Netanyahu’s unmistakable priority is his election back home—just three months away and trailing in the polls. To the Israeli public, the visit was intended to signal that, in spite of recent tensions, Bibi is still “the guy”- uniquely experienced and positioned to manage the relationship and to deliver the U.S. for Israel (the Netanyahu-Trump meeting was the focus of an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition here).

Ideally, Netanyahu would get the kind of electoral hug and endorsement that Trump has offered elsewhere. As a fallback, dispelling any possible Trump flirtation with Netanyahu’s prime competitors (Eisenkot and Bennett—some of the Israel Lobby will see those alternatives as useful for resuscitating Israel’s image without meaningful changes in policy).

2. Pulling that off is more tricky for Netanyahu, given the unprecedented shifts taking place in U.S. politics and public opinion vis-à-vis Israel. Israel First versus America First is a source of internecine MAGA warfare, while Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians and constant regional warmongering are deeply unpopular among Democrat voters.

The widely held (and very justified) suspicions that this failed U.S. war against Iran would not have happened without Israel’s urging, added a layer of risk and trepidation to this Netanyahu meeting with the President. Trump signalled in advance that Netanyahu should not make current and future developments in the war look like they were serving an Israel First agenda.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu would still be confident, and have precedent on his side, in assuming that even if Trump is aware of the playbook and sees it coming, Netanyahu is a deft hand at massaging the relationship and still maintains a formidable lobby in Washington (including within the administration) of insiders and influencers.

Netanyahu can also offer Trump something more unorthodox—that presidential life would be so much more boring sans Netanyahu. Together, they had achieved what Trump always likes to refer to as historic breakthroughs—from the Abraham Accords in the first term to two wars against Iran (so far), claims of making peace in the Middle East after 3,000 years, the Gaza so-called ceasefire and release of hostages, creating a Board of Peace etc. In reality, most of that list amounts BS, for Trump those things feature prominently in any “Best Of” presidential reel.

3. The real test rests on practical deliverables that Netanyahu can take home, foremost amongst those, what next in the war against Iran?

Having succeeded in pulling America into a major war with Iran after decades of trying, Netanyahu is in no mood to stand down. In a bleak domestic electoral landscape for the Israeli premier, a main hope remains that, contrary to the evidence of the last months, this time a massive American military assault delivers for Bibi the lottery ticket of Iranian state and/or regime collapse.

There are three basic scenarios: (i) the war ends either by way of an agreement or America walks away claiming victory (whatever the actual circumstances); (ii) an ongoing war of attrition, with ups and downs in intensity, but no exit; and (iii) a massive escalation intended to deliver a decisive outcome—from a US/ Israeli perspective an Iranian collapse or capitulation—but more realistically the escalation leads back to the first two scenarios.

Israel’s goal is to prevent an end of war and either jump straight to escalation or to nurture attrition as an eventual on-ramp to the Big Bang.

i. Israel was instrumental, though not alone, in successfully working to collapse June’s Islamabad MOU. That deal, reflecting the balance of power and the gaps between the anticipated outcomes of Israeli-US war plans and the reality, faced stiff opposition inside the administration and from Israel. The deal itself reflected what has become the standard modus operandi of Trump’s negotiations—deliver a text that is sufficiently inchoate and undetailed as to quite easily unravel.

The U.S. led in collapsing the MOU with its insistence on delineating a Hormuz passageway, abrogating Article Five of the memo. Simultaneously, Israel contributed to convincing Iran that the deal was not serious, successfully upending the Lebanon clause in the agreement by reaching a separate, American-brokered deal whereby the government of Lebanon handed its sovereignty over to Israel, endorsing the ongoing occupation of its own territory. Iran offered its own contributions to resumed hostilities (this was one of the items we talked about on Afshin Rattansi’s Going Underground)

Israel will be working to ensure—even though Trump is frustrated with the war, stuck and eager to find a way out—that any further negotiated deal will remain sufficiently fragile as to be collapsible. Given the dynamics that have emerged during this war, any exit strategy for the U.S. will involve the kind of climb down that no leader, least of all Trump, enjoys (even if Trump has a unique ability to make and endlessly repat claims entirely and demonstrably divorced from reality).

Netanyahu arrived in Washington during a brief pause in hostilities following two weeks of escalation, and while new bridging proposals for a ceasefire were under discussion. That pause has sufficiently frayed as to have possibly been eclipsed for now.

ii. While Netanyahu’s preference is for a massive escalation, if he considers that unattainable in the short term, his efforts will be to nurture the current U.S. predisposition as a parking space (the assumption that it can win in an ongoing war of attrition).

That scenario has the added benefit of Israel militarily sitting on the sidelines in this current phase. That spares Israel the cost of munitions depletion, especially interceptor stockpiles, and of absorbing incoming Iranian strikes, allowing Israel to focus on its multiple other fronts of military aggression (Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and Syria for now).

On the U.S. side, this creates some space to distance unpopular perceptions of this being a war driven by Israel (although the argument may strike many as not being particularly credible). One caveat is that Iran may not indefinitely indulge Israel’s preference of cheerleading from the side. Israel will attempt to nurture the working assumption behind the attrition idea—namely that Iran is suffering more, that its position is economically unsustainable, and the regime is running out of steam as long as the U.S. maintains its blockade, including naval deployment, that America has the staying power and Iran will cave first. Israel will particularly encourage harsher economic measures and will continually seek to provoke Iran.

A second caveat is that the initial fifteen-plus weeks of this war did not play out that way. Despite forty days of bombing and repeated spurious American claims of victory, America was continuously looking for a way out. Trump moved to a de facto ceasefire for eighty days and then agreed to the short-lived Islamabad MOU.

In absolute terms, there is no doubt that Iran is absorbing more painful hits, including to its economy. But once the American and Iranian respective thresholds of pain and resilience capacity are factored in, the equation according to which this war is being run offers a different outcome—that the U.S. side is more inclined to reach first for the de-escalatory ladder.

Iran shows signs of being able to absorb the pain. While it is being bombed (and still being threatened with civilizational and infrastructure erasure), it is easier to hold a more unified public front (one that might come under more strain after the war is over). Meanwhile for the U.S., rising energy costs will carry a knock-on political pain factor (Trump’s apparent indifference towards the midterms is not shared by the GOP ecosystem), the stock market is wobbly, and there is repeated evidence of U.S. military defence stockpiles under strain, and of public opposition to the costs of this war.

iii. Israel’s gambit is that Trump remains sufficiently unpredictable, unstrategic and disconnected from reality that he can be persuaded to pursue the kind of escalatory intensity which has thus far been rejected. Even if there is an apparent awareness inside the administration that this war has gone badly and could get worse, both in terms its domestic and international consequences, the thin-skinned presidential susceptibility to criticism over a weak deal and impatience means the ball of a Big Bang escalation, even including partial ground operations, remains in play.

Netanyahu will likely have gone into his July 28^th meeting assuming that even if Trump is not immediately amenable to an Israeli desired level of escalation, that the foundations could be built and the seeds planted for a Trump embrace of “the big one” when frustration next hits a peak. Netanyahu will be carefully calibrating how far to push and when, while consistently creating the conditions and building the case for the next phase. Netanyahu’s political antennae are probably telling him to pursue public messaging which downplays Israel leading on escalation right now—that accords with some of the Israeli briefings coming out of this visit.

That could be in ten, thirty or fifty days from now (Netanyahu still has ninety days until he faces Israeli voters). Israel will keep drip feeding its case for escalation, deploying intel (whether real or cooked), creating provocations where possible on the ground, and hoping that at some point Trump turns around and says, “hey, let’s look again at that plan Bibi shared at Lindsey’s funeral”. None of which should imply that there is actually a plan up Netanyahu’s sleeve that is game-changing and that America could successfully sustain at an acceptable cost.

4. Israel’s pilot zones in Lebanon and Gaza

A PR narrative was doing the rounds in advance of Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington—namely that the Israeli premier was bringing to Washington meaningful steps towards progress in advancing American so-called peace proposals in both Lebanon and Gaza.

On the eve of the visit, the Israeli cabinet approved a pilot program regarding Gaza and the Board of Peace, while implementing three pilot zones in Southern Lebanon. But once those are interrogated at a granular level, they rather serve to underline the extent to which centres of American power remain committed to carrying water for Israel. Under scrutiny, it is very clear that these gestures are so minuscule as to be considered an insult in any other setting.

In Gaza, the sliver of territory in question is in part of the additional areas seized by Israel since the so-called ceasefire (beyond the so-called yellow line outline in the twenty-point plan). The prospective international force (ISF), if it ever enters, is envisaged to number in the low tens of personnel, with no mandate to protect Palestinians, rather it forms part of a revamped modality for Israeli control.

In Lebanon, the pilot zones were not part of Israel’s self-declared security buffer zone, in other words, its occupation. Israel is not allowing for the return of civilians, and the pilot program is part of an arrangement which legitimizes Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty and ongoing control until Israel decides otherwise.

Anyone claiming that the U.S. is pressuring Israel to make serious moves towards de-occupation in Lebanon or Gaza (or Syria or the West Bank, for that matter), apparently struggles to understand the meaning of the word “pressure”.

5. Lebanon, Palestine, and the regional front

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s head of national public diplomacy and part of the delegation in Washington, told reporters following the Trump-Netanyahu meeting that “there is no pressure on Israel to withdraw from the important achievements it made in Lebanon or Gaza”. Hard-right Israeli media commentator Amit Segal repeated the claim, attributing to an anonymous Israeli official, that “Trump did not demand an Israeli withdrawal from any front during the meeting”. While I would not ordinarily consider these sources to be particularly reliable, there seems little reason to question their claims on this occasion—those positions have not been contradicted or challenged by American officials.

i. Lebanon

Israel continues to not only militarily occupy a zone ten kilometres deep into Lebanese territory, it is also carrying out ongoing destruction and levelling of entire neighbourhoods and preventing the return of displaced civilians. Israeli Defence Minister Katzhas proudly asserted that “Southern Lebanon would become Gaza…we would destroy everything there…the infrastructure has been destroyed…homes in 24 villages along the border—villages that had existed for hundreds of years…have been demolished. The army systematically flattened the villages with bulldozers and explosives.”

There was a very telling sidebar during the Lindsey Graham commemorative events in Washington this week—a dinner in his memory hosted by Lebanese businessman and pro-Israel agitator Antoun Sehnaoui and his partner Morgan Ortagus, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife and ambassador in attendance, alongside Stephen Miller and various senators.

Sehnaoui comes from the family that financed Israeli-aligned Christian militias who conducted the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians in 1982. Sehnaoui has courted a profile of working with Israel, and is considered to lead a lobby in Washington which significantly influenced President Joseph Aoun’s move to agree to the Trilateral Framework surrender document of June 26^th (I discussed that agreement and its role in the Greater Israel regional picture here on BreakThrough News). In part, this is designed to ensure the undermining of any sustainable quiet on the Iran front.

While the Lebanese government is trying to claim a win with the implementation of the three pilot zones, Israel is making clear that these are not only insignificant, but will not be repeated, and the occupation is going nowhere. Israel’s supposed Lebanese “partner” should prepare for further humiliation.

Michael Young, a senior Lebanese commentator at Carnegie Beirut, was right to point out that the pilot zones could have been a good idea if the withdrawals were significant and were a prelude to and part of a clear commitment to a full withdrawal, as well as being an on-ramp to the quick return of displaced inhabitants—which is precisely the opposite of Israel’s intentions.

Israel’s approach in Lebanon is that the only alternative to direct Israeli control is internal Lebanese clashes, trying to turn the LAF into a de facto proxy. It fits with a bigger picture approach—mirroring what Israel is attempting in Gaza by arming clan militias, in Syria with Druze forces, and its attempt to back an armed Kurdish incursion in Iran.

ii. Palestine

Signs are intensifying that Israel’s pre-election approach on the Palestinian front will be to intensify and maximise creating more facts on the ground in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, to intensify displacement, and test how far elements of a new regime of control can be embedded in Gaza. The Board of Peace is working exactly as intended in Gaza, enabling Israel to maintain the occupation with greater international complicity, Israel expanding its backing to militia forces designed to engender civil war, and with some profiteering on the side for Americans and others.

The plans of High Representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov including the intentionally unreasonable demands surrounding demilitarization, are serving to achieve that end (partially now being advanced via the prospective Board of Peace mini-pilot zone). Reports of imminent breakthroughs on the Gaza governance and arms decommissioning front are more spin than substance. Meanwhile the killing of Palestinians continues on a daily basis, with the count now at more than 1,200 fatalities since the declaration of the so-called ceasefire.

In the West Bank, the Israeli state is advancing additional land confiscations, designations of new settlements and legalization (in Israeli terms) of so-called outposts and farmsteads as well as settlement budget appropriations, in part for more apartheid infrastructure. The tag team coordination between state and settler militias has assumed new levels of sophistication, whereby occasional settler provocations are designed to generate a Palestinian counter-response, in turn providing the backdrop for the IDF to finish the settlers’ work.

After one recent altercation, Defence Minister Katz committed to expand offensive activity in the West Bank and to take over another refugee camp in accordance with the model applied in Jenin, Tulkaram and Nur al-Shams. That was described as including the evacuation of residents and the maintenance of a permanent IDF presence. In parallel, Israel is intensifying its provocations and seeking to create a new status quo at Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.

When one adds the financial crisis being imposed by Israel on the PA, then it is clear that some in the government are seeking to collapse that PA structure and perhaps to generate a massive clash and subsequent IDF operation in the West Bank before elections. Other parts of the Israeli state apparatus prefer to maintain the useful security collaboration of the PA security forces.

iii. Regional front

Finally, it is worth noting that the theatre of confrontation may yet expand further, notably in the context of a re-escalation in the US-Iran war.

As tensions rise with Yemen and Saudi, the Ansar Allah Houthi movement and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, direct clashes could yet resume with Israel. Iraq is becoming a more active front—Israel has taken action there in the past and continues its occupation zone and periodic strikes in Syria. The targeting of a U.S. gas port installation at Damietta on the Mediterranean coast may just be a one-off, though it could presage unpredictable developments on the Egypt front.

And as American forces have increasingly re-located from the Gulf to Jordan, the Hashemite Kingdom has been absorbing more intense Iranian strikes, with hints that domestic discontent is growing (or is at least being given permission to vocalise) at the predicament Jordan is in, especially as Israel doubles down against Palestinians in the West Bank.

And a final coda on Saudi/Israel. Against the backdrop of all the supposed U.S. frustration with Israel, when President Trump signed a U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with Saudi, he then conditioned its implementation on Saudi normalization with Israel (Biden tried to pull off a similar stunt).

It is worth letting that sink in—if the deal served American national security or economic interests, then why make it dependent on benefits for Israel? Echoes again of Israel First versus America First (the tensions surrounding that Saudi deal were one of the main subjects of this interview with Democracy Now). And from a Saudi perspective, it was surely a reminder that the U.S. remains wedded to a regional approach which front-loads doing Israel’s biddings above all else. In other words, another gentle nudge toward encouraging hedging and diversification of options.

By most metrics, comparing this two-and-a-bit page MoU to the 159-page (including annexes) JCPOA agreement of 2015 is meaningless. There are strong tactical reasons for bigging up the deal as being good for the U.S.—most importantly, it is the best alternative after the U.S. and Israel initiated military action 110 days ago.

Four war goals were, at various points, declared by Israel’s leadership and, mostly endorsed by the U.S. President or those around him: (i) more definitive closure against any Iranian nuclear weapons program than was achieved in the 2015 JCPOA; (ii) a final end to any Iranian missile threat; (iii) no more Iranian support to its so-called regional “proxies”; and finally, (iv) regime change/collapse.

Recently, President Trump seemed to add an additional condition—the expansion of the Abraham Accords normalization of regional states with Israel to add Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, Kuwait (Trump also referenced countries already in formal diplomatic relations with Israel).

