With the Israel-Hamas war deep into its fourth month, U.S. diplomats are hard at work trying to hammer out another truce in order to accelerate hostage releases and provide some respite for the more than 2 million Palestinians stuck in Gaza.
Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser, is traveling to Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates this week in the hopes of getting truce talks going again after a nearly two-month hiatus. Multiple draft agreements are on the table. The Israelis reportedly offered Hamas a two-month freeze in the fighting in exchange for the return of the 100 hostages who remain in Hamas’ custody. Another proposal, spearheaded by Arab-majority states, is far more idealistic in that it seeks a permanent ceasefire and dangles the possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as an incentive for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to start a serious negotiating process over the establishment of a Palestinian state.
While Netanyahu would love nothing more than to resurrect his bleak political future by bringing the Middle East’s most powerful country onside, he doesn’t believe that the benefits of such a groundbreaking diplomatic agreement would outweigh the costs of a Palestinian state. Everything Netanyahu has done and said over the last three and a half months, and his entire political career, suggests that a Palestinian state is a pipe dream as long as he’s in office (and given the declining support among the Israeli public for a two-state solution, it might not be possible after he leaves office either). The Biden administration’s stance notwithstanding, Netanyahu now makes it a habit to remind Israelis that he was against the Oslo Process all along and is the only man standing in the way of a Palestinian state. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said in a news conference last week. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?”
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