The four-day cessation of hostilities in Gaza is about to end, amid signs that it may be extended. However, even if that happens, then what? The Israeli and American positions are heavy with confident affirmations of intent, but neither side appears to have a political endgame in mind that could end the carnage in Gaza.
That’s somewhat surprising since the Americans, from the start, were worried about whether the Israelis were clear about where their military operation in Gaza might lead. On his visit to Israel soon after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden told the Israelis that their decisions required “being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.” This was interpreted as a warning that unless Israel had an exit strategy, it could find itself caught in a quagmire, increasingly blamed for its mass killing of civilians, which could unleash dynamics leading to a regional conflict.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza did not ease American apprehensions, which found their way into several newspapers. For example, Israel’s Ha’aretz reported on November 6 that, “[s]enior Biden administration officials have expressed concern and frustration about Israel’s lack of an ‘exit strategy’ in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken posed questions on the subject to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the Israeli war cabinet over the weekend, and received the impression that the matter has barely come up for discussion so far …”
That may well have been true, but then we soon saw that the United States itself had no clear endgame either. Biden published an article in the Washington Post on November 18 that sought to define a political path forward for the administration. The impression was that the president was merely reheating unsuccessful ideas. Much of Biden’s focus was on Ukraine, a war that most people seem to have forgotten, but on the Palestinian question, the president resorted to an old stalwart. For him, a “two-state solution—two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity—is where the road to peace must lead. Reaching it will take commitments from Israelis and Palestinians, as well as from the United States and our allies and partners. That work must start now.”
Few surprises there, though Biden failed to explain how, given the ominous mood in Israel today, with a range of politicians openly peddling projects to transfer the Palestinian population to other Arab countries, there could be any momentum for a two-state solution. In fact, Biden repeated the mantra that there was a need to defeat Hamas, even as he wrote that “[t]here must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.”
What the Israelis will have retained from Biden’s article is only one clause, namely implementing a “future free from Hamas.” Netanyahu and his far-right allies (and perhaps most other leading Israeli politicians) appear to be largely uninterested in a two-state solution. Having not done so previously, the Americans are unlikely to exploit the idea recently revived by the Arab and Islamic states for “adherence to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative,” which offers Israel peace agreements by all Arab states in exchange for Israeli withdrawals from the lands occupied in June 1967, a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194, and acceptance of a sovereign independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Nor will the Biden administration ever test Hamas’s intentions, though Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas Political Bureau, recently declared, “We are ready for political negotiations for a two-state solution with Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.”
In other words, while the U.S. president may have an idea of what he wants to work toward, he has no real sense of how to achieve this. In focusing on crushing Hamas, he has fallen back on the Israeli interpretation of the conflict—the very interpretation that Biden, on his visit to Israel in October, had feared lacked clarity when it came to Israel’s achieving its objectives. Nor has Biden taken into consideration that no one trusts the Americans on their commitments anymore. If Biden loses the election in one year’s time, everything he says today is likely to be quickly reversed by his Republican opponent, especially if it’s Donald Trump.
Similarly, no one knows quite what to do with Gaza. All options pose problems. The Palestinian Authority is not keen to take the territory in hand, let alone the Egyptians or the United Nations. The Israelis may want to maintain troops there, but it’s unclear what timeframe would be acceptable to the Americans. Even if the Biden administration and the Israeli government agree that Hamas should be eliminated, they don’t seem to be factoring in problems that might derail this.
The first is that the longer the Gaza war continues, the greater the probability that it will spread to other parts of the region, above all Lebanon. The Americans have made it amply clear they do not favor such a thing, and have sent envoys to the region to say so. But how does this square with Biden’s statements that Hamas must be eliminated? It’s clear by now that this outcome would constitute a setback for Iran, therefore that the Iranians and their allies might escalate the conflict to prevent it from happening. That’s why Biden may soon have to choose between halting the Israeli military operation or allowing it to continue and perhaps propelling Washington into a regional conflict it desperately wants to avoid.
A second possible problem is the cost of Israel’s campaign. Some estimates put the figure at $50 billion if the conflict lasts between eight and twelve months. Israel’s Finance Ministry has estimated the war at $270 million per day, meaning it may have cost the country between $12–13 billion until now. While the United States may cover a portion of the sum, given the mood in the U.S. Congress opposed to spending money on foreign wars, it is safer not to overemphasize this. Israel’s Finance Ministry estimates that economic growth for 2023 may reach 2 percent, down from an initial estimate of 3.4 percent. While this won’t be a major consideration in decisionmaking in the short term, it raises the question of whether Israel can afford an extended Gaza operation, one without a clear resolution point.
A third problem is the human cost of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The Biden administration has bought the Israeli government time, but this is reaching its limits, not least in light of the current truce. For everything to resume again, as Israel concentrates on attacking southern Gaza, where over 1 million Palestinians have sought shelter, will certainly provoke increasing public anger, which means greater public pressure on the White House. Already, the administration’s hypocrisy, with the president and secretary of state expressing compassion for Palestinian children, only to follow up such remarks with affirmations that the war must continue so that Hamas is defeated, has outraged many people.
We are already past the limit of what is tolerable in Gaza. That Hamas will draw out the process of exchanging Israelis under its control for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel will further slow the momentum of Israel’s ground operation. However, unless the Americans define a realistic political path out of the war in Gaza, things may drag on indefinitely as Israel seeks to determine what constitutes an unambiguous victory. Violence without a political purpose is usually very bloody, while the Americans are aware of one thing, namely that their implicit “deterrence dialogue” with Iran is what has averted a much wider conflagration. Would Biden be willing to greenlight more Israeli brutality if it means undermining this dialogue?