In simple terms, none of these goals have been achieved and the 14-point MoU addresses some of these in a realistic rather than delusionally maximalist way. Only the two issues created by the war itself are resolved by the MoU going into effect—namely ending the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Little surprise then that the deal is being pilloried across the Israeli political spectrum and commentariat as a resounding failure and fiasco.

It has been clear for some time that Trump was looking for a way out of the mess that Netanyahu initiated by banking on the president’s poor judgment and on a hollowed-out U.S. governmental decision-making system. Following 39 days of active American-Israeli warfare, and bombastic claims of overwhelming victory, it became sufficiently clear that the war plans had tanked, and that the U.S. was heading for strategic defeat. A largely functioning, albeit inchoate, ceasefire was pursued. That continued for 71 days as realism slowly coursed its way through the veins of U.S. decision-making until the MoU was electronically signed on June 18^th.

The next phase, 60 days (or more) of negotiations will be buffeted by uncertainty—Trump will no doubt embellish his attempt at a victory narrative, some of which Netanyahu will be forced to swing behind, but the Israel premier no doubt has schemes up his sleeve.

The decades old Israeli assumption, now in tatters, was that if you pull the U.S. into a war then defeat, capitulation or collapse of Iran would be inevitable. Israel and the U.S., in their hubris, never considered that Iran would be capable of offering yet another example of a lesson the West stubbornly refuses to learn—the possibility of being undone by the advantages of an asymmetric strategy predicated on outwitting an arrogant adversary, strategic anticipation, and thorough preparation.

That is not to make light of the impact on Iran. Even given its experience of sanctions and running a resilient economy, Iran will have to recover from skyrocketing inflation, with several food staples doubling or tripling in price since the start of the war; economic contraction of a predicted further 6% of GDP for the coming year, and the massive loss of jobs that comes with that; and the destruction of critical energy and other infrastructure. It also lost a significant cohort of its leadership.

The U.S. is naturally better positioned to absorb economic costs of war, although those are not trifling either, with Moody’s predicting a war cost to America of $132 billion. A more telling impact may be the very significant depletion in stocks of key weaponry, and of exposing so much of its current war-making modalities and tech, as well as the U.S. inability to impose its will on a country bearing the burden of decades of U.S. sanctions, and demonstrable American indifference to the interests of its supposed close allies in the region and beyond. The reputational hit will have a long tail indeed.

Perhaps the largest question looming is whether the U.S. will now make a definitive break with decades of economic and threatened military pressure, and a regime change orientation, towards Iran. Trump is acknowledging that the U.S. has exaggerated in its weaponisation of the Treasury department in how it can take the financial assets of other countries and that Iran will not unilaterally divest itself of the ability to be secure (the U.S. apparently dropping its missile demands vis-à-vis Iran). But it is unclear whether the U.S. system can internalise the implications of these realisations, nor should one prematurely write off Israeli influence. A resumption of war cannot be discounted and Trump continues to issue threats.

In the meantime, the U.S. may simply focus on bullying Iran where that is most easily accomplished, taking out its war failure by embittering the World Cup experience and preparations of Iran’s football team.

The Israel-U.S. rupture

President Trump has over the last days unloaded at the Israeli Prime Minister in what are probably unprecedented ways—then again, there is little about the Trump second administration that is not unprecedented. Part of this should be understood as standard Trumpian MO of diverting attention from his own failures and evading responsibility. After all, no other president fell for Israel’s multi-decade effort of best-case-scenarioing what a U.S. strike on Iran could achieve. Trump, no less than Netanyahu, owns this.

While Trump is not directly blaming Netanyahu for the failures of the war (he can neither admit to having been duped nor having failed) he is sending the signal over who is to blame. And he is (correctly) relying on the outrage in the pro-Israel echo chamber to do the rest of the work in drilling home that message—inadvertently proving that Israel/the lobby are to blame.

That echo chamber is in uncharted waters when it comes to the extent of the meltdown, the flailing, and the self-harm that they continue to indulge in. Having aligned overwhelmingly with the Israel First wing of MAGA, Trump has pulled the pendulum significantly in the opposite direction—now currying favour with the America First faction.

For starters, Trump pushed Netanyahu to desist from bombing Beirut on June 1st. More significantly, the administration apparently and belatedly realised that making Israel part of the negotiations guarantees no deal. The prospect has tantalisingly come into view of a U.S.-Iran deal that might reflect American interests rather than those of Israel’s leadership.

It should not go unnoticed that Netanyahu secured seven in-person meetings with Trump in the first 13 months of this second term. Subsequently, in the four months of fighting a war together, there have been plenty of phone calls but zero face-to-face encounters.

No doubt, Trump has been distancing himself. The praise he heaped on other regional leaders rubbed salt in that wound. Iran can notch up another success in having pursued a wartime strategy that intensified and deepened this U.S.-Israel fissure. It played into an already existing and quite dramatic shift in U.S. public opinion vis-à-vis Israel that is now traversing party lines and is most pronounced in younger generations. Given the degree of Israeli dependence on the U.S., this could prove to be the most consequential fallout from this made-in-Israel war.

Can Israel contain the rupture?

Donald J. Trump is not the first American President to let it be known that he is frustrated with an Israeli premier and to use expletives in so doing. The style may be unique, but the substance may end up being standard fare. In other words, Israel is called to heel briefly, but the U.S. soon returns to form in doing its bidding and giving it a free hand.

Make no mistake, Israel, its echo chamber and lobby are not about to roll over—they know how to bounce back and play the long game, and the tools at their disposal remain formidable. It can be simultaneously true that the U.S. both forces this deal on Israel and pivots to demonstrating that the bond is still strong and acts as if the U.S. ‘owes’ Israel.

The Israel lobby’s deployment of its congressional network, supportive media (now strengthened by the ultra-Zionist Ellison family purchase of Warner Bros. and Paramount Global) and the ability to deploy staggering sums in campaign finance (especially after the Citizens United ruling) in an election year is still not something to be sniffed at.

While the U.S. does have the leverage to impose outcomes on Israel, the question has always been whether it is ready to deploy that leverage and in a sustained fashion. Even in the current dynamic, will the U.S. enforce on Israel the clause it has signed in the MoU in respect to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon, or will it allow Israel to continue to occupy part of that country?

While the reference to Syria managing affairs in Lebanon could be read as a rebuke to Netanyahu, at the same time it demonstrates how divorced from regional realities the U.S. administration still is.

Israel will use the 60 days (and possibly longer) to reintroduce its positions into the negotiation equation and, from its perspective, for hostilities to be resumed. It will try to create a situation where the U.S. remains maximally deployed in the region and does not draw down its previous basing arrangements. Netanyahu will emphasise that Trump now needs to do something for him, for Israel—whether in reintroducing Abraham Accords expansion into the mix, or on the Lebanon front, or giving Israel an even freer hand in Gaza and the West Bank, or perhaps for Trump to personally embrace Netanyahu in his re-election campaign. None of that should be ruled out.

To put things in perspective, President Obama was reviled and relentlessly attacked by the pro-Israel lobby. In March 2015, Netanyahu even went as far as addressing a joint session of Congress to argue against the President’s Iran JCPOA deal. And yet, the Obama administration, just a year later, signed a 10-year memorandum of military support worth $38 billion in total—the largest aid package in U.S. history.

But this could also mark a qualitatively different phase in relations, especially given the U.S. domestic political dynamics and perhaps more importantly what the world has already witnessed in the U.S.-Israeli failures in this war. The dressing down that Israel has received from the President and Vice President will resonate far beyond the immediate news cycle.

Israel’s next moves

Israel’s leadership has not yet found its groove following confirmation of the MoU and its contents. Political and media commentary is awash with shock and disappointment, anointing the entire war a fiasco, with frequent denouncements of the American President. Netanyahu himself offered a victory narrative version 1.0 centred around this war having saved Israel from annihilation. He will have to balance out an endorsement of Trump’s victory claims while seeking to simultaneously distance himself and set out Israel’s terms.

The atmosphere is all the more febrile given that elections are just a few short months away—due to be held in September or October. Netanyahu trails in the polls and is doubling down on presenting himself as the necessary and experienced leader for what he continues to define as a permanent wartime struggle for Israel’s very survival. There is something jarring, even in an electoral campaign, for a leader to tell his people that they were inches away from mass death and total destruction when that leader has been at the helm for more than 16 of the last 18 years (the claim—which attempts to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat—is also patently untrue in exaggerating the threat Iran or any other actor posed to Israel).

But Netanyahu is accurately reflecting and endlessly feeding the contemporary Israeli psychological disposition of constant trauma (often manufactured, sometimes real as on October 7^th). In other words, the pressure to reject diplomacy and intensify military activity comes not just from Netanyahu—but also from most of the Zionist parties due to challenge him in the forthcoming election, the so-called “opposition”.

As Noa Landau notes in Haaretz, the Israeli opposition is “outflanking him [Bibi] from the right …Their central argument doesn’t confront military objectives and their limitations…The Israeli opposition doesn’t want to encourage this realistic discussion; it prefers to peddle the idea that it has a better magic solution.” Netanyahu’s main opponent, Naftali Bennett, claims he is the one who will deliver regime change in Iran while also threatening that Türkiye will be next in Israel’s crosshairs after Iran.

But the immediate challenge facing Netanyahu is how he can transition from the meltdown vis-a-vis the U.S. to getting his hands back on the steering wheel driving U.S. policy. The first test case is, of course, Lebanon, where Israel sought to intensify its attacks following the signing of the U.S.-Iran MoU, and which momentarily delayed and threatened this week’s Bürgenstock talks.

Even as it agreed a new truce with Hezbollah on June 19^th, Israel continues to insist that it will maintain a military occupation in South Lebanon—in violation of Lebanese sovereignty. As long as that presence remains, there will be resistance, and that will serve as a justification for periodic Israeli escalations (as just happened when four IDF soldiers were killed in between large Israeli strikes, both prior and subsequent to those losses, with over 100 Lebanese fatalities). The current tentative truce will clearly not be the final word on that front. Iran may also see advantages in maintaining a Lebanon situation of episodic confrontation, especially if Israel’s disproportionate actions can be used to further fuel U.S.-Israel tensions.

It is in the direct remit of the U.S. to end its blockade on Hormuz, release frozen Iranian assets, suspend sanctions for enabling the export of Iranian oil, and to begin relocating some of its military deployment from the region—whereas a ceasefire and withdrawal of Israel’s occupying forces in Lebanon requires sustained U.S. pressure on Israel. It is unequivocally the case that the U.S. can deliver this—Israel is so dependent on the U.S.

But if the state of play in Gaza, since the so-called ceasefire was declared and the previous Lebanon “ceasefire” are anything to go by, then the U.S. is perfectly capable of defining a ceasefire as a state of affairs in which Israel maintains deadly daily military operations and occupation. However, in this instance, the issue is ending a war in which America is directly involved, and in which Iran has a say.

Netanyahu will work to convince the administration to hold to the separate U.S.-led direct track between Israel and the government of Lebanon where talks are due to resume on June 23rd, and in which Israel is trying to impose conditions designed to reignite conflict in Lebanon—whether that continues to be led by the Israeli military or by dragging the Lebanese government into a renewed civil war.

So, Lebanon is where this festival of Israel-U.S. name calling will be distilled down into the actual assertion of power and imposition of decisions (one way or the other). And of course none of this bodes well for the Palestinians—with Gaza still experiencing daily strikes and casualties, and Israel preventing the entry of much-needed relief, while the West Bank is under the most prolonged and relentless Israeli assault—settler and military—since 1967.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to anticipate that Israel will take its frustration out on Palestinians and intensify the realization of its long-term draconian plans. Part of the Washington quid-pro-quo may be to create an even more enabling environment (true, if hard to imagine). Israel’s government intends to go into this election having implemented and paved the way to finalize its zero-sum agenda in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

In theory at least, there is an alternative scenario: that Trump’s warnings and those of JD Vance for Israel to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in” act as a wake-up call. That Israel reconsiders its maximalist (overreach) Greater Israel project of regional domination. That is sufficiently counterintuitive to Israel’s inability to display pragmatism that its chances, unfortunately, are vanishingly small.

End thoughts

There is an awful lot to unpack in translating the MoU into a sustainable agreement—from Lebanon’s sovereignty to what constitutes proximity in the removal of American forces, to the future administration of the Straits of Hormuz, and of course, the arrangements regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and the removal of sanctions/unfreezing of assets.

Not all of those points will need to be thrashed out if the return of war is to be prevented. But two military confrontations in the space of a year, combined with the reality of Israel’s hawkish maximalism, and the resurgent neoconservative camp in the U.S., mean that a return to war cannot be ruled out.

Beyond that, the repercussions of this conflict will play out over a long horizon, and some of that will be unpredictable and extends far beyond U.S.-Israel dynamics.

The region has witnessed in very palpable terms the shortcomings of its security relationship with the U.S. While it was Iran that launched missiles into Gulf states, it was the U.S., at Israel’s urging, that started this war, ignoring the counsel of its Gulf allies, listening only to Israeli entreaties. A Saudi friend shared a local proverb with me: “better wise enemies than crazy friends”.

States in the region will look at how to manage their relations with Iran, including possibly leaning into more economic integration as a security measure—investments give a certain leverage. While they will continue close relationship, including on the security and arms procurement front with the U.S., expect simultaneously a far more significant hedging to take place in the coming years.

Part of that will be in expanding other geopolitical relations, including those with China and arms purchases from places such as South Korea, and Europe if it can step up to be part of that mix. But there will also be a much more intense exploration of cooperation among regional states.

One core question will be whether a meaningful third bloc emerges in the region, counterbalancing the Israel axis (with UAE and others) and the Iran axis. The closer ties between Saudi, Türkiye, Egypt and Pakistan (who met at the Foreign Minister level on a fourth occasion on June 21st), as well as Qatar, are a trend to watch. Any emerging bloc will have to address how it contains Israel’s project of domination, radicalization, and destabilization.

Other issues likely to be on the agenda include: how the future of U.S. military bases is addressed, and what happens to those that have been largely destroyed during this war; whether Israel’s nuclear weapons become an issue, and whether proliferation questions extend beyond Iran; the routes where one sees the building of the future nodes of transportation and connectivity, including energy pipelines; and even how resonant Iran’s narrative of successful resistance becomes.

When JD said of Israel that “you’re a country of 9 million people, you just can’t kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have” he was speaking to a reality that politicians from across the Zionist political spectrum, pro- and anti-Bibi camps alike, refuse to acknowledge.

The Trump administration has not applied that to the Palestinian question and is hardwired not to do so. That, though, remains the crux—an Israel committed to a zero-sum project against the Palestinians is by definition an Israel committed to a hostile posture in the region and to hard-power domination. It is a project that has just been exposed, in very palpable terms, as unrealizable.

How many more setbacks, over how extended a period of time, and with what level of fallout for Israel and its neighbourhood, will it take for Israel and its public to change course?

Addressing a hearing of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) in January 2023 (in other words, long before October 7^th and what followed), I urged European lawmakers to desist from Europe’s complicity in violations of international law, which encourage Israeli extremism and undermining any prospect of peace or de-occupation:

I also used that platform to push back against the misuse, abuse and conflation of the accusation of antisemitism to stifle debate, the byproduct of which is to undermine the struggle against real antisemitism and racism:

Alongside the short clips above, the entire hearing is posted here.

Recently I have become convinced of the prospects for change and action in Europe. That opportunity is not primarily being driven by European governments and political leaderships who mostly refuse to take seriously the universal application of international law, or the idea that Palestinians are equals with equal rights. There are, of course, noble exceptions led by Spain and honourable mentions should be given to Norway, Ireland (although given the strength of public opinion they could be doing more) and Slovenia (under their previous government though that will all be reversed); on a good day Belgium and Holland, more rarely France, Sweden and others.

So what is pushing this? Mostly a combination of European public disgust at the reality of Israeli policy and the complicity of its own governments, alongside an assist from Israel in its egregious cruelty and crude promotion of what it is doing. In some places, Israel’s treatment of Christian communities in the Holy Land, including the desecration of churches and statues, is tipping the balance even for governments reluctant to act (such as in Italy and Poland).

