The willingness of Netanyahu to deal at the last moment under pressure from Trump – defying far-right members of his coalition including Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – has not been lost on Israeli commentators.
“I ask myself where did all the obstacles go?” wrote Ben Caspit in the Hebrew daily Ma’ariv. “All the conditions? All the ridiculous spins that were thrown out by the leader and were echoed by his mouthpieces?
“And what about the Philadelphi corridor [on the border with Egypt]? All of the obstacles that emerged at decisive moments in the negotiations, all of the statements that were issued, including several that were issued during the Sabbath, about how Israel would never leave, never stop, never surrender and never give in?”
This was posted yesterday, and since that time, Israel has already killed dozens more people including a bunch of little kids, and Netanyahu has said he won’t put the cease-fire up for a cabinet vote until Hamas stops sabotaging it in ways he is leaving unspecified.
The people who are taking seriously this idea that Trump might have been the guy who finally grasped how best to make progress on the Israel and Palestine problem, need to take a long, hard look at themselves and how they form their judgements, and why they are willing to believe hilarious fantasies as long as it’ll serve a narrative they like. And maybe stop doing that.
Since you’re obliquely inferring it, I don’t support Trump and neither does the Guardian. In Britain, “Guardian reader” is used to imply a stereotype of a person with modern progressive, left-wing or “politically correct” views.
I don’t expect journalists to report a version of reality that I like; that’s how I stay grounded and avoid getting trapped in a bubble where only some vast improbable conspiracy can explain why my assumptions about the world are constantly contradicted by reality.
Do you ever get tired of being profoundly wrong?
My assumption about the world is that Israel will resume killing Gazans en masse within 3-6 months, and potentially much sooner than that, and will not stop completely for quite some time. We’ll see whether that prediction is profoundly wrong. Actually, I think it is better than even odds that the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian entity will no longer exist by the end of Trump’s term.
I’ll be absolutely glad to be wrong if that turns out not to be that case, of course. It’s hard to predict the future. I still don’t plan to give Trump credit for achieving this cease-fire, because he is incredibly cruel, racist against Arabs, and also so mentally incapable of successful diplomacy or geopolitics that it seems silly to talk about. It’s truly bizarre that The Guardian is attempting to credit him for this, saying things like that nonsense about “dictation pace,” irrespective of the progress on the cease-fire.
I definitely think that it’s possible that Netanyahu wanted to stall the cease-fire until the lack of one had hurt the Democrats in the election, because Trump will be a much more friendly partner to him even than Biden was, and Biden was a war criminal for his partnership with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is not a moron, and he sure does like killing Palestinians, and I see no reason to think Trump has any desire to stand in his way.
I’m aware that The Guardian is traditionally left-leaning and reliable. They seem to be 99% sensible stories and then 1% total weird bullshit like this. For some reason, the topic of the weird bullshit is almost always Trump- or Russia-related. I don’t have any particular vast improbable conspiracy to explain why that is, I have simply noticed the pattern and been alarmed by it.
I don’t think that believing Trump is a moron, and reacting with alarm and disbelief to a story that paints him as a skilled and fast-talking diplomat, means I am trapped in a bubble. I think that it means that I am, as you say, grounded in reality.
Update: They started killing in the West Bank, too. Airstrikes with drones and helicopters on a refugee camp, and then a ground operation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg750yzdr8o
Like I say, it’s hard to predict the future, but if I had to guess at the specifics, I would say anywhere from two weeks to two months of no humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza, meaning people are still dying horribly at a pretty rapid pace, and then some pretext to resume the full military operation there. We’ll see whether I am profoundly wrong about that, I easily could be. My only pretty confident prediction is that the dying in Gaza will continue this year.
I didn’t have operations in the West Bank on the bingo card quite this soon, and I won’t make any specific predictions about what will happen there, but it’s not surprising to me that they’re being pretty overt about their rejection of peace. Like I said, any qualified observer could have seen it coming after watching the past year. In any context that didn’t give an opportunity to shit on Biden, I suspect that you’d be able to see it, too, and we wouldn’t be having any kind of disagreement about this.
Edit: Further update: Trump lifted the pause on 2,000 pound bombs.
