During my 9 days of reporting not too long ago in Israel and the West Bank, little did I do know that essentially the most revealing second would come within the ultimate hours of my discuss with. As I used to be packing to go away final Saturday night time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a news convention wherein he indicated that Israel and the United States shouldn’t have a shared imaginative and prescient of the way Israel will have to entire its struggle in Gaza or learn how to convert any Israeli victory over Hamas into a lasting peace with the Palestinians.
Without such a shared technique, the Biden management, the American other people and specifically American Jews who strengthen Israel will want to make some fateful selections.
We will both need to turn out to be captives of Netanyahu’s technique — which might take us all down with him — or articulate our personal American imaginative and prescient for a way the Gaza struggle will have to finish. That will require a Biden management plan to create two states for 2 indigenous peoples dwelling within the spaces of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.
Yes, I’m speaking about a wartime peace plan that, if Israel agreed, may just assist give it the time, legitimacy, allies and sources it must defeat Hamas — with out getting caught governing all of Gaza and the entire West Bank ceaselessly, and not using a political horizon for the Palestinians.
And haven’t any phantasm, that is the one imaginative and prescient Netanyahu is providing at this time: Seven million Jews seeking to govern 5 million Palestinians in perpetuity — and that’s a prescription for crisis for Israel, America, Jews in every single place and America’s reasonable Arab allies.
The Biden plan — are you sitting down? — may just in reality use as one in every of its beginning issues President Donald Trump’s proposal for a two-state answer, as a result of Netanyahu warmly embraced that during 2020, when he had a other coalition. (Netanyahu and his ambassador in Washington almost wrote the Trump plan.) More on that during a 2d.
Here is why we’re at a juncture that calls for daring concepts, beginning final Saturday night time. Speaking in Hebrew within the joint news convention with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu rejected U.S. and global issues over the hundreds of Palestinian lives already misplaced to the struggle to uproot Hamas from Gaza. Even extra vital, he declared that Israel’s army would stay in Gaza “as long as necessary” to stop the Gaza Strip from ever once more getting used to release assaults on Israeli civilians.
Gaza “will be demilitarized,” he said. “There will be no further threat from the Gaza Strip on Israel, and to ensure that, for as long as necessary, I.D.F. will control Gaza security to prevent terror from there.”
Those are professional Israeli issues given the Hamas atrocities, however Netanyahu additionally indicated that Israel would oppose the go back of the Palestinian Authority — Israel’s spouse within the Oslo peace procedure that governs Palestinians within the West Bank — to Gaza following the struggle. The authority, Netanyahu mentioned, is “a civil authority that educates its children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to eliminate the State of Israel … an authority that pays the families of murderers based on the number they murdered … an authority whose leader still has not condemned the terrible [Oct. 7] massacre 30 days later.” Bibi — who by no means offers the Palestinian Authority credit for the way it works on a daily basis with Israeli safety officers to hose down violence within the West Bank — presented no advice of the way and from the place an alternate, professional Palestinian governing authority able to paintings with Israel would possibly emerge.
This used to be an in-your-face rebuke of the Biden management place articulated through Secretary of State Antony Blinken final Wednesday. As The Times reported, Blinken declared right through a assembly of international ministers in Tokyo that Gaza will have to be unified with the West Bank underneath the Palestinian Authority as soon as the struggle is over. To retain America’s Arab and Western allies, Blinken mentioned that at this time — as of late — we will have to articulate “affirmative elements to get to a sustained peace.” And “these must include the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” he mentioned. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
My four-word translation of Blinken’s proposal to Israel: “Help us help you.’’
Blinken, though, also offered no details of how that might happen. The Biden team needs to flesh that out.
Why is Netanyahu trying to destroy the Palestinian Authority as a governing option for a postwar Gaza? Because he is already campaigning to hold onto power after the Gaza war is over, and he knows there will be a huge surge of Israelis demanding he step down because of how he and his far-right cronies distracted and divided Israel and its military by pursuing a judicial coup that Israeli intelligence sources told Netanyahu was emboldening and tempting enemies such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The only way Netanyahu can stay in power is if his far-right allies don’t abandon him — particularly Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. So to hold the support of the Jewish supremacists in his cabinet — some of whom want Israel to erect settlements in Gaza as soon as possible — Netanyahu has to declare now that the Palestinians will have no legitimate, independent representation in Gaza or the West Bank.