I recently discussed these issues—the debates, opportunities and choices now occurring in European capitals—with FMEP President Lara Friedman on her podcast Occupied Thoughts:

And on this edition of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story:

Budging decades of European strengthening of bilateral relations with Israel will not be easy. The initial options being pursued, unsurprisingly, are largely symbolic and designed to insulate those bigger picture bilateral relations—moves to sanction individual Israeli ministers like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich or settler entities do not impact the calculation of average Israelis, and even recognition of Palestine is not translated into decoupling of Europe from its complicity in the Israeli occupation of the recognized state. So those steps should not be a strategic priority. But by necessity this will also be a journey where the emphasis should be carrying policy across the bridge to meaningful sanctions rather than scolding those who are late comers to the need for action (many of whom will still distance themselves from BDS until the moment they cease to do so).

I’ve written about this possible watershed moment in a piece published with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), which I am posting in full below. That explores the implications of the choice Europe faces between challenging Israeli maximalism and extremism or continuing to indulge it—how that plays out across European trade, rearmament, and energy security policy, what it means for any future global architecture of international law and the costs for Europe.

Even in the days since the piece was written, the ground continues to shift. Perhaps most significantly, there was just a vote at the UN denying Germany an elected place on the Security Council for the next two years—the first time Germany has failed to secure a seat in such a vote—and the outcome was openly acknowledged to be a consequence of Germany’s shameful position on Palestine-Israel.

Ireland’s government has just clarified its legal position that: “the only reasonable reading of the ICJ Opinion [from July 19, 2024] is that a complete prohibition on trade with Israeli settlements is required”.

And the new centre-left government in Denmark has included a reference in its coalition agreement (a rare development) to Europe’s obligations under its Association Agreement regarding Israeli violations in the OPTs.

Of course, none of this is sufficient, and the excellent Martin Konecny of EuMEP has explained in detail the spurious arguments used by the EU Commission and its leadership to obstruct import bans on settlement products. Konecny provides legal memos to back that up.

The opportunities are accumulating if public pressure is sustained and intensified. Here is that FEPS piece in full, hinting further where the strategic focus should be:

https://feps-europe.eu/europe-and-israel-a-strategic-watershed-moment/

In the same short period that Spain and Belgium were tightening arms embargoes against Israel, Germany was finalising close to a billion euros in new Heron drone contracts with Israel Aerospace Industries, and Greece was midway through a multi-billion military modernisation programme leaning heavily on Israeli weapons systems. There is no better demonstration of the schizophrenia that currently characterises European policy toward Israel.

Europe can attempt to split the difference, but a choice will eventually have to be made: will a state that has systematically violated international law, defied ICJ rulings and claimed a unique exemption from accountability continue to be normalised and integrated into a flailing European project that contributes to the further dismantling of an international architecture of law? Or will Europe, rooted in its interests, be a central player in building and shaping a multilateral architecture for a new multipolar order that is based on a normative international law framework?

Europe’s attempt to assert itself as an upholder of international law after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was precipitously undermined by its failure to uphold a similar standard on Gaza. At the time, some argued that the loss of the Global South was not particularly consequential and that Europe was anyway too divided. Even as protests against European policy toward Israeli crimes proliferated in many capitals, and as the credibility of national and pan-European structures was increasingly undermined due to this double standard, the consequences appeared manageable to leaders across the continent.

But the costs of indulging Israeli impunity have grown exponentially. It led to Israel dragging the US into a war with Iran, which has now affected every European economy, including a surge in oil and gas prices, stagflation and the very real threat of further economic collapse. Israel is pursuing a strategy of making itself the dominant hard power in Europe’s southern neighbourhood in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it is trying to pull Europe into that structure of domination. It is an ambitious project and almost certainly one of overreach that cannot be achieved or sustained. It is also premised on abandoning any international law-based approach to human rights and global equity. Those are the stakes of the choice Europe faces.

Europe has significant potential leverage. But when it comes to the three Ts – trade, tourism and tournaments – very little has changed. Europe remains Israel’s largest trading partner, a quarter of Israel’s foreign financial assets are held in European banks. Israelis travel to Europe visa-free – including, as things stand, individuals being able to enter Europe without having to sign a declaration form or waiver regarding their non-participation in war crimes and/or incitement to genocide. And instead of imposing costs for Israel’s permanent occupation and expansionism, their continued acceptance in European competitions from Eurovision to UEFA signals a sense of normalcy for Israel. At most, European policy has nibbled at the furthest edges of impacting that. Rather than suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement, or parts thereof, as called for by a European citizen’s petition with one million signatures, and banning all arms trade, the EU’s most recent action was merely to sanction three Israeli settler individuals and four Israeli settler organisations. Just to be clear: there is no occupation or settlements distinct from the entire Israeli state and its military.

What Israel envisions is a new regional architecture of which Europe is a part. In fact, Europe’s south-east Mediterranean member states are being very openly recruited as an extension of a Greater Israel regional hegemony project. Greece and Cyprus have actively deepened their relationships with Israel in ways that lock their defence and energy futures into Israeli-led frameworks. Athens is procuring Israeli missile defence systems – Barak MX, David’s Sling and Spyder – and, in 2026 alone, signed a €650 million deal with the Israeli military technology company and defence contractor Elbit Systems. The flagship symbol of this convergence is the €2.5 billion Great Sea Interconnector, a submarine electricity cable linking Israel, Cyprus and Greece, alongside the stalled but politically central EastMed gas pipeline. Once the contracts are signed, the cables are laid, and this dependency on Israeli infrastructure is built into its own grid, the exit becomes more onerous and unlikely. More emphasis, anyway, should be placed on clean energy, renewables and self-sufficiency.

Along with India, states in the Gulf (led by the UAE), the Horn of Africa and North Africa, this makes up what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling a putative future ‘hexagon of alliances’ – a blueprint for a hard-power regional hegemony that is designed as much to foreclose accountability as anything else. It is a strategy unlikely to be realised, but possibly enough to wrong-foot Europe’s choices.

Europe’s historic rearmament drive raises questions of great consequence: part of a much bigger turf war within the EU between the option to achieve maximum strategic autonomy – a ‘Buy European’ approach – versus one that remains firmly locked-in to an American-led procurement framework. The latter option means doubling down on a dependent relation with the US, even as President Donald Trump consistently works to undermine NATO. Israel will be touting its tried-and-tested weapons systems (tried-and-tested on Palestinians that is, mostly civilians and in ways that violate international law).

Europe has alternatives. That does not mean abandoning relations with the US, but it does mean nurturing strategic autonomy, and it certainly means avoiding dependence on Israel (and, in effect, ‘made in Israel’ is a variant of ‘made in Washington’). The consequences of the ill-conceived war of choice against Iran are only just beginning to play out, but one already sees a trend within the West Asia/North Africa region to build alliances that can begin to deter and contain the destabilising and radicalising influence of the Greater Israel domination project. For instance, the increased frequency of meetings and cooperation among a quad consisting of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan.

These diverging paths map onto a starker choice. It was partly summed up in the offer made by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference in February this year, inviting Europe to join America in renewing Western domination – a kind of colonialism 2.0, racist and out of sync with today’s geopolitical realities. But this American offer is no more than a mirage: Trump clearly holds Europe in contempt, and is busy courting China even as he threatens Europe for attempting the same.

The alternative is for Europe to rise to the moment and best pursue its own interests by being a central pillar in a global architecture of an international law-based order for the 21st century. Chief among those would be the protection of global commons and the prevention of collapse on a colossal scale. That in part requires an end to the exceptionalism accorded to Israel, to desist from sacrificing international law on the altar of Israeli impunity (something for which Europe’s citizens are now paying a direct cost, notably in this Iran war).

Europe cannot achieve that if its rearmament and energy strategy are tethered to a Greater Israel project of exceptionalism. It will not be good enough for Europe to suffice with rhetorical condemnations of Israel’s illegal actions. Instead, Europe must align itself in its arms, trade and bilateral relations with the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice – declaring Israel’s occupation unlawful – implement the responsibilities of non-criminality incumbent on all third-party states, and, in so doing, to demonstrate independence and leadership.

The mediating parties led by Pakistan, Qatar and others, carry a heavy burden in attempting to knit together the outlines of a deal. They face multiple challenges, but chief among them remains the absence of strategy, coherence and seriousness on the U.S. leadership side.

Rather than speculate on the details of a deal, which even if reached will struggle to be implemented, this post addresses the ways in which Israel is working to be as influential in preventing an end to this war as it was in curating how the war was launched.

It may be that negotiations, whether now or later, are doomed irrespective of Israeli machinations. Israel apparently is not convinced of that, given the effort it is putting into operating as a deliberate, committed, and relentless saboteur.

The options on the table essentially remain the same four possibilities outlined in my previous post. And many of the problems that negotiations seek to resolve were the direct creation of Israel and the U.S. launching this war—from the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; to the assassination of an Iranian leadership that had committed (including via a fatwa of the Supreme Leader) to not obtain nuclear weapons; to an Iran with more leverage and less willingness to put its faith in a negotiated process, and with greater economic needs (and therefore more insistent on issues of sanctions removal, unfreezing of assets and the possibility of imposing a maintenance fee for Hormuz Strait passage).

But Israel’s intensions are hiding in plain sight—there is not much need for inference or interpretation here. Follow closely the statements and actions of Israel’s leadership and the background briefings from officials that Israel’s media stenographers faithfully reproduce, only one conclusion is possible—Israel is committed to pulling the U.S. back into a maximalist military campaign, to derail negotiations, and to set intentionally unrealizable goals for talks, while doubling down on its military actions on other fronts to further muddy the waters.

One of the more curious developments of the past week was an assertion made and then repeated by President Trump that a massive expansion of the Abraham Accords should follow any U.S.-Iran agreement, and in fact could be a condition for the U.S. to enter a deal.

President Trump held a call on Saturday, May 23^rd to discuss the Iran war state of play and diplomatic efforts with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain. On Monday, May 25^th, Trump posted on Truth Social that “it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords. Those Countries discussed are Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates (already a Member!), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain (already a Member!).”

Trump repeated the assertion in the televised sycophants gathering, otherwise known as the cabinet meeting, on Wednesday, May 27^th, adding Kuwait to the mix (in the same session, Trump threatened to ‘blow up’ another GCC member state, Oman). Trump’s rather sudden and curious insertion of an Abraham Accords component into the Iran negotiation mix was apparently met with stunned disbelief on the part of his regional interlocutors.

It came after yet another call between Trump and Netanyahu the previous day, the third documented call between the Israeli and American leaders that week. According to media reports, Netanyahu had been urging Trump not to pursue the positions under discussion in negotiations.

Senator Lindsey Graham immediately jumped on the bandwagon posting on X: “To Saudi Arabia and others…if you refuse to go down this path as suggested by President Trump, it will have severe repercussions for our future relationships and make this peace proposal unacceptable” — adding to the impression of this being an Israeli initiative given Graham’s reliability as an Israeli mouthpiece.

That Netanyahu promoted this idea of now being the time for an Abraham Accords expansion is by far the most reasonable assessment as to where that came from—consistent with comments Netanyahu has made during the war. It is emphatically clear that this was not out of some Israeli expectation that such a breakthrough could be achieved—it is rather the case that this is a transparent poisoned pill designed to (at a minimum) complicate or at best torpedo possible progress in negotiations.

Very senior officials in the region have confirmed to me their understanding that this was an Israeli-planted attempt at sabotage.

Even The New York Times reported that “Trump’s linkage between that deal and an expansion of the Abraham Accords has been largely met by baffled silence” (in the Middle East region), pointing out that “half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon.”

In practical terms Trump was making this normalization push at just about the least propitious time. This does not come against the backdrop of intensified deepening of Israeli-Saudi ties, whether open or discreet (Saudi is the core of this).

Since the magnitude of atrocities in Gaza became clear and the mood in the region soured even more on normalization, Saudi Arabia has repeatedly set out a clear position linking expanded ties with Israel to demonstrable and irreversible steps to a Palestinian state—a position repeated by Saudi commentators over the last days in response to Trump.

This is also coming at a time of deep Saudi Emirati tensions and the notion that Saudi would follow the UAE lead by joining the Abraham Accords is particularly fantastical—if and when the day of Israel-Saudi relations arrives, it will be an independent and Saudi framed architecture, it won’t be Riyadh jumping on an Abu Dhabi branded bandwagon.

The Israeli-inspired war against Iran, ignoring and overriding Saudi and other Gulf concerns, has not driven the Kingdom closer to Netanyahu’s desired embrace—it has further demonstrated that Israel itself is a destabilizing and radicalizing influence in the region. That is one reason for the formalization of closer Saudi, Turkish, Pakistani and Egyptian coordination seen in recent months.

Meanwhile, Israel, its leaders, and the Netanyahu echo chamber have intensified their attempts to pressure and vilify Saudi (and it goes without saying that they are entirely rejectionist regarding any “progress” on the Palestinian front). Following the Saudi-UAE friction around the Yemen and Sudan issues in late 2025 and early 2026, Israel lobby sources in the U.S. launched campaigns attempting to depict Saudi media outlets as engaging in antisemitism.

In October 2025, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stated: “If Saudi Arabia tells us that it is normalisation in exchange for a Palestinian state, then no thank you…keep riding your camels in the Saudi desert.”

Netanyahu media confidant Ariel Kahana, writing in the pro-government Israel Hayom paper on Sunday, May 24^thclaimed that Iran’s success in the current war “wasn’t the result of Iran’s intelligence; rather it was more the product of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s cowardice” [for not joining the war more aggressively and siding with Israel, according to Kahana].

Even before Trump’s latest push, Saudi current and former officials claimed that Israel is a “troublemaker”, “a greater regional threat than Iran”, and that “wherever Israel is present, there is destruction and ruin”.

Reactions to Trump’s Abraham Accords expansion demand among Saudi and regional commentators have been uncharacteristically pointed and caustic. Mamoun Fandy, Director of the London Global Strategy Institute, captured the mood well: “Israel is not a strategic asset to Saudi Arabia…the assumption that every Arab state must orbit Israel is a fantasy produced by Israeli self-importance, not geo-political reality”.

Pakistani officials equally distanced themselves from the proposal with Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif affirming that the demand “clashes with our fundamental ideologies.” And even Türkiye which has (now highly strained) relations with Israel, has noted Israel’s increasing targeting of their country. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan noted in April that “Israel cannot live without an enemy, is now seeking to declare Türkiye the new enemy after Iran.”

Israel’s other track of sabotage, even less open to interpretation, is its escalation of military action on the ground—primarily in Lebanon, but let’s also not forget Gaza.

One of the thorniest issues that almost derailed the existing ‘ceasefire-ish’ dynamic was Israel excluding the Lebanon arena from the de-escalation arrangement announced on April 8^th. The Pakistani mediators had asserted that the ceasefire applied to Lebanon, America went back and forth under Israeli pressure until it was agreed that a (kind of, but not really) ceasefire included Lebanon (similar to the not really ceasefire in Gaza).

For an Israeli government under fire for having failed to achieve the victories it promised across multiple fronts and not least in Lebanon where Hezbollah was considered vanquished, the intensified Israeli military actions of the last days is a win-win. At the very least, Israel gets to wreak more havoc and destruction, but ideally the Lebanon escalation further loads the apple cart, weighing down the prospects of a deal with Iran, ideally tipping dealmaking beyond the attainable.

The March resumption of major hostilities in Lebanon has not played well for the Israeli side. Hezbollah, as resistance movements tend to do, has adapted and recalibrated, for instance finding new cheap fibre optic drone technology to expose Israeli vulnerabilities. This has been the primary cause of the nine Israeli losses since the Iran ceasefire was in place.