Not that Biden had enacted any particularly effective level of stoppage of weapons shipments. But, Trump is on his first day going out of his way to undo even the pretty pitiful limits Biden had put on it. It’s a key priority for him. For contrast, here’s what Biden did on day one:
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2021/interactive_biden-first-day-executive-orders/
Update: Israel has also, according to sources on the ground, violated the ceasefire in Gaza multiple times since Sunday, including when a sniper shot a child.
Edit: If you’d like me to stop, let me know and I will. I thought we could just send each other updates, though, and keep each other informed how things are going.
My reply is to your first paragraph, where you imply the journalists were irresponsible for reporting an imminent ceasefire due to demands from Trump. Despite your expectations, the ceasefire appears to be going forward. You can quibble with the tone or narrative, but this was good journalism from a respected source. Your outrage is misdirected.
Your second paragraph is entirely in bad faith, as are your replies to me. There is no credible reading of the article that implies Trump is a seasoned statesman who will solve the Israel Palestine conflict. Netanyahu has given indirect support to Hamas as a wedge against Fatah before Oct 7th. The redirection of the conflict into the Fatah-controlled West Bank is consistent with his history of rewarding the most violent actors on both the Israel and Palestinian side. Agreement from Hamas to not substantially interfere in these West Bank incursions to the US and Israel may have been the secret sauce that led Netanyahu to accept the terms.
You are now shifting the goalposts to Trump solving the conflict entirely. No one thinks that will happen. I’m not impressed.
My reply is to your first paragraph, where you imply the journalists were irresponsible for reporting an imminent ceasefire due to demands from Trump.
Reporting the ceasefire was fine. I posted a story from the AP a few days ago, where they reported on the first few hostages freed. It’s news. My quibble was entirely with the tone of the reporting, giving credit for it to Trump and painting Trump in terms like “speaks at dictation pace” and “suddenly came to recognise precisely where it is that they stand with the new American president.”
Despite your expectations, the ceasefire appears to be going forward.
I always admitted the possibility of a short performative ceasefire. I was a little bit surprised that one happened on paper, but I am not at all surprised that the Israeli military is continuing to kill Palestinians at a steady pace in both Gaza and the West Bank during the supposed cease-fire. I think it’s likely that they’ll keep killing a steady scattering of people from time to time, until someone shoots back at them, and then they’ll declare the ceasefire cancelled and resume their full-scale attacks, saying that Hamas broke the cease-fire. It’s now looking to me like the “couple of weeks” estimate I gave earlier is more likely than the ones that were at the higher end. It’s also possible that they will simply continue to refuse to allow any food to enter Gaza, and let things work themselves out on their own.
They also, by the way, just invaded several more towns in the West Bank.
Here is some analysis of the ceasefire situation that I generally would agree with:
https://aje.io/ibkb8d?update=3459663
Of course, no one has to have exactly that same take on it in order to be legitimate news. I’m saying that this treatment of Trump goes so far into fantasy-land, and implies such outlandishly false conclusions, that it’s journalistic malpractice, not just some opinions I disagree with.
There is no credible reading of the article that implies Trump is a seasoned statesman who will solve the Israel Palestine conflict.
You are now shifting the goalposts to Trump solving the conflict entirely. No one thinks that will happen.
When did I do that? I said it was absurd to say that he would “make progress” on the conflict as a whole. I also think it’s absurd to say that he will bring an end to this particular war as a whole, yes.
The article says: “In what some Israeli media described as a ‘tense meeting’, Witkoff delivered his message. The president-elect was emphatic that he wanted a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. Trump wanted the war in Gaza finished. He had other fish to fry” and then listed the Israelis as realizing that he would be so stern in his demands that they “would never be able to outflank him.”
You are right in one sense. That, what I just quoted, is so incredible that no one should take it seriously. It is what they said though. Trump will not bring a “finish” to this war, and definitely not to the Israel Palestine conflict in general, except through the route of extermination and annexation. There is no sense in which he is demanding peace and the Israelis are suddenly sitting up and forced to confront the new reality that they can’t get away with stuff under Trump. They are planning to “outflank” him by continuing to kill Palestinians, including at a resumed rapid pace after the end of the cease fire, with no real objection from him. That’s so obvious that I am confident making it as a future prediction.
Basically without those two paragraphs I quoted just now, it’s a perfectly sensible article that I would have no issue with. Although, I would think that adding in the context about how fragile the cease-fire is likely to be, and the issues that could derail it, would be a useful bit of journalism.