Yes, I know it is hard to believe, but Netanyahu is campaigning in the middle of this war.
It is time for President Biden to create a moment of truth for everyone — for Netanyahu, for the Palestinians and their supporters, for Israel and its supporters and for Aipac, the Jewish lobby. Biden needs to make clear that America is not going to be Netanyahu’s useful idiot. We are going to lay down the principles of a fair peace plan for the morning after this war — one that reflects our interests and that will also enable us to support Israel and moderate Palestinians and win the support of moderate Arabs for an economic reconstruction of Gaza after the war. I cannot see any major economic support for the rebuilding of Gaza coming from Europe or from countries like the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia unless Israel and some legitimate Palestinian authority are committed to the principles of a peace framework to create two states for two peoples.
Biden needs to say: “Israel, we are covering your flank militarily with our two aircraft carriers, financially with $14 billion in aid, and diplomatically at the U.N. The price for that is your acceptance of a peace framework based on two states for two indigenous peoples in Gaza, the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel. This plan is based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which was also the cornerstone for negotiations in the peace plan put forward by President Trump in 2020.
“Bibi, do you remember what you said about that Trump plan that gave Palestinians about 70 percent of the West Bank for a state, plus an expanded Gaza Strip and a capital in the area of Jerusalem?” Biden may just upload. “Here’s the Associated Press story of Jan. 28, 2020, to remind you: ‘Netanyahu called it a ‘‘historic breakthrough’’ equal in significance to the country’s declaration of independence in 1948.’”
The Palestinian Authority foolishly rejected the Trump plan outright, as a substitute of asking to make use of it as a place to begin. This is a likelihood to make up for that mistake — or be uncovered as unserious.
In his precious new ebook at the historical past of the peace procedure, “(In) Sights: Peacemaking in the Oslo Process Thirty Years and Counting,” Gidi Grinstein, a member of Ehud Barak’s negotiating crew at Camp David, argues that the Trump plan supplies a herbal basis for a revived peace procedure for a two-state answer. That is not just as a result of Netanyahu already agreed to it, Grinstein instructed me in an interview, even supposing the settler hard-liners in his cupboard didn’t and nonetheless would no longer. It’s additionally viable since the Trump plan used to be in reality according to the precondition that peace used to be conceivable most effective after Hamas used to be got rid of from energy in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority may just think keep an eye on of the Gaza Strip, which, the Trump plan argued, could be expanded through land carved from Israel’s Negev Desert.
President Biden may just additionally suggest that with the assistance of our reasonable Arab allies just like the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain, we’d get a hold of a plan to overtake the Palestinian Authority, purge its training gadget of anti-Israel subject material, improve its forces that paintings day by day with Israeli safety groups within the West Bank, and segment out its monetary strengthen for Palestinian prisoners who harmed Israelis.
Is the Palestinian Authority as much as such a deal? Are revolutionary Palestinian supporters within the West who chant the eliminationist mantra “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” up for it? Will Israel’s silent majority be if Hamas is defeated? Let’s see what everybody in point of fact stands for — or if they have got a higher resolution — as a result of nor is going to vanish. Biden wishes to place all of them to the take a look at.
I do know that a lot of American Jewish leaders privately would like Biden to place ahead such a plan however thus far just one, Ronald Lauder, a longtime Republican and president of the World Jewish Congress, has had the braveness to name for it — in a Saudi newspaper, no much less, in an essay entitled: “A time for peace and a two-state solution.” As he defined: “Only a two-state solution would guarantee Israelis and Palestinians a life in dignity, safety and with a better perspective on the economic situation, which would lead to a sustainable future.”
Such a plan would give protection to America’s pursuits — and shed light on that we care about what’s easiest for Israelis and Palestinians and our allies within the area, no longer what’s easiest for Bibi’s political long run — which a number of Israeli analysts instructed me could be to tug out the struggle, so he couldn’t be ousted through mass demonstrations — or to tug us into a warfare with Iran in hopes that will overshadow all his errors.
If a two-state plan have been embraced through Israel, even with reservations, it could improve for the sector that Israel sees its struggle in Gaza as one in every of vital self-defense and a prelude to lasting peace. And if such a plan have been embraced through the Palestinian Authority, even with reservations, that will improve that the authority intends to be the opposite to Hamas in shaping an impartial long run for Palestinians along Israel — and that it is going to no longer be a bystander to Hamas’s insanity or a sufferer of it.