Following comments last week committing to an even greater acceleration of Israeli operations in Lebanon and vowing to “press the gas pedal even harder”, Netanyahu doubled down on Sunday, May 31^st promising to expand and deepen Israel’s hold and occupation in Lebanon. According to Israeli media, Israel is also threatening to resume extensive air strikes in Beirut. All of which demonstrates the extent to which Israel’s new Lebanon campaign is considered to be delivering underwhelming results, becoming a political-electoral liability for Netanyahu. Given that bellicosity and warmongering extends deep into the so-called “opposition” camp the accusation against Netanyahu is of the Lebanon war being insufficiently aggressive and ambitious in scale. Even the capture of Beaufort Castle is being described across the board by military commentators as of “low strategic importance”, quoting senior IDF officers as saying “in the end we conquered another hill”.

In the past days, Israel issued evacuation orders for the entire city of Tyre—Lebanon’s fifth-largest city, home to some 200,000 people—and began striking it within two hours of the order being issued. This is a pattern. Since Israel resumed its Lebanon campaign in March, over 1.2 million people have been forcibly displaced—roughly a quarter of Lebanon’s entire population. Reuters reported that Israel has thus far issued evacuation orders covering 20% of Lebanon, “far beyond the buffer zone it previously announced to the Litani River”. If this were an Israeli propaganda piece, it would be noted that this is the equivalent of 80 million Americans being displaced from their homes.

Israel has conducted strikes on healthcare infrastructure, ambulances, and first respondents, with video footage documenting repeated Israeli use of “double tapping” (a drone strike followed immediately by a second strike on the paramedics and bystanders who rush to help).

This is taking place in parallel to Israeli Lebanese negotiations where Israel’s position remains that there will be war in Lebanon—the choice for the Lebanese government being whether that is led from the outside by Israel or from the inside by Lebanese state structures (if the government succumbs to pressure and relaunches a full-scale civil war).

The uptick in Israeli killings in Gaza in recent days is not specifically linked to crashing the Iran talks—Iran has not put Gaza on the negotiating table. Israel’s continued pursuit of a zero-sum strategy of displacement and eradication against the Palestinian population certainly contribute to a poisonous and angry regional atmosphere — further exposing the risible nature of Trump’s ‘normalization now’ push.

But the Gaza effort (and continued assaults in the West Bank) are also a signal that were a period of quiet on the Iran and/or Lebanon front be imposed on Israel by the U.S., then Israel would likely take the opportunity to further intensify militarily on the Palestinian front.

It is worth noting, even in passing, what is now being exposed — unsurprisingly — about the so-called Board of Peace and its Gaza mechanism: in practice, a vehicle for advancing Israeli maximalism.

Since the October so-called ceasefire took effect, Israeli strikes have killed more than 900 Palestinians in Gaza and Netanyahu has just committed to expanding Israel’s direct reoccupation of Gaza from the 60% plus that it currently holds to 70% or more. Jeremy Scahill at Drop Site has an in-depth look at the dynamics around Gaza and the Board of Peace and the so-called negotiation efforts there, which includes some of my own thoughts.

In many respects, the Board of Peace is not constraining Israeli behaviour but legitimizing it. One disturbing aspect is that it now operates with a United Nations imprimatur, following the November 2025 passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2803 which effectively outsourced Gaza’s governance to an exclusively American dictated sub organ of the Board of Peace, now run by Greater Israel acolyte Aryeh Lightstone, and an employee of the UAE’s Diplomatic Academy — Nickolay Mladenov.

As the FT recently exposed, the only fund to assist Gaza reconstruction and aid within the Board of Peace structure that carries a recognized mechanism for international oversight—the World Bank administered account—contains zero dollars. The monies actually swirling around, open to profiteering abuse by private companies aligned to Trumps friends and family exist in a separate JP Morgan account, which offers zero public transparency.

This serves in part to exacerbate the appalling conditions in which Palestinians in Gaza are being kept, letting Israel off the hook for the accountability it should be held to and the compensation it should be paying, simultaneously discouraging donor nations from engaging. These mechanisms can probably best be understood as taking to the next level Israel’s Bantustan plan for those Palestinians it does not permanently displace from the territory.

The four options on the table prior to the trip in terms of the Iran war remain the same:

1. Resume U.S.-Israeli military strikes, perhaps with a view to escalating in order to de-escalate/declare victory, but with no reason to believe this round produces a better outcome for the U.S.

2. Walk away while declaring ‘victory’, hoping mediation can deliver a degree of predictability in the Iranian response (Iran will do the same in a compelling way).

3. Negotiate a deal—but that requires a demonstration of American sophistication and understanding of the parameters of the possible, which has been absent so far.

4. Continued stagnation. Thirty-eight days after the U.S. and Israel initiated a war of choice, there have now been an equal number of days where a kind of ceasefire has largely prevailed, with neither side budging significantly. That kind of semi frozen war could be prolonged.

The escalation camp—with Israel as cheerleader-in-chief is arguing that a short, sharp, painful round of strikes offers an on-ramp to a more resounding victory narrative (if the President then walks away with ‘no deal’) or will deliver that long-awaited Iranian capitulation and acceptance of an American post-war diktat.

There is every reason to believe these scenarios remain fictitious, which does not mean the President can’t be convinced and that they should be ruled out. Israel is not being shy in pushing for a resumption of hostilities— the Israeli press is full of briefings by officials to that effect and frustration that its calls have yet to be enacted.

Israel’s goal remains the deployment of U.S. military power (along with its own) to maximally degrade the Iranian central state and to induce state collapse, chaos and fragmentation to advance the (excessively ambitious and largely unattainable) Greater Israel agenda of regional domination.

While Israel’s sales pitch may be treated with more scepticism these days in Washington, DC (given its proven lack of credibility to date), the President is presumably immune or incapable of recognizing that he was duped by Israel, and there are a cohort of hawks inside U.S. government and those benefiting from the war, who are similarly aligned.

I discussed these dynamics recently on Al Jazeera’s The Bottom Line with Steve Clemons, and in a series of interviews with Chinese CGTN TV.

The negotiated option is bedevilled by a U.S. track-record of using talks as a cover for military preparations and escalation and by the unserious and incompetence (one presumes partially unintended) of the American negotiating position and team.

The difficulties are compounded by Trump’s 2018 upending of the JCPOA, the leverage accumulated by Iran during the war and the absurdity of negotiations now centring around the U.S. efforts to achieve parts of the status quo ante from before it launched a war. The Strait of Hormuz was open, and Iran had committed (under its assassinated former Supreme Leader) to no nuclear weapons capacity. Perhaps headlines for an agreement at most could be reached and the details kicked into the long grass—even that is considered to be a stretch.

All of the scenarios, including that of stagnation, will have to contend with the cumulative economic effects of a continued blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, and how to resolve that.

The U.S. president apparently was enthusiastic that a winning card had been identified in the U.S. imposing its own double blockade on the Strait. The assumption being that the pain would be greater for Iran, countries close enough to influence Iran (and even as a bonus, U.S. allies, notably in Europe, whom the President enjoys denigrating and treating with contempt).

That however assumes that U.S. resilience and capacity to absorb pain is greater than that of Iran. Clearly Iran is more significantly impacted by the war in terms of economy, destruction etc., but this is about relative thresholds of pain rather than absolute levels. The carry-over from the economic to the political in the U.S. still make it more likely to blink first (although even that consideration is partially mitigated by the incoherent and inconsistent nature of contemporary U.S. “strategy”, if one can call it that).

Presumably, if the blockade is to be mutually lifted, that would either depend on a deal, including attaining sanctions relief and unfreezing of assets for the Iranian side, or that Iran is able to gain some economic benefit, for instance by the taking a maintenance fee, if not toll, for its management of the Strait in relation to those vessels traversing it.

In the meantime, this continues to be a period of overall considerable churn throughout the region. The UAE is doubling down on its relationship with Israel, while Saudi-UAE tensions have been bubbling up again, and there have been a series of statements by current or former senior office holders in Türkiye, Saudi Qatar and elsewhere, pinpointing the need to also contain and deter Israel’s destabilizing and radicalizing regional ambitions.

In an interview with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland at The Majority Report I went into some depth in relation to Israel’s positioning in the region and the trajectory that is on.

Finally, Israel continues to prevent either a ceasefire or serious negotiations on the Lebanon and Gaza front, and is perhaps preparing for an intensification of its military campaigns in one or both places. In both it maintains a strong military presence and daily killings—including the direct reoccupation of almost two thirds of Gaza, where the situation Israel imposes remains appalling.

As Israel heads to elections, there is very little challenge from the various Zionist parties to the extremism that has been on display for some time—including a wall-to-wall Zionist parliamentary coalition that backed a second bill allowing the death penalty, this time by the creation of a sui generis tribunal allowing mass show trials of those Palestinians arrested in relation to the crimes of October 7th.

I discuss the implications of that in this interview with Al Jazeera Arabic.

And for a big picture look at Israel’s journey down this road of maximalism, here is a longer interview with the CBC’s Nahlah Ayed, which includes excerpts from a speech I delivered in Ottawa. That can be listened to and read here.

I'm sceptical it can succeed, but in order to confront and prevent the project, one needs first to understand its dimensions.

You can read the full op-ed here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/13/benjamin-netanyahu-middle-east-greater-israel

Or below in the continuation of this post.

Also flagging this clip posted by Ayman Mohyeldin from an interview I gave to MS NOW’s The Weekend about Netanyahu’s push to upend any ceasefire, especially via Israel’s continued strikes in Lebanon.

It’s a theme I also discussed recently with Becky Anderson on CNN. With Israel-Lebanon talks taking place in Washington, DC, I argued that Israel is trying to push Lebanon back to civil war. And this clip looks at Israel's refusal to countenance genuine win-win diplomacy. Finally, this segment explores Israel’s intentions vis-à-vis the GCC states in the context of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.

What Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right really mean when they invoke ‘Greater Israel’

By Daniel Levy, President, U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP)

The Guardian, April 13, 2026

Much remains unclear about the significance and durability of the two-week pause in the US and Israel’s war on Iran. But one aspect of the conflict remains as clear today as it was six weeks ago. Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does.

Israel’s war aims were to maximally degrade the capacity of the Iranian state, achieving not so much regime change as state implosion. Despite the ceasefire, Netanyahu has emphasised that this is “not the end of the campaign” and that Israel’s “finger is on the trigger” to resume combat. A seasoned strategist, he has spent the second Trump administration seizing the opportunity of geopolitical fluidity to reach for his end goal: a Greater Israel.

When it’s invoked on the Israeli right, “Greater Israel” is often seen as a purely territorial concept: an attempt to increase the size of territory that Israel claims as its own. This is certainly integral to its meaning. After all, Israel has been expansionist and entailed the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians since its inception, and this process has now accelerated considerably.

In the past two-and-a-half years, Israel has flattened and reconquered Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and laying waste its civilian infrastructure, squeezing its population, according to one estimate from last year, into just 12% of an already tiny strip of land. In the West Bank, Israel continues a campaign of destruction and displacement towards Palestinian people and property that is unparalleled since the six-day war in 1967, expanding its matrix of control and settlement.

After the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in 2024, Israel seized territory in Syria (beyond the illegally annexed Golan Heights) and is in the process of reconstituting a zone of occupation in southern Lebanon. Government ministers from the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power factions, and Likud parliamentarians, openly agitate for Israeli sovereignty and settlement in that country. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus”, and Netanyahu himself claimed to feel “very much connected” to this territorial vision of Greater Israel.

However, Greater Israel should be seen as a geopolitical and strategic concept as much as a territorial one. The acquisition and control of land is, in many respects, the obvious and easy part. Israel’s prime minister is pursuing something both more ambitious and more sophisticated than the simple control of territory – a project of dominion that is made up of new alliances, underwritten by hard power dependency.

To understand this, we need to go back a few years. After the terrible crimes inflicted on Israelis on 7 October, and as the magnitude and cruelty of Israel’s response in Gaza became clear, its attempts at regional integration – normalising relations with Arab neighbours – became increasingly stuck. Netanyahu faced a choice: either resume efforts at regional normalisation via a more accommodationist approach to the Palestinians, or double down on his zero-sum negation of a Palestinian future. In opting for the latter, Netanyahu needed to remove Iran as a regional power balancer – a move that required direct and massive US military engagement alongside Israel.

In the days preceding the Iran war, two influential former Israeli security figures writing for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security observed that, from the point of view of key regional Sunni states, overthrowing the Iranian regime or weakening it significantly would establish Israel’s status as the “dominant regional power”.

Achieving this necessitates not only collapsing Iran but simultaneously weakening the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – and making them dependent on Israel for security and energy export routes. In other words, the war’s spillover impact of GCC states being hit by Iranian drones and missiles can be seen as an intentional design feature for Israel, not a regrettable side-effect.

Predictably, when Israel and the US launched this war, the GCC’s access to global markets via the strait of Hormuz was severely impacted. And when Israel escalated by targeting Iranian energy infrastructure, Iran made good on its threat to respond in kind against the Gulf.

Netanyahu took the opportunity to call for “alternative routes instead of the chokepoints of the Hormuz Strait and the Bab-al-Mandab Strait”, anticipating “oil pipelines, gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to Israel, right up to our Mediterranean ports”.

In his public pronouncements, Netanyahu has connected some of the dots of his project for Greater Israel dominion. Just days before the start of this war, during a visit to Israel by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, Netanyahu shared his vision to “create an entire system, essentially a kind of hexagon of alliances around or within the Middle East”, including “India, Arab nations, African nations, Mediterranean nations (Greece and Cyprus), and nations in Asia”. Israel would be the key nodal point of this alliance.

A recently published piece in Hebrew from two high-ranking figures at the official strategy institute of the Israel Defense Forces helpfully filled in some of the blanks. They argued that Israel’s military would not only conquer territory directly, but also achieve “operational control even in areas far from Israel’s borders, without occupying and holding territory”. Israel would be granted “a superior status as a kind of ‘queen’ of the jungle” (it is not uncommon to hear the rest of the Middle East referred to as “the jungle” in Israeli political discourse), establishing “a regional order that will further Israel’s goals”.

In recent speeches, Netanyahu has started referring to Israel not only as a “regional superpower”, but “in some respects, a global superpower”. Israel is looking to place itself at the centre of a regional alliance that could be sustained even if US power draws down. Netanyahu has promised that the hexagon alliance would be deployed against the “radical Shia axis … and the emerging radical Sunni axis”. Israel has not been shy in naming the next “threat” to be addressed: Turkey.

Talk of a Greater Israel dominion might be treated as typical wartime hyperbole. Recent Israeli policy tells us it would be a mistake to do so. A permanent war orientation runs deep in Israel’s political class, government and opposition, security establishment, new-right elite and media. This thinking, however, carries tremendous potential for overreach and blowback; it is a danger for Israel itself and something the region will not accept.

In the long list of postwar challenges, deterring and containing this project of Greater Israel dominion might be among the most important.

Daniel Levy is a political commentator and the president of the US/Middle East Project. He served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo II talks.

On Al Jazeera English, we discussed how this war serves Netanyahu and his attempt to achieve “Pax Greater Israel” and how Trump is upending America’s relationships with its closest allies.

@aljazeeraenglish‘Does America have a plan? Israel has a plan. Does America know?' . Daniel Levy, President of the US/Middle East Project, says that the US-Israel war on Iran is reckless and harms allies, to Israel’s exclusive benefit. #news

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This Owen Jones clip looks at how Israel is squeezing what it can from American power while it is still able to do so, even at the cost of hastening its decline.

In a Novara Media interview with Michael Walker, the theme expanded to Israel capitalising on American imperial power in its twilight to establish itself as the dominant hegemon in a post-America order in the Middle East.

Speaking with Sakhr Al-Makhadhi on AJ+, we explicitly unpack how Israel and America’s war aims are not only divergent but contradictory—Israel seeking to smash Iran to smithereens, America seeking to install a stable supplicant, Venezuela style.

And finally, a longer segment from Joy Reid’s show, where we reflect on whether this war marks a defining moment in American imperial collapse — and what that looks like both for US domestic politics and for Israel’s standing in America and beyond.

Unsurprisingly, there is a degree of overlap across the interviews.

With Novara Media’s Michael Walker I discussed, amongst other things, the impact of the Larijani assassination and the resignation of Trump’s top counterterrorism official, and what I mean by Israel’s strategy of “use it or lose it” for what it wants from Trump in this war.

That can be viewed here:

With Owen Jones we dug into various aspects of what Israel is trying to achieve, including the risks of dragging the U.S. into this war (this link is to a very short clip on that subject). We also discussed how this both feeds off and feeds into U.S. and Western decline.

That interview can be viewed here:

And finally, it was a pleasure to return to Bob Wright’s NonZero Podcast. With Bob we looked at Israel’s war aims, how Netanyahu is using the Trump moment to pursue those, and how to interpret the consensus support for this in Israel and its shift towards a more radical agenda. We also got to probe the dilemma faced by GCC states and the U.S.-Israel angle, including how Israel’s maximalist strategy might play out.

That conversation can be viewed here:

The piece reviews Netanyahu’s multi-decade campaign to pull America into a major war with Iran, and the relentless efforts in the last weeks (Netanyahu visited Trump twice in the eight weeks preceding this war) – presumably concluding that he had finally found a president stupid enough to do this, and working to ensure that any negotiation option would tank.

While not neglecting American agency, it is transparently obvious that this is an ‘Israel First’ war. And Netanyahu must surely be aware that a war unpopular with the American public, and understood by so many to be serving Israeli, not American interests, will intensify Israel’s loss of support among ordinary Americans.

Begging the question, why risk so much?

Maybe it’s Netanyahu’s faith in the influence, war chest and intimidation tactics of the Israel lobby, or in the gullibility of American leaders, elected officials and the public; or maybe Netanyahu is just politically desperate with polls coming up and this really is the most expensive election campaign in history.

The post suggests another theory – that Netanyahu may already be thinking beyond American primacy and Israel’s popularity, and he wants to use American power while it is still available. Netanyahu might believe this could be the decisive operation to entrench Israeli domination in the region and to allow him to finish the job with the Palestinians.

Trump may be incoherent, basing decisions on his fragile ego and divorced from reality; but Netanyahu knows what he wants – an extreme, terrifying and wildly ambitious endgame.

Netanyahu’s goal for Iran is regime collapse and state implosion – a chaos that would spill over into the surrounding states, but from which Israel would be shielded. Talk of backing armed Kurdish groups to seize territory in Iran is all about beginning the process of state fragmentation, which, even if it takes years, Israel hopes would be hard to reverse.

Netanyahu’s gambit is that this could cement Israel’s hegemonic project of regional military domination, forcing the rest of the region to bend the knee, and most crucially, ensuring that Israel would not be challenged in its total victory endgame for the Palestinians of eradication and ethnic cleansing.

I conclude by suggesting that this Israeli play is unlikely to succeed. But it is extremely destructive and costly (look also at what Israel is doing in Lebanon, and of course permanently to the Palestinians), impacting the entire region and beyond, including shocks to the global economy. This will geopolitically weaken the U.S.

As for Israel – is there any sanity left when there is elite consensus in a small settler-colonial state to pursue such a far-reaching mission of domination and humiliation of an entire region?

It’s a longish post which could be read in its entirety here at Zeteo.

That was broadcast on Al Jazeera Inside Story and can be viewed here:

Offered a shorter take on the same theme to AJ+, here:

An earlier interview given in late January foresaw these developments. Here is that brief clip from a Declassified UK interview discussing what the Israeli leadership is trying to achieve in terms of state and regime collapse, implosion and regional spillover, rather than fairy tale stories of regime change.

That can be viewed here:

In the lead up and even subsequent to the meeting, certain media (led by Axios) and political actors insisted on hyping supposed tensions between Trump and Netanyahu.

The alignment is overwhelming even in the context of ferocious disagreements within the MAGA movement over Israel First versus America First and it is very familiar—an Israeli prime minister effectively wrapping  an American president around his finger. So this particular genre of disinformation is worth briefly examining.

In part, it is classic media and commentariat bunkum, attempting to tease out and magnify a marginal case of tensions rather than focus on the uncomfortable main story: the continued active America support, along with the complicity of Western and other countries, in ongoing Israeli criminality and cruelty against the Palestinians and war-making in the region. Rami Khouri captured this very neatly in describing the U.S.-Israeli play as a combination of the games Monopoly and Risk—the real estate greed and imperial military impulses coming together. Of course, there have been moments of disagreements between Trump and Netanyahu in the last year, and that could happen again, but that is patently not the storyline with regard to the so-called “Gaza peace plan”.

The additional reasons for misdirection in reporting, I think, can be found partly in the wishful thinking of the Israeli ‘liberal opposition.’’  But more acutely, the Zionist anti-Bibi camp offers no alternative vision—certainly not in relation to the apartheid regime over Palestinians, and is pinning its hopes on Trump bringing down Netanyahu and his coalition while leaving in place this rotten regime. Others collaborating in this charade—among them European and regional states, and the Palestinian Authority leadership—no doubt find it highly convenient to buttress a storyline of U.S.-Israeli tensions and an always imminent but never-quite-there fallout.

The playbook outlined in my previous post was faithfully followed in the Florida meeting. Trump is indeed giving Israel permission to define implementation of a ceasefire however it pleases—including by initiating fire and killing Palestinians every day, obstructing humanitarian aid, avoiding military withdrawal from the majority of Gaza, and preventing any international force that might offer a modicum of protection for Palestinians.

If announcements are made regarding appointments for the Board of Peace or a subservient Palestinian tier of government, this will be done in such a way as to not interfere with Israel’s maximalist objectives (for instance, expanding the Israel-based CMCC.) The U.S.–Israel disagreement over Türkiye is real and will play out over time, but it will not result in any practical consequences in the Palestinian arena under the current, Israeli-defined trajectory of no withdrawal and no international force. Likewise, so-called reconstruction projects in Gaza will be controlled by Israel and very possibly profited from by Israeli companies—while indifferent and indeed antithetical to Palestinian wellbeing.

Following the meeting, Israeli media quoted anonymous governmental and IDF sources that say that if Trump makes any announcements on the Gaza ceasefire deal in the coming weeks they will have no “immediate practical consequences on the ground.”

This abysmal reality will continue to prevail and be championed by Trump as constituting “peace after 3,000 years of conflict”—for as long as it is not countered and challenged, whether in public or private.

What remains the biggest lie in the public Trump-Netanyahu statements, and the ace card in the Israeli hand, surrounds the so-called question of Hamas disarmament, which has been relentlessly hyped since the meeting, even as pragmatic Hamas proposals are conspicuously ignored.

There were a sprinkling of comments made at the meeting in Mar-a-Lago and subsequent to it, that are somewhat new and noteworthy:

1) Possibly the most consequential and least commented on intervention was when Trump re-upped talk of mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. He did so in response to a question from a journalist from the Jewish News Syndicate, clearly intended to promote that issue of ethnic cleansing. Trump jumped at the opportunity to resurface his original and it seems still instinctive preference to simply rid Gaza of Palestinians. It is beyond grotesque to resend that signal to an Israeli polity and society in which consent for genocide has been manufactured, and which is so steeped in zero-sum schemes for removing and eradicating Palestinians. Israel is already taking its next steps to prevent 37 aid organisations working with Palestinians from functioning, with the issuing of the next phase in orders to close down operations for the likes of MSF, Oxfam, IRC, NRC as well as UNRWA (in separate punitive legislation).

2) The West Bank was the area where Trump acknowledged that there was not 100% U.S.-Israel alignment, a point seized upon by the “Trump will challenge Netanyahu and deliver peace” nonsense choir.  The U.S. has come out against West Bank annexation, thereby giving Israel a green light to do anything else it pleases, which in practice amounts to annexation plus. Netanyahu is likely to be successful in framing the West Bank ‘problem issues’ as revolving around a few “unruly youth”, what he described in an interview with Fox News as “about 70 kids…teenagers who come from broken homes.” This, unsurprisingly, is revisionist claptrap—it is the relentless destruction, theft, and aggression of the Israeli state, with its military and matrix of control and state-backed settler militias that prevent any normal life or rights for Palestinians, rather than misbehaving juveniles.

3) Netanyahu apparently made considerable progress in building the case for further (and ideally joint) military action against Iran. Expect that, and talk of regime change, to intensify in the coming weeks and months, with a new ‘Axis of Evil’ being cooked up to include, for instance, Venezuela (note, for instance, this claim by former military intelligence officer and INSS researcher Danny Citrinowicz that "Venezuela is the hub" of Iran's activity in Latin America.) Iran, and indeed Trump, will feature prominently in Netanyahu's reelection campaign in 2026.

4) Finally, Trump made what was on the face of it a remarkable offhand claim that were it not for Netanyahu, it is very possible that “Israel would not exist.” On one level, this could be dismissed as just more Trumpian bombast—feeding Israeli time-honoured narratives regarding the schemes of its adversaries as well as more short-term Netanyahu braggadocio. It may though speak to a sense that Trump has previously referenced of Israel’s vulnerability—he has mentioned before Israel’s global isolation (and forced the apology to Qatar) and even the waning power of its lobby in the U.S. There is a truth to the notion that Israel is over-extended and that its extremism is generating new exposures; a zero-sum Zionist regime is an endless source of regional destabilization and militant escalation. Without elaborating on that now, let me draw attention to the recent comments of Mouin Rabbani distinguishing between Israel as an ideological state, the need to de-institutionalize Zionism as a racist state structure, and the Jewish-Israeli population—whose rights and interests need to be respected in any future political dispensation.

As Israeli PM Netanyahu prepares for an expected fifth meeting of the year in the U.S. with President Trump (and sixth overall presidential audience in the same timespan), it is Israel which continues to dictate terms on the ground with little counterpressure or interference.

I am sharing here an update on developments since my last post on Substack assessing post-‘ceasefire’ dynamics as well as Israel’s moves on the West Bank and regionally. Unfortunately, the grim expectations outlined in that last post have largely been borne out. I had the opportunity to discuss some of these issues regarding Gaza last week on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, which can be viewed here, and looked at Israel’s latest actions in the West Bank in the latest episode of the same show.

The reality previously described is becoming more entrenched—where diplomatic circles, especially in the West, maintain the pretence of there being a ceasefire while relegating Gaza to the low-maintenance tray of international diplomacy—a situation perfectly convenient for Israel’s leaders.

As its crimes recede from the headlines, Israel is busy stymying its Phase 2 deliverables and reverting to a familiar strategy of obstruction and blame-shifting, mostly with the backing of the U.S.

Despite the occasional talk of transitioning to Phase 2 of the Gaza ceasefire agreement and leaked tidbits hinting at imminent announcements on Board of Peace nominations, governance structures, international forces and investments, the reality in Gaza and beyond remains bleak.

Israel has been given the green light to define a ceasefire as the continuation of lethal military assaults on a daily basis, the direct occupation of over 50% of the territory of Gaza (incrementally moving the so-called Yellow Line to seize more land under cover of the ‘ceasefire’) and again having senior international officials and ministers from third countries serving as truck-counting desk officers.

Israel could take further satisfaction in the passage of UNSCR 2803, giving an international legal imprimatur to a plan which undermines ICJ rulings, while making conditional and handing Israel a veto over Palestinian inalienable rights, including that to self-determination.

The bottom line is a more, not less, entrenched Israeli presence in Gaza (with recent analysis of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture and DropSite News finding that Israel has built 13 new military outposts since the ceasefire took effect) and of a Gaza plan in which the only components advancing towards implementation are those which serve maximalist Israeli positions while further undermining Palestinian rights and interests.

All this is happening while pragmatic Hamas proposals that could address longer-term security, including via a hudna, burying, non-display, and non-use of weapons and Israeli withdrawal, are a priori continuously ignored. Simultaneously, Israel is upping the ante in the West Bank and pushing escalation, not only in Syria and Lebanon, but also on the Iran front as it seeks to draw the U.S. back deeper into its wars of choice.

One telling sign is how this deal has been received by the most radical factions inside an Israeli government that is characterised by extremism. The Ben-Gvir and Smotrich factions have been quiescent in response to the deal, reassured, understanding that the existing ceasefire allows Israel to maintain control in Gaza, and can be aligned with the goals they have set for ethnically cleansing Palestinians and preparing Jewish resettlement. A deal considered unproblematic to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich should raise alarm bells.

As Netanyahu heads to the U.S., a natural moment of progression has been reached within the plan itself, with all the Israelis held having been returned other than the last remaining body—anticipated to either be returned shortly, or acknowledged by neutrals to be untraceable (even though Israel will characteristically instrumentalise the issue). Trump himself acknowledged when the deal was reached that not all the bodies may be retrievable. While there have been reports of frustration with Israel in the White House over a lack of progress in Phase 2, frustration with Israel and pressure on Israel are not at all the same thing.

There is a broader and intense questioning within the MAGA movement of the U.S. relationship with Israel. The ferocity of the Israel First vs. America First debate is unprecedented, but it is premature to expect a change in policy, in particular given the intense Israel loyalty of senior members of Trump’s team.

In parallel, there is a reluctance on the part of America’s allies—in the region, Europe, and elsewhere—to call out the deep holes and flaws in what has been put forward. Each state is managing its own equities with the Trump administration, and for none does Palestine register as a top priority. The regional mediating parties—Türkiye, Qatar, and Egypt—have been attempting to get the U.S. to move beyond acceptance of Israel’s naysaying, thus far without tangible results. Meanwhile, the recognised Palestine national leadership of the PLO and PA is neither attempting to nor capable of pushing that agenda. The U.S. is not challenging Israel where it counts—a modus operandi that is very familiar.

It is worth setting out in detail the issues around which policy deliberations and pronouncements are likely to revolve in the coming weeks—not because genuine progress should be expected, but rather to help see through the Israeli-U.S. gameplan:

1. Gaza Governance—Board of Peace; Executive Implementation; and a Palestinian Technocratic Committee:

Diplomatic activity around the issues of governance, management, and service provision inside Gaza revolves around decentering Palestinian interests and agency, as designated in the Trump plan and UNSCR 2803. It is quite an achievement by Israel and the U.S. to have international endorsement for a new layer of imposed external control.

This is also the area in which announcements of progress on Phase 2 might happen first: President Trump appointed himself as the head of the Board of Peace, and the rumour mill is active regarding other heads of state who might serve alongside him. In a meeting in Florida on December 19th between U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and senior representatives of the regional mediating parties – the only operational component mentioned as a near-term prospect was “the establishment and operationalisation of the Board of Peace.” In practice, announcing a list of names on a Board of Peace, as if that constitutes progress, is risible but also largely irrelevant.

The tier below the Board of Peace is anticipated to have a more active managerial function as an executive implementation body. This is where ex-U.K. PM Blair is likely to be slotted in (recently exposed as one of the most frequent foreign dignitaries to visit Netanyahu since the Israeli premier had an ICC arrest warrant against his name). Jared Kushner may or may not play a central role in this body, while Nickolay Mladenov—former Bulgarian FM and UN envoy—is being touted as the lead candidate to head this body. It is also noteworthy that Mladenov serves as the Director-General of the UAE’s diplomatic academy.

It is the third tier of this structure, below the two colonial international levels, which is most keenly contested—what is described in UNSCR 2803 as a “technocratic apolitical committee of competent Palestinians.” It is no surprise that Israel would have an interest in creating a level of depoliticised co-opted Palestinian Bantustan governance that no longer retains even the nominal linkage to a PLO mandate of national liberation (which the West Bank Palestinian Authority still formally does). Various parties are recommending names of Palestinians, some in an attempt to create an element of legitimacy and political linkage, others in the service of Israel’s efforts to achieve the opposite. If the effort to create a depoliticised more-Bantustan-than-the-PA, and Israeli-U.S. controlled body is successful, then rather than the PA assuming powers in Gaza, expect this new invention over time to be imposed in the West Bank.

2. An International Force in Gaza

The ISF continues to attract diplomatic attention—most recently, on December 16th, the U.S. Central Command hosted a gathering of potential contributing states in Doha.

Israel understands that even under terms it considers favourable, international forces in Palestinian territories would likely limit the IDF’s freedom of action, will inevitably be additional eyes and ears on the ground bearing witness to Israeli war crimes, and would set a precedent—generating pressure for a similar deployment in the West Bank. As previously noted, Israel’s default position is therefore to prevent an international force the mandate of which might include any element of protection for Palestinians. The creation of such a force would also be a political headache for Israel’s premier, as such a move would face inevitable opposition from his coalition allies and therefore threaten governmental stability.

What is more, the premise of the ISF includes assuming control in areas from which the IDF would withdraw—in other words, the plan links ISF deployment to the Israeli military winding down its occupation of over 50% of Gaza. Yet another reason Israel opposes the idea.

The Israeli side will be pleased that the only international architecture thus far created (one not actually referred to in the plan) is a Civil Military Coordination Centre (CMCC), based in Kiryat Gat. The CMCC is a highly user-friendly vehicle for the Israelis—rather than leading to pressure on Israel to, for instance, increase aid, it has become an opportunity for Israel (and the American co-hosts of the control room) to embed their own narratives, intelligence, and siloing of other international actors whose presence at the CMCC exists at Israel’s forbearance. The CMCC has helped to normalise international collaboration with an Israeli military that is currently being investigated for genocide and other war crimes.

Israel continues to use the disarmament of Hamas demand as the go-to argument to derail any progress. But what has been increasingly demystified in recent weeks is that modalities could be put in place regarding military capabilities and security arrangements vis-à-vis Hamas, even prior to addressing Palestinian liberation, rights and the entirety of the conflict. Senior Hamas officials have gone into some detail with regard to possible options for achieving this (including in a recent interview of Khaled Meshaal with DropSite News’ Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad.) Those include possibilities for a long-term hudna, the non-use and non-display of weapons, including the option to bury weapons. These are pragmatic propositions that draw on other experiences in de-escalation.

What is neither realistic nor serious is the forcible and complete disarming and dismantling of resistance when that has not been achieved militarily by the more powerful party in an asymmetrical conflict, and when the causes of the conflict—the occupation, apartheid, and structural violence visited on the Palestinian people—are still very much in place. If there is to be a way forward, Hamas’s pragmatic positions would need to be engaged with and seen as the basis for agreement.

Absent such an approach, one should expect any near-term announcements on the ISF to follow those anticipated on the governance front—in other words, bearing little relevance to possible positive change on the ground that protects Palestinians and deters Israel. One could envision, for example, the U.S. announcing that the ISF box has been ticked when the reality consists of little more than the existing CMCC, perhaps alongside troops from certain countries establishing bases inside the Israeli-controlled zone of Gaza with no peace-advancing function. The U.S. could deploy a clutch of additional competencies to define the ISF job as done. The Times of Israel, for instance, reported U.S. officials describing ISF involvement being constituted by logistical support, training of Palestinian police, and funding (all things already happening in different configurations.)

3. Aid, Reconstruction, and Displacement

In one of the most transparently egregious violations of the first stage of the ceasefire, aid deliveries not only continue to be blocked, but have fallen dramatically short of the 600 trucks per day agreed upon in point 7 of the plan. UN data shows that from October 10th until December 19th, 8,724 trucks have entered Gaza via the various crossings—translating into approximately 124 trucks per day. Under wintry conditions and flooding, Israel is preventing the entry of shelter for the displaced population. As UNRWA, Amnesty International, and others have noted, there are food parcels and shelter waiting at the border to which Israeli officials refuse entry, including UN tents, blankets, repair materials, and other essentials for the winter.

This follows an October 22nd ICJ ruling, issued in response to a case initiated by Norway, which found that Israel’s continued restriction on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza violates its international obligations. This policy is in part used as a negotiating lever by Israel, for whom it is convenient to keep the wheels of diplomacy centered on daily machinations around aid access—exposing the unwillingness of Western states to use hard leverage. In light of Israel’s actions and openly broadcast intentions in the last two years, one should assume that gratuitous cruelty is also at work.

There is, however, another disturbing component to this policy that should be taken seriously: plans continued to be aired by senior Israeli ministers for the permanent displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. Examples of this proliferate, such as the obvious Israeli fingerprints on high-profile encouragement of Palestinian relocation to third countries via organisations such as Al-Majd Europe and Israel’s apparent consent to only open the Rafah Crossing to Egypt for exiting Palestinians.

That would seem to contradict discussions reported to take place between the U.S. and Israel regarding ‘Alternative Safe Communities’ in the so-called ‘green’ Israeli-controlled zone as spaces for Palestinian future residence. Plans for the construction of a ‘New Rafah’ have been leaked, which could be home for about 25,000 people, including new residential compounds and the provision of services. Setting aside for a moment whether Palestinians would feel safe under an Israel-controlled regime given existing experience, even the limited amount that is known about such areas sounds more like internment-style camps with constant surveillance, patrolling, and Israeli vetting.

If these ever come into existence, expect them to be camps for Israeli-sponsored militias and their dependents; areas from which Israel could continue to launch interference and civil disturbance among the broader ‘red zone’ Palestinian population. Mostly such schemes are designed as window dressing to distract attention from the appalling conditions imposed by Israel and its displacement plans, designed to impress the U.S. administration, potential private sector contractors and consultants who are sniffing opportunities to profit from this misery. Reports on a ‘Project Sunrise’ envisage Palestinians in Gaza (who were never consulted on these cruel schemes) becoming indebted to the U.S. and others for their munificent provision of loans. Again, if anything is built in the Israeli zone, don’t be surprised if it is eventually inhabited by Israeli Jewish settlers rather than Palestinians.

The assumption that external donors will be forthcoming is itself revealing. A question rarely asked is whether having destroyed Gaza, Israel should not be held accountable for the funds needed for its rebuilding and for compensation for the damage caused. Israel has significant assets in overseas institutions, yet one hears no calls to freeze or confiscate those assets. Another alternative being floated by Israel is for the tax revenues that it collects and steals from the Palestinian Authority to be diverted to projects of Israel’s choosing in Gaza.

4. The West Bank and the Annexation Red Herring Problem

On December 21st, Religious Zionism leader and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that the current Israeli government has legalised settlements at an “unprecedented pace.” Quite a bar to hit given Israel’s decades-long relentless expropriation and settlement of Palestinian land. Netanyahu’s current government has just finalised the approval of 19 new settlements, making a total of 69 settlements ‘legalised’ during its tenure—of course, the term legalised is theirs, the entirety of the settlement project and the occupation itself are illegal under international law.

The international focus on a formal legislative act of annexation, and its prevention, is a red herring gift that keeps giving for Israel. Even the Trump administration has intervened to prevent Israel from legislating the formal extension of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. In so doing, the U.S. and certain European and regional states have sent the signal that any other action is apparently permitted with little to no consequences. ‘Do anything but annexation’ was the dance around which the Abraham Accords were choreographed between Israel and the states involved in that initiative.

What Israel is in fact doing in the West Bank is more consequential than an act of annexation. Israel categorically rejects two-states, Israel is ‘prevented’ from annexing so that the pretext of a Potemkin peace process can be sustained. What has gone on in recent years, and exponentially accelerated since October 7th 2023, is a level of destruction of Palestinian land, housing, and infrastructure, unprecedented displacement and significant advances in closing down UNRWA, alongside the massive empowerment of settler militias, with whom the IDF very occasionally clashes (mostly in a wink to the outside world to deflect pressure).

Western governments have occasionally taken action against settler leaders, settler entities, and settler projects. But this is largely an exercise in cosplay given that the one and only address for anything settler related is the State of Israel itself, and the fact that it is the job of every state institution to maintain, sustain, and advance the settler project—in other words, to reinforce what is being, correctly, legally designated as an apartheid regime.

5. Israel Still Pushing Regional Escalation

In the lead-up to his planned Florida meeting with Trump, Netanyahu and his team are busy creating the impression that regional escalation, whether in Lebanon or Iran or both, is a question of when, not if. Undoubtedly, that is in part a typical bait-and-switch maneuver to downplay the Gaza scenarios described above, and there are invariably elements of psyops, but the intensity of Israel’s mobilisation of the case for America to join further regional aggression is noteworthy.

Israel is maintaining zones of military occupation (what it calls ‘security zones’) in both Syria and Lebanon. Israeli troops are deployed up to 15km inside Syrian territory, frequently attacking Syrian positions, while attempting to dictate no-go zones for the Syrian military and deepening relations with allied Druze and Kurdish militias in Syria. Displays of pragmatic realpolitik on the part of Syrian President Al-Shara’a, and an apparent willingness to pursue a non-aggression pact with Israel, are met with a familiar shrug in Jerusalem.

The pattern is similar, albeit more extreme, with Lebanon. Israel’s model of a U.S.-backed ceasefire defined by continued Israeli freedom of military action, of which they consistently avail, was tested in Lebanon before being applied to Gaza. Again, a Lebanese governmental attempt at problem solving concessions to moderate Israel’s attacks—including highly unusual direct Israeli-Lebanese talks—are met with a doubling down of Israeli maximalism.

There is a common thread running through Israel’s positions on the Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine fronts. When Israel is faced with a protagonist willing to compromise and the prospect of Arab and U.S. support for ostensibly favourable dispensations, it rejects these moments of opportunity and instead pursues a path of attempted military and political domination. Subsequent efforts by Arab and regional actors with the Trump administration to expose Israeli rejectionism, with a view to Washington intervening to assert more balanced arrangements, have failed to demonstrate efficacy. Netanyahu continues to bet that America will accede to Israel’s plans, that the region will be unable to mount a sufficient combined countermove, and that brute military aggression will prevail. It is an approach that also serves Netanyahu’s political and economic vision of a mobilised and militarised society, alongside a Keynesian model of overcompensating reservist soldiers to pump money into the domestic economy.

The major development in recent days from Israeli leadership circles has been an intensification of threats against Iran. A recent headline in the Netanyahu-friendly newspaper Israel Hayom read: ‘Israel prepares intelligence dossier to convince Trump on new Iran strike.’ All of the background briefings and ‘leaks’ to security correspondents push the narrative that time is running out on preventing Iran from reconstituting its threat capacity, and that the only sustainable solution is regime change in Tehran. These themes have been echoed by some of the most prominent members of Israel’s Republican echo chamber, including U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Senator Lindsey Graham (it should be considered that Netanyahu also sees this through an electoral-political lens.)

The resumption of more intense warfare against Lebanon or Iran, and pulling the U.S. directly back into that, would be unpopular in the region and in America itself, where the standoff between the Israel First and America First forces keeps intensifying. The equation is as stark as it is familiar: deploy leverage to rein Israel in or allow mayhem and destruction to prevail.

Even before a familiar day of mass killing of Palestinians on October 19^th, Israeli forces had taken the lives of 40 more in Gaza via direct fire, shelling, and air strikes, including 11 members of the Shaaban family. That was in addition to Israel’s continued stop-start approach to allowing in the limited aid agreed. The death toll on the 19^th was two Israeli soldiers and 45 Palestinians.

The ceasefire generated immense relief – seeing the last twenty Israelis held in Gaza, the military age males, joyously returned to their loved ones; the approximately 1,950 Palestinian prisoners released (albeit some forced into exile), many having been sentenced by the military tribunals of Israel’s illegal occupation, many others held without any pretence of legal procedure; the immeasurable hope that the Palestinian Gaza population would no longer face unconscionable daily killing, destruction, displacement and starvation from Israel’s relentless assault.

All of that is real, albeit painfully fragile. By contrast, the claims of the American President to have delivered peace after 3,000 years were pure fiction.

It makes sense that U.S. officials are the lead actors – Vice President JD Vance was in Israel following-up Trump’s visit, as were envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio due to follow. After all, this was not just Israel’s war, but America’s – it could not have continued without the limitless supply of American weaponry alongside political, diplomatic and economic support. Indeed, to prove that equation, the ceasefire was declared when America decided it would be (a decision President Biden and his team refused to make in the first 15 months of Israel’s killing spree).

An American enabled war has given way to an American dictated deal. The regional mediators working with the U.S. delivered the consent of Hamas to a (deeply flawed) arrangement by for the first time creating maximum plausibility around the hardest sticking point – that this time Israel would not resume its assault. That is already being tested.

Israel attempted to annihilate the Hamas negotiators in the midst of their discussing an American ceasefire plan and conducted that strike in the sovereign territory of Qatar – an American ally and home to the largest U.S. military base in the region. Israel thereby undermined the relations of the Gulf states with the U.S. Meanwhile, international pressure was being dialled up, Netanyahu spoke of isolation and economic autarky, and that did not play well inside Israel. Those elements formed the backdrop to Trump making Netanyahu an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Netanyahu has a victory narrative, the embrace of the U.S., and indeed much to like in the 20-point plan. But this agreement was reached under duress – Israel’s far-reaching war aims, its total victory, were not achieved.

As is evident, Hamas remains standing. It is militarily diminished but resilient and adding new recruits. Politically, its message of resistance resonates further. The dreams of an ethnically cleansed Gaza becoming a new riviera and of Zionist resettlement have not (for now at least) been realized. Israel’s actions since the ceasefire demonstrate that the dream of forcibly displacing Palestinians from “Greater Israel” still resonates.

Despite the bombast, there is no peace plan, the 20-point paper is empty in that respect. No flourish of grandiose claims can make up for that absence. There have been lavish ceremonial gatherings in the past (the Annapolis relaunch of peace efforts in 2007 under President George W. Bush had both more countries and more Arab League member states in attendance). But on each peace process occasion, when the music has stopped, it has always been the Palestinians still left with no chair.

The haphazard nature of the American proposal (despite Arab states efforts to solidify its content) contains the seeds of its own unravelling. There is no escaping the shadow cast by a combination of U.S. unseriousness and indulgence of Israeli extremism. That predilection is both historic and contemporary. The Trump administration has form – its previous ‘From Peace to Prosperity’ plan of 2020 was cut from this same cloth of enabling a permanent Israeli regime of apartheid over Palestinians. Current efforts are possibly teeing up a division of Gaza into two zones, with half the territory possibly coming under a resumed, permanent Israeli dominion.

Surely then, if Trump turns his attention away from this file, Israel can get away with anything, and if U.S. engagement dominates, then Israel can still get away with anything.

Yes, but: the unpredictability of Trump, his desire to assume the peacemaker (and prize winner) mantle, the personal relations with regional leaders (partly reflecting the shifting map of global geo-economic power), and the newly emerging fissures within the MAGA world regarding America First versus Israel First are all relevant and should be tactically maximized. These may offer a rather thin reed of opportunity to grasp.

Elsewhere, popular mobilization and pressure have pushed Israeli-allied Western governments out of their and Israel’s comfort zone – maintaining that push will be crucial.

Certain taboos have been broken in the last weeks. The U.S. is engaged directly with the Hamas leadership – something that should have been obvious all along – but something Democrat administrations conspicuously failed to do, along with European governments. While it would be premature to say that the U.S. monopoly as mediator has been superseded by a genuinely multilateral approach, it is the case that diplomatic interventions now have a more regionalized and internationalized element than previously prevailed. That could make a difference going forward.

The 20-point plan did not play out in Israeli politics as Netanyahu perhaps hoped. His victory narrative has been consistently punctured in mainstream discourse as being a bluff, acknowledging that Hamas has not been vanquished, and that this has been costly to Israel in reputational and other ways. While domestic questioning of what Israel has done to Palestinians remains largely absent and unseen in media, vulnerabilities and divisions are evident. In many respects, the Israeli political environment after the hostage release is a more uncertain one – the effect has been disruptive, and there are new divisions within the pro-Bibi camp. Netanyahu’s own political calculation still leans into maintaining the existing coalition in order to drive changes advantageous to managing his court case and political longevity. Israeli society remains fragmented.

Opposite that, there has perhaps never been such clarity in Palestinian politics as to the need for renewal, re-legitimation and a re-unifying of ranks. Given the intensity of engagement with Hamas, the idea that the Fatah-led PA in Ramallah can remain relevant by relying on division has been revealed in all its absurdity. Assuming the mantle of the amenable Palestinian to curry favour with Israel’s allies renders the PA irrelevant – a more compromised Palestinian fig leaf of collaborator can always be found (as in any community).

If Fatah and the PLO are again to assume agency, it will require a path of reuniting with other political and social forces, drawing on sources of legitimacy that embrace Palestinian political pluralism and diversity, including struggle. Hamas has stated that national decisions are for a national movement to agree on. Palestinian representation has been the single most conspicuous absence in this supposed peace festival. Palestinian leadership is needed to plug that gap.

Given the apparent confusion and uncertainty in interpreting current events, in relating to this flimsy plan, and in assessing what can be done, below is an attempt to unpack some key issues:

1. Sustaining a ceasefire or manufacturing chaos

If there were something useful to distil from Trump’s Sharm El-Sheikh Summit and Knesset appearances, that would consist in emphasizing to Israel the clear message that the war is over and the ceasefire will hold.

Israel has reneged on previous ceasefires, Netanyahu continues to talk the language of war and has maintained a coalition that exists on a premise of permanent aggression and maximalism towards Palestinians (plenty of opportunity for that is available in the West Bank too).

A Trump support act of 26 leaders gathered at Sharm (in addition, curiously, FIFA football President Gianni Infantino was also present – will football get its own state before the Palestinians do?). Those leaders were there both to ingratiate themselves to the capricious American leader, but also (and less demeaning) to entrench that perception of a moment of great import – the end to a war.

That partly answers the question of how this ceasefire was reached – Hamas was pressured, but it still needed to be convinced that there was maximum plausibility to the ceasefire commitment. That could easily be delivered by a U.S. willing to use its considerable, practical material leverage over Israel. It won’t. Therefore, the closest thing to a guarantee was to create this perception.

The problem, as is already very evident, is that the flimsy terms of the agreement – intentional from its Israeli authors (and presumably also some of their American acolytes) allow plenty of wiggle room for interpretation, for continued deadly IDF military interventions, and for undermining any truly better horizon for Palestinians in Gaza.

Hamas too can derive some benefits from this situation – grossly illegitimate external dictates are easier to dismiss and Trump’s latest threats are hollow, Israeli backed gangs are particularly unpopular, and if chaos is the default, then the return of Hamas structures will be more readily accepted by the public.

By refusing to engage in a pragmatic, realist fashion – one that genuinely incorporates Palestinian interests, freedoms and rights, or indeed governance and security needs in Gaza – the U.S. plan (and its bias) has an inbuilt structural instability guaranteed.

That is convenient for Israel. It intends for the continued IDF military presence in half of Gaza to be permanent and to enhance its support for armed gangs and militias to ferment disorder. So, while the bar for a return to mass killing and devastation might have been raised higher, one is still seeing daily Palestinian casualties.

In many areas previously heavily populated by Palestinians before the destruction and displacement, Israeli forces remain in parts of cities and neighbourhoods, creating very obvious and immediate points of friction. Because there is no serious plan with any Palestinian ownership for future governance, chaos is the default. For Israel, it is the preference.

The only option for filling that vacuum is the presence of the civil police force associated with the previous Hamas governing institutions (who have been sporadically present).

Palestinians have shown remarkable resilience, and Israeli schemes tend to generate highly predictable blowback. Hamas has demonstrated that in spite of its losses, it can reassert its presence on the ground.

While Israel may try to carve out zones of control for the gangs it is arming and will try to deploy those militias as a destabilizing force, Palestinians are very unlikely to volunteer to live in Israeli-controlled zones (even if Jared Kushner has now appeared to bless such a plan for construction zones, presumably with lots of lucrative contracts for building and supplies to be awarded).

Hamas has long agreed (also prior to 2023) to step back from governance in Gaza, and it has discussed a formula with mediators for certain weaponry to be handed to a legitimate Palestinian successor structure and for non-display of other weapons. Hamas cannot be expected to disarm – resistance does not stand down when an illegal armed occupation is still in place.

Israel seems to be pursuing a policy of civil war promotion (which is not new, see under Lebanon and Syria).

The release of 20 living Israelis in an agreement after long months in which Israel tried and failed to launch rescue operations, without any defections or betrayals on the part of the armed resistance groups holding Israelis (including also Palestinian Islamic Jihad), and after two years of an Israeli siege, are all evidence of Hamas durability that should not be taken lightly.

However, Israel and the U.S. have thus far rejected the kind of realism that is needed and has been demonstrated in conflicts elsewhere which involve armed anti-occupation resistance. Instead, they have sought to impose colonial style, external governance structures, with at most a co-opted sprinkling of token Palestinians.

One question for the coming days and weeks is whether the attempt to design an International Stabilization Force (ISF) can be an alternative to this trajectory of chaos.

2. The International Stabilization Force (ISF)

One issue around which there has been intense diplomatic contacts over the last week is that of creating an ISF.

In the plan the ISF is tasked to secure border areas, prevent munitions entering Gaza and to train Palestinian police. It does not reference what is most needed in such a force, namely, to protect Palestinians and act as a tripwire against renewed Israeli killings and incursions. That is hardly surprising — it aligns with the overall indifference to Palestinian life displayed in the 20-point plan, which is also a bi-partisan constant of American policy.

The ISF is depicted as the key to unlocking the further withdrawal of Israel’s occupation forces from the more than 50% of Gaza which they continue to directly control. The physical demarcation of this so-called yellow line implies that Israel’s forces are not withdrawing anytime soon. A constructive ISF mandate and structure could serve as a precedent for the West Bank. And these are precisely the reasons Israel is not enthusiastic.

It is my understanding that those details are currently under discussion, being led by U.S. CENTCOM commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, in consultation with regional parties and with what are touted to be the main contributors, Indonesia (whose president has openly spoken of sending 20,000 troops) and possibly Azerbaijan. We know that the U.S. has 200 of its forces in Israel, not Gaza, and other states would send a contingent mostly for training, coordinating and specific missions, rather than large deployments.

Egypt will undoubtedly play a lead role. And for all the talk of a regional presence, any contribution from the Gulf, Jordan or others, including Türkiye, will be circumscribed in size and mandate.

The fact that the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) is based inside Israel is a hardly subtle hint as to who the Americans will take their cues from. For instance, during his visit, U.S. Vice President JD Vance got to “see Gaza” through the eyes of Israeli/U.S. drone surveillance at that sterile CMCC facility in Kiryat Gat (he really didn’t need to fly 10 plus hours from the Beltway for that).

If Indonesia establishes channels with Israel as part of a constructive ISF mandate then that should not be confused with normalization (although the latter will be the spin) – but there are other ways this could play out with Indonesia which would be unhelpful to both the domestic politics of the leadership in Jakarta and in sending the wrong signal of impunity to Israel.

One question is whether the force will come under a UN Security Council mandate or at least have the Council’s endorsement or whether any UN consent is rejected (as happened with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in the Sinai).

Back-to-back understandings could be reached with Hamas regarding the role of the ISF (along the lines described in point 1 above). But if the mandate of the force is to disarm Hamas, then its fate as a bloody failure will be sealed, and that is precisely what Israel’s government wants. In spite of hints to the contrary, the IDF will not vacate the areas of Gaza it has reoccupied in order to make way for an ISF.

The ISF question is worth watching closely – will it take shape, and if so, as another layer of occupation over Palestinians, or a force that can act in accordance with the advancement of international law and the protection of Palestinians?

3. Aid to Gaza

Throughout its’ two-year assault on the Palestinian civilian population, Israel has prevented and weaponized aid and assistance – and lied about it incessantly. It should come as no surprise then that Israel insisted on continuing to control what materials and aid can enter Gaza and at what volume. Within days, Israel was reneging even on the arrangements agreed to in the 20-point plan.

The fact that only under the duress of this deal did the Israeli government accept the entry of aid – exposed (again) that when Israel claimed not to be preventing aid (and blamed Hamas), and when those claims were loyally regurgitated by Western media, it was all just a campaign of disinformation.

Israel’s go-to place long before October 2023 has been the criminal collective punishment of the entirety of Gaza’s population by dialling down and up (although invariably down) what is allowed into that territory. Its modus operandi is to play a well-rehearsed game that gives international donor governments access to disburse aid (who get to tell their own publics, ‘look, we are helping’) in exchange for indulging Israel’s constant illegal actions across the occupied Palestinian territories. That was the story of more than a decade and a half of the blockade on Gaza since 2007. The current effort is designed to bring back a show which deserves no re-runs.

The weaponized cruelty around access of desperately needed goods to Gaza was plunged to new depths with the creation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Although the GHF has been thoroughly exposed as a criminal exercise in genocide profiteering and enabling, it is not something that either the Israeli leadership or the GHF private sector beneficiaries will give up without a fight.

It has been announced that Mike Eisenberg (Israeli-American GHF founder) has been appointed – it seems by both the U.S. and Israel – to serve as a representative to the U.S. command centre that oversees the Gaza deal. There may well be an effort in Israeli controlled areas of Gaza to attempt to lure Palestinians by allowing stocks of goods and reconstruction projects that are prevented from reaching “unoccupied Gaza” – although the defining disposition of inhumanity towards Palestinians guarantees that such schemes will be of very limited efficacy, attraction, and longevity.

On the aid front, the need could not be clearer: access for what is needed in Gaza – in terms of humanitarian assistance, basic supplies, medicines, materials for reconstruction and even shelter during the winter months – must be secured outside of Israeli control. All states involved in the aid effort who claim to be prioritizing Palestinian wellbeing should insist on this one principle.

The Israeli claims of dual use and security prerequisites are an excuse, and any genuine concerns can effectively be managed by third parties without Israeli interference. In such a context, the most effective routes for dispersing assistance and resuming economic activity should be pursued – whether via the Egyptian border and/or by creating port or landing strip facilities in Gaza that are not under Israeli control.

The issue here is not logistical – it is (along with most key issues to be addressed) a question of political will in standing up to Israeli bullying.

4. Accountability

When a conflict situation transitions, often to an initial highly fragile peace, the question of accountability can be a dilemma – go for justice or turn a page and don’t look back. Different modalities in post-conflict settings have been tried in order to address that, such as processes for transitional justice or truth and reconciliation.

That quandary is not in play in this instance – Palestine/Israel is not a post-conflict scenario. It is precisely the absence of accountability, the absolute impunity and exceptionalism applied to Israel, which ushered in this catastrophe and extremism.

So, accountability matters — not only because it impacts the Israeli incentive structure – but also, because an absence of accountability normalizes this level of war crimes. What has unequivocally been missing in all the talk of ceasefire, is accountability. There is a determined push to move on, nothing to see here, a denial of what has gone on or that those responsible have anything to answer or compensate for.

In fact, the dehumanization of Palestinians continues, and as such, also continues to lay the groundwork for further cruelty and criminality. Security is still talked about as something only Israelis are worthy of. Ensuring the return of all the bodies of slain Israelis is absolutely worthy. The return of Palestinian bodies held by Israel, including many that have been mutilated, is paid scant or zero attention.

While Trump has justifiably and laudably met on multiple occasions with the families of those Israelis who were held in Gaza, no senior American official is recorded to have met a Palestinian survivor of the Gaza atrocities or families impacted by the slaughter.

Western media is still prevented from entering Gaza and largely fails to adequately engage local journalists.

Failing to uphold accountability matters well beyond the confines of the Palestine/Israel space. It is chipping away at the already crumbling edifice of the international architecture for upholding law, charters, and conventions – in other words of protecting people everywhere.

The locus of activity should be precisely in those spaces where the push for continued impunity is most active —particularly against the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and the implementation of their rulings. The ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu should matter. Israel’s violations of not only the ICJ opinion of July 19, 2024, on the illegality of the occupation in its entirety, but also of the provisional measures ruled in the South African genocide case and the continuation of that case is where public pressure should be mobilized (in particular, third state complicity).

On October 22^nd, the ICJ made another important ruling that ordered Israel to facilitate rather than prevent UNRWA and other UN agencies from providing humanitarian, relief and other assistance in Gaza.

Compliance with all these rulings is what the Hague Group has been set up to promote. That should also be applied to the issue of compensation – it’s the Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule – Israel broke it, Israel should be on the hook in paying to fix it. And even if that is unlikely to be attainable in the foreseeable future, it matters because it puts Israel on the defensive and can create leverage, rather than a priori accepting Netanyahu’s primacy in dictating what happens next.

5. A final thought

A faultline is apparently emerging in the diplomacy around this plan. The Palestinians do not have an effective or unified leadership to press their case in governmental circles. Other states have their own priorities vis-a-vis the U.S. administration. Some of the regional parties involved understand the flaws in what is being proposed and will attempt to, in part, mitigate those. Even while operating within the envelope of a hugely problematic American plan, some are prioritizing getting a ceasefire entrenched, preventing a return to killing, getting aid in, and attempting to find a modality where IDF withdrawal might be possible and for the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem not to be forgotten.

But that is not the vision of the U.S. and Israel, who are driving this plan. The intention there is increasingly transparent, and it consists of the following: try to keep the non-IDF controlled zones unliveable for Palestinians with sporadic killing, chaos and the encouragement of civil war (if that leads to mass displacement of Palestinians outside of Gaza, all the better); attempt to create economic and residential zones where the IDF or possible future ISF is in control under a combination of external-colonial and quisling-Palestinian governance (despite its co-optation by Israel, the Palestinian Authority still contains a liberationist nationalist reflex, and is therefore deemed an unacceptable partner).

That model could perhaps be replicated later in the West Bank and, in the meantime, will allow private companies and well-connected individuals à la GHF model, to continue war profiteering. There are divisions within this model between Israeli hardliners who see this as a stepping off point to resuming genocide, and American hardliners who are content with a return to bedding down apartheid and shrinking the Palestinian Bantustans.

In the future, if there is an Israeli government willing to give the Palestinian Bantustans a nomenclature upgrade (state minus?), then the push for normalization will be resumed at full thrust.

If this more or less captures the current state of play, then the alternative position is easier to delineate. That will consist of exposing what is really happening: maintaining and intensifying the public push for pressure on governments to challenge Israeli impunity; working to increase divisions and the questioning of this approach inside Israel; and to stand up a more united Palestinian politics best able to counter such machinations.

While the strength of the U.S.-Israel position would seem hard to challenge, the capacity for hubris, overreach and misreading of realities on the ground should not be underestimated. And occasional U.S.-Israel tensions can be incentivised and utilised. As one saw with the GHF, Israeli-birthed structures are incapable of treating Palestinians humanely, and these zones will not succeed.

Israel’s aggression in the West Bank has reached a ferocious intensity that will also not go unnoticed. On 22^nd October, Israel’s Knesset advanced legislation to annex Palestinian territory (backed on the Zionist side by most of the so-called ‘more moderate’ opposition). These and measures elsewhere will continue to stir popular opposition globally and locally. Regional governments may bend themselves to America’s will, but are not going to risk their own structures of societal consent by endorsing more massacres or resuming premature normalisation. And most of all, Palestinian resilience has not been vanquished.

It would be unwise to take Israeli attempts to project invincibility at face value. The next chapter is yet to be written – it is naïve to assume that the existing penholders are locked-in or immune to pressure and change.

We are calling to move from a fragile ceasefire and flawed plan to achieve actual justice, peace and equality that ends Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid and that best guarantees a future for Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike.

The letter is a contribution to reclaiming a Jewish universal ethic and to mobilizing sustained pressure, calling on all states to take clear action, ending with four important demands in this respect.

We have a great initial set of Jewish signers from across the world and from diverse fields, with many prominent and award-winning initial signatories.

Posting here below the full text of the letter.

That text along with names of some of the initial signers is on the new Jews Demand Action website here where you can also sign onto the letter – please do if relevant.

JEWS DEMAND ACTION

OPEN LETTER

His Excellency, Mr. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations,

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Heads of State, Permanent Representatives to the United Nations,
‍
It is with great relief that we welcome the ceasefire, the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian captives, and the hope for an end to the daily killing, destruction, displacement, and starvation in Gaza. And yet there should be no doubt that this ceasefire is fragile: Israeli forces remain in Gaza, the agreement makes no reference to the West Bank, the underlying conditions of occupation, apartheid, and the denial of Palestinian rights remain unaddressed.

It was international pressure that helped to secure this ceasefire, and it must be sustained to guarantee that it endures. The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end. The risk of reverting to a political reality of indifference to occupation and permanent conflict is too great. This same pressure must be continued to deliver a new era of peace and justice for all—Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The need for redress long predates October 7^th, 2023. The crimes committed by Hamas and other armed factions on that day horrified us. The Israeli actions that followed were unconscionable. We bow our heads in immeasurable sorrow as the evidence accumulates that Israel’s actions will be judged to have met the legal definition of genocide. Attempts are already underway to deny accountability and reassert the same broken playbook of impunity. That cannot pass.

We therefore issue this appeal as Jews from all walks of life and across the world. We affirm our belief in the universality of justice and the fair and equal application of international law. We have not forgotten that so many of the laws, charters, and conventions established to safeguard and protect all human life were created in response to the Holocaust. Those safeguards have been relentlessly violated by Israel. Accountability for the Israeli leadership’s grievous violations of international law is necessary. It is time to do everything possible to definitively end the Israeli government’s collective punishment of the Palestinians and to pursue peace for the sake of both peoples.

As Jews and as human beings, we declare: Not in our name. Not in the name of our heritage, our faith, or our moral tradition. The monumental scale of the killing and destruction, the forced displacement, the deliberate withholding of life-sustaining necessities, and the ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank must end and never be repeated.

We deplore the fact that Israeli leaders have repeatedly taken to the world stage to declare that these actions are committed in the name of the Jewish people, as a manifestation of Jewish destiny. The Israeli government may claim to speak on behalf of the Jewish collective, but it does not speak for us.

This affront to our collective conscience cannot stand. It must be challenged. These are not Jewish values nor are they guided by the lessons we draw from our peoples’ history. Instead we see in many of those standing up for Palestinian rights a reflection of the people who stood with Jews in our times of need. Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it. When our sages taught that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world, they did not carve exceptions for Palestinians.

We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid. We write in the hope that this initiative further emboldens a moment of renewed Jewish commitment to act with conscience and compassion. We vow to work urgently to achieve equality, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis.

To that end, we issue this call to businesses, labor unions, civil society, and especially the leadership and member states of the United Nations:

1. To respect and abide by the decisions of the International Court of Justice, noting their application also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; to apply arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court; and to resist efforts to unduly pressure and influence and prevent the workings of both courts.

2. To refuse any complicity in continued crimes and violations of international law against Palestinians by Israel, including by ending the provision of arms and other relevant goods and services; to use relevant leverage, including targeted sanctions on governmental bodies and individuals responsible for violations of international law, and suspension of relations with commercial entities contributing to these violations.

3. To ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches all Palestinians in Gaza at the scale that is commensurate to their vital need, that the blockade is lifted and materials for reconstruction enter, and that there is a full Israeli military withdrawal.

4. To refute false accusations of antisemitism that abusively deploy our collective history to tarnish those with whom we stand together in the pursuit of peace and justice.

With deep respect and in the spirit of our shared Jewish tradition,
‍
Jews Demand Action

We discussed the ceasefire and holes in the Trump 20-point plan, what next, the regional picture, how to insert hope, accountability and end Israel’s impunity…oh, and also Taylor Swift.

This note is an attempt to do just that. First, there is no avoiding that this plan is as sinister as it is delusional. It is not serious – it fails to offer the kind of substantive, detailed and realistic proposals that could improve a desperately horrific situation.

Where granularity is needed around the specifics of timelines, withdrawal maps, verifications and guarantees for implementation, there is instead the same preposterous, vacuous notion of ‘trust Israel and America’.

But it is also nasty. It is dripping with racism towards Palestinians (who were not consulted in the paper’s preparation) over whom new mandates for economic and governance colonization are to be imposed. Apparently only those who are being genocided (rather than the state conducting the genocide) must be de-radicalized and disarmed. The choice offered to Palestinians between genocide or apartheid is barely concealed.

It came then as no surprise when Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu ran to the Israeli press to offer his victory jig over his latest conquest in Washington DC. The White House remains ‘Israel First’ territory, ‘America First’ be damned.

Put simply, it is not a genuine attempt at offering an horizon for peace (read Fadi Quran for what a real plan might look like). And yet, for all the egregious sins of omission and commission, for all its unseriousness – when the key facilitator and enabler of war crimes puts out a plan in the midst of a genocide – it cannot be ignored.

Shifting geopolitics and the move away from unipolarity are felt less palpably at this stage in the West Asia/Middle East region. That will change, but not in a timeline that addresses the urgency of realities in Palestine.

So there is a frustrating but necessary division of labour in responding to what the U.S. has put forward. It is more than understandable, it is fully justified, to take the principled position of rejecting engagement with the plan entirely. After all, this is not a blueprint which will define the future in Gaza or elsewhere, similar to the 2019/2020 first Trump administration so called ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan. But on the negative side, this paper and how it is related to could very well shape components of a reality that might become even more detrimental to international law, justice and peace. And the blunt reality is that state actors will and have already engaged.

The plan is being used to push back against the momentum behind holding Israel accountable, the thing that could actually produce positive change. Minimizing that negative impact will benefit from a trenchant critique of the plan. So with all the caveats regarding a plan that would be comical were it not so tragic, it is worth briefly deconstructing what’s in there.

It might be helpful to consider the 20 points as being divided into three baskets.

The first basket picks up on the previous papers for securing a ceasefire, hostage release and end of war – but as noted, it lacks detail. The second basket, which is the most fleshed out in the paper (still far from a blueprint) consists of arrangements for running Gaza – security, governance, economy, investments and service provision – which have implications also for the West Bank. The third basket consists of the merest passing reference to a political horizon for peace – so caveated by conditionalities and so limited in scope that it seems designed to guarantee a perpetual Palestinian status of living without rights, freedoms or hope.

Each of these three baskets requires a somewhat different approach, hence the suggestion of a division of labour. Most urgent, of course, is to end the daily killing, displacement and starvation, to end Israel’s genocidal assault.

Can the plan at least achieve that? The short answer is no.

The issue here is not Hamas. The paper significantly shifts the goalposts of what was discussed in the past – in the knowledge, and one has to assume from the Israeli side with the intent, that Hamas will not accept this. The key point is that in the unlikely event of Hamas acceptance, Israel’s war against Gaza will still not end.

There are two possible response options, pushing to accept the immediate ceasefire component of the plan as is or pushing for clarifications and details, and the changes needed to actually make this the end of this particular nightmare.

The first option consists of an attempt to bludgeon Hamas into signing off on this, including threats of ‘paying in hell’ if they do not – a hollow threat, given that Palestinians are already deep into the 9 circles of Dante’s hellish Inferno.

The second option is about engaging Hamas – that is not shorthand for appeasing - anyone who is serious about wanting to end this and even about the safe return of Israeli captives understands that Hamas will have to agree (and has been willing to reach an agreement on reasonable terms for quite some time – in other words, not the ones presented by Israel/U.S.).

The compelling factor is the need for terms of an agreement that carry the serious prospect of sustainably ending military action and changing the reality in Gaza. Without revisions, the paper will not lead to an Israeli withdrawal, will not allow Palestinians to return to much of Gaza and will leave them kettled in small areas. Terms that almost guarantee Netanyahu will resume killing, perhaps initially at lower intensity, not even creating conditions for the massively needed scaling up on the humanitarian side.

One response is that as imperfect as this is, it is worth the risk, and that anyway there is no ironclad way of guaranteeing Israeli compliance with a more comprehensive package.

To understand the shortcomings of such ‘pragmatism’, a brief detour into Israeli politics is required.

The terms as currently set out work for Netanyahu because neither scenario require him to end the war – if there is no deal, the other side will again be blamed. If there is a deal under current terms, then the stages and conditionalities as set out allow the IDF to remain in most of Gaza (as Netanyahu has stated), to prevent Palestinian movement and give plentiful wiggle room for Israel to resume and then escalate military operations- just as when Netanyahu crashed the previous and more serious ceasefire agreement in March of this year.

Netanyahu would look to hold his coalition together, even if Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power and/or Smotrich’s Religious Zionism factions temporarily withdraw from the government during any brief period of implementation without forcing elections. He can also remind those actors that Israel will continue to have a free hand in the West Bank – not referred to at all in the paper, and where Israel can continue to wreak further destruction and Bantustanization.

If in the coming days Netanyahu senses that his coalition politics cannot sustain even a deal so skewed in his favour, then the paper still gives Netanyahu space to derail talks.

Let me again pre-empt the obvious objection to what I have written – namely that any deal will need Netanyahu’s consent and must therefore take his politics into account. The simple answer is, meeting Netanyahu where his current coalition is at, has been proven to have only one outcome – more extremism (whether in Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem, or even inside ‘48 Israel), more killing, permanent war and further regional destabilization.

It should be obvious, but for the avoidance of doubt, to indulge this Israeli coalition is to encourage perpetual war, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

An honest assessment at this stage includes two unavoidable conclusions. First, that pressure, not capitulation, is what will change the Israeli equation. Sadly, the second conclusion is that the best one can get out of Israeli politics in the short to medium term is to desist from the kinds of criminality which have produced these losses, destruction and displacement. That is possible and desirable. A horizon of peace and adherence to international legality is not on offer, there is no Israeli opposition waiting to enter government offering any such vision.

It is not constructive to pretend otherwise, to lie to oneself or one’s public as European governments in particular, but also others have consistently done. To end this will require a combination of pressure from within Israeli society and from the outside.

Some of that was beginning to be generated due to public pressure in Europe. Given the extent to which Europe is Israel’s backyard, Europe does have a significant role in impacting the terms of debate and conversation inside Israel. Let’s call those the ‘Three T’s’ – trade, tourism and tournaments.

One has to impact the calculations of the average Israeli in order to shift the domestic pressure equation. Visa-free travel to Europe is important to Israelis, Europe is Israel’s largest trade partner, and Europe is where Israel participates in international tournaments –from football and basketball to the Eurovision song contest.

Netanyahu’s hope, undoubtedly, is that the plan will serve as a sufficient distraction to push back the growing demand for action. In this division of labour – the groups in civil society who have understood what is happening should not be confused for a single moment. This is a time to redouble efforts, not to stand down - campaign for that shift in policy, pulling recalcitrant governments from paralysis towards action.

If Israeli society is sufficiently pushed, then a system already creaking will crack further, and new possibilities can emerge, including for a coalition (with or without elections) that is forced to end the war (to be clear, we are not yet in the zone of an Israeli politics that is willing to move beyond apartheid or to make peace).

We have mentioned Europe, but what of other state actors?

Perhaps the most noteworthy initiative over this period has been the formation of The Hague Group –countries who have committed themselves to pursuing the rulings of the international court system and to implementing policies which ensure non-complicity in the violations of international law and war crimes being committed. That includes bans on arms sales to Israel, not allowing ports for shipments of arms and fuel for the war, support for the international courts and other measures.

That group is co-chaired by South Africa and Colombia, and had 34 countries attend its recent ministerial level convening in the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York September 26^th – almost exclusively from the Global South. While the states represented do not have the depth of relations with Israel to decisively move the needle, they are laying down a marker and helping generate a gravitational pull in the direction of states taking practical and consequential measures.

States in the region, Arab and Muslim majority states, are increasingly managing a regional reality which acknowledges that Israel has become the primary radicalizing and de-stabilizing factor. With its military strikes violating the sovereignty of six states, in addition to its attacks on Palestinians, and with the latest aggression against Qatar, Israel now features prominently in the mapping of national security threats of many countries. But adjusting to that new reality will play out over a longer period of time.

In the interim, most of these states have avoided deploying direct leverage (for instance, using economic power in the case of Gulf states) and have instead focused on working diplomatic channels with the U.S.

And it is, of course, the U.S. which holds the most immediate and impactful leverage vis-à-vis Israel.

The relentless conveyor belt of arms going from the U.S. to Israel, the economic, political, diplomatic and security assistance, the level of American enabling makes this not just Israel’s, but also America’s war. And in the bigger picture, there is an attempt to impose a Pax Israel-Americana on the region.

Shortly before presenting what was then a 21-point plan, President Trump met with eight leaders of Arab and Muslim majority states (in alphabetical order: Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and the UAE). Most of those states are engaged in different ways in an effort to coax the position of the U.S. administration into a place that is outside of Netanyahu’s comfort zone, and that offers a somewhat more robust prospect for America to push Israel into a plan that could end the war.

One might see this as an approach predicated on driving some kind of wedge between Netanyahu and Trump – knowing that Trump can be unpredictable and has lost patience briefly with Netanyahu in the past; also knowing that there is a major tension inside the MAGA movement between Israel First and America First.

However, the downside and major challenge in this approach is that thus far it has been proven to rest on highly flimsy foundations – any Trump frustration at Netanyahu tends to be quickly papered over by the many Israel whisperers in his close circles, and is unlikely to translate into a sustained policy standoff.

In this 2025 paper, similar to the 2019/2020 ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan, Trump 2.0 has unsurprisingly repeated the predilections of Trump 1.0 in endorsing Israel’s narrative, conditions and designs for the future.

Another side note is required here regarding the posture adopted by those eight Arab/Muslim majority states and others. While frustration that more is not being done by those states is legitimate, there is a tendency for that to spill over into positions which strengthen and assist the spin and narrative of Netanyahu.

His play is to cynically claim that most of these states are quietly aligned with Israel, want nothing more than to normalize at the expense of the Palestinians, and that any gestures to the contrary are purely performative. It is somewhat similar to his racist and inaccurate claim, which he has taken to repeating recently, that any opposition in Europe to Israel’s policies springs from fear of invading hordes of Muslim migrants.

Israeli PR consistently puts out hints that further normalization is about to occur, or that various states are about to agree to take in tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from Gaza. Most of this is smoke and mirrors designed to create a counterpoint to the reality that exceptionalism is waning, and that relations with Israel are on an increasing trajectory of denormalization.

When Netanyahu recently acknowledged isolation and the possibility of Israel pursuing a form of economic autarky, it was a misstep which was received badly inside Israel. This ground should not be ceded, and despite historical reasons for misgivings, it would be wrong to echo Netanyahu’s spin and to indulge this predisposition to assume that any state is just waiting to sell the Palestinians down the river.

That is not the contemporary story of support being shown for Palestinians in the public nor does it align with where public sentiment in the region is at.

It is useful to briefly compare and contrast the written statements put out in response to the plan by the eight Arab/Muslim majority states and by the EU respectively.

The European response falls into the category of disinformation and capitulation; the Arab/Muslim majority response at least leans into the possibility of engaging in order to pull the plan in a direction that can be worked with.

Europe welcomes “Israel’s decision to support the plan” (although Netanyahu publicly declared things which contradict the plan) and calls on Hamas to accept as is; the eight states avoid doing that. The European response does not mention the words ‘West Bank’, does not rule out annexation in the West Bank, makes no mention of a full Israeli withdrawal in Gaza, ignores both the absence of Palestinian governance and the structures to be imposed there, and fails to relink Gaza and the West Bank. The Arab/Muslim majority states response addresses full Israeli withdrawal in Gaza, Gaza-West Bank integration, as well as no West Bank annexation.

But the initial revisions proposed by the eight to the plan were all rejected. None of those revisions appeared in the text released on Monday.

Finally, circling back to those three baskets, what does this analysis then tell us in terms of what can be done next?

On the first basket – terms for the war’s end, a ceasefire and the release of Israelis in exchange for Palestinian prisoners – the key will be to build in details that make this exercise meaningful and sustainable rather than remaining in the zone of an Israeli driven blame game which further perpetuates suffering. In the likely event that Hamas and the mediating parties respond with necessary clarifications and revisions, encouragement should be given to engage with rather than reject those.

Crucial is