On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas announced an agreement on a multi-phase ceasefire deal that, if fully implemented, would bring the war in Gaza to an end. Phase one of the deal, which is expected to go into effect in the coming days, would call for the release of some of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and for the pullback of some Israeli troops in Gaza. Palestinian prisoners held in Israel would also be released. At the same time, more humanitarian aid, which has been repeatedly held up by Israel, and is much needed, would be allowed into the territory. Subsequent phases would see the release of more prisoners and hostages, and the removal of all Israeli forces from Gaza. The Biden Administration worked with the incoming Trump Administration on the deal, which still has to be formally approved by the Israeli government; Donald Trump took credit on Wednesday for the agreement. (He had made clear that he wanted to see the hostages released before his Inauguration.)
I recently spoke by phone with Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department official who has been involved in peace negotiations in the Middle East for decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, decided to agree to a ceasefire now, what Trump’s relationship with Israel is likely to center on, and why the Biden Administration could not get a deal done for so long.
What is different now? Why is this ceasefire probably going to happen?
The hollowing out of Hezbollah, and Israel’s escalation and dominance in Gaza, in Lebanon, and even in Iran, has made it unmistakably clear to what remains of the Hamas leadership that their options have narrowed considerably and that they had nothing to show for fifteen months of war, other than death and destruction. This deal offered them an opportunity to basically reject Netanyahu’s notion that he would achieve “total victory.”
The second thing is the fact that Netanyahu’s recent military successes in Gaza and in Lebanon, and in strikes against Iran, have persuaded him that he could do a deal that, in his judgment, would not get beyond the first phase, and that he could assure [his right-wing coalition partners] Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir that he could eventually resume the war after the first phase of the deal.
Yes, a lot of Netanyahu’s allies have been saying in the media that this agreement may not get past the first phase. Can you talk about that, and what the phases are?
That’s been my assumption all along about these negotiations, ever since Biden articulated the three-phase framework. Phase one gives each side things without forcing them to give up, for political and security reasons, their basic cards. It is only the second phase that essentially rips off the cover. In that phase, Hamas is obligated to return all of the hostages. And Netanyahu is forced to concede that the war is over, and is tethered to a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas would never be prepared to give up the remaining hostages, including I.D.F. soldiers, the living and dead, unless Netanyahu agreed to end the war and withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza, which would hand Hamas a political victory.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, is simply not prepared to end the war, let alone withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza, under any circumstances. Even if you had a different Israeli Prime Minister, Israel would withdraw from Gaza only if it can be persuaded that there is a security force that is capable of stopping Hamas’s rearmament, and its resurgence.
But Netanyahu also doesn’t want another force there other than the Israeli military, right?
No, he doesn’t. He could be reluctantly persuaded if there were Arab boots on the ground. Even if that were the case, the Israeli withdrawal would be highly gradual and performance-based, depending on what they see is the function and efficacy of a security force. That’s why I never believed that this Israeli government would be able to endorse and facilitate moving from phase one to phase two. Look what’s happening in response just to phase one. You have Ben-Gvir and Smotrich both threatening to quit the government.
So you think we are going to get phase one, where some Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are released, and more aid flows to Gaza, and Trump and Biden can both claim victory. But you don’t see this as the beginning of the end of the conflict in some larger way?
It’s hard to see. Phase two means, essentially, what is the future of Gaza? Who’s going to govern? What are the security forces that are going to be required? What about reconstruction? There are a hundred studies that have been done by think tanks and governments—Europeans, Israelis, Americans—on post-conflict Gaza, but we are light-years away from the politics that are required to implement any rational plan to deal with these realities.
I interrupted you earlier before you were going to say your third reason why the deal is happening now.
The outgoing U.S. Administration has no leverage and the incoming Administration has a great deal. The reality is that Netanyahu believes it is harder to play with and say no to Donald Trump than it was to say no to, and manipulate, Joe Biden. And that unpredictability is critically important to Netanyahu’s decision-making on this issue. He wanted to give Trump a pre-inaugural win that would (a) remove Netanyahu as a problem for Trump in the first several weeks or months of his Administration, and (b) he wants currency with Trump in order to focus Trump on what Netanyahu’s real agenda is, which is getting the Americans to support or acquiesce to Israeli military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
In saying no to Biden, Netanyahu knew he would have the support of the entire Republican Party. Say no to Trump, and there’s no counter. Trump dominates the Republican Party, and there’s no escape valve. There’s no alternative constituency in America to which Netanyahu can appeal. Trump’s cornered the market.
I have read two distinct arguments about this, though. One is that Trump threatened Netanyahu and told him to end the war, and was able to do what Biden couldn’t. The second essentially says that Netanyahu is doing this in exchange for Trump giving him something that Biden wouldn’t, like annexation of the West Bank, or the strike on Iran you mentioned.
Trump is not that strategic. I think Trump basically has looked at Netanyahu, understands that he’s a political figure determined to stay in power, and understands that he is a problem for Trump. He was a problem for Trump in Trump’s first term, around when you had four or five Israeli elections. And Trump once quipped, “They keep having elections and nobody is elected.” He was a problem for Trump when Trump criticized him for running bad P.R. on Gaza, or for not finishing the job.
Maybe Trump’s true motivation, the one I think is strategic, is that when he looks at the entire Middle East, there’s only one area he really cares about, and that’s the Gulf. Because the Gulf is stable, the Gulf represents financial interests. The Gulf has hydrocarbons. The Gulf has emirs, crown princes, and kings who flatter him. And the Gulf represented his major foreign-policy success during his first term, which was the Abraham Accords.
To him, it’s transactional. They’re authoritarian figures like him. He can deal with them. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and he believes he can get one by brokering an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement. But even here it’s complicated, because Trump appointed Mike Huckabee, a pro-annexation evangelical, as Ambassador to Israel.
Right, a significant part of the idea behind the Saudi normalization deal was that it would happen with some sort of promise of a Palestinian state.
Exactly. And the more casualties and wreckage you had in Gaza, the greater the price that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, will likely demand from any Israeli government before he agrees to Israeli-Saudi normalization. It will not be done on the cheap.
I want to go back to Biden. For the past many months, the critique of him was essentially that the United States had leverage that it didn’t use—mainly, cutting off weapons sales. But I don’t perceive that Donald Trump is ever going to cut off weapon sales to Israel. I don’t perceive that Donald Trump is really going to do any of the policy things that people, especially critics of Biden, have advocated for. So what threat doesTrump actually represent? Bibi just doesn’t want to be yelled at on the phone by Trump, but he’s happy to be yelled at on the phone by Biden?
