MO of delay, delay, delay; until what he opposes becomes a dead letter?  It’s an approach that has stood him in good stead throughout his career. But it’s questionable whether that will work here.

Trump’s peace plan: what’s in it for Palestinians?

Even if Trump pressures Bibi, the former’s peace deal offers the Palestinians little except the potential end of the slaughter in Gaza. It doesn’t offer a Palestinian state. It doesn’t offer any protection from Israeli aggression. It doesn’t tangibly improve of the quality of life for Palestinians. They will likely be left holding the bag, while Israel  continues its ethnic cleansing from Gaza to the West Bank.

On that note, Human Rights Watch this week called the Israeli destruction of three West Bank refugee camps and expulsion of 32,000 from them, a “war crime and crime against humanity.”  Settlers are methodically and systematically erasing entire villages and pushing residents in a pincer movement , into a smaller and smaller territorial envelope in cities like Ramallah.  This echoes the Nazis forced “relocation” of Jews from their homes into concentration camps. The first stage of its extermination regime.  Israel’s ultimate goal is to eliminate any Palestinian presence in the West Bank, except in a few remaining “cities of refuge.”  It would turn them into isolated bantustans within Greater Israel.

Currently, Netanyahu is under no compunction to change these policies.  Neither Trump nor MBS seem prepared to stop them.  Each has bigger fish to fry. Each has national and personal interest as their highest priority.  There is no room for Saudi brotherly solidarity or altruism, when legacies and personal glory are at stake.

Perhaps most importantly, the plan offers no timetable for a Palestinian state, a provision demanded by Arab states–most prominently Saudi Arabia. Instead the US proposal offers this weak tea:

“Conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” once the Palestinian Authority (PA) has carried out the requested reforms. The United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous coexistence,

God save us from “credible pathways” and “dialogue.”  Not to mention the provision that Israel would participate in creating a “political horizon” whatever that means.  As I’ve written here, this language is laughable.  It guarantees nothing, offers nothing.  It’s rhetorical obfuscation that throws a sop to Palestine.  It confirms the betrayal of Gaza by the same Arab states endorsing this so-called plan.

The kingdom’s stated goals are somewhat clearer and more firm:

Saudi Arabia wants to see “a clear time-bound Israeli withdrawal” from Gaza, plus steps that empower a Palestinian security force and government and lead to the unification of Gaza and the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority [said] Manal Radwan, a senior Saudi foreign ministry official…

“These steps are not the end goal, they are the pathway to the realization of the Palestinian state and implementation of the two-state solution,” she said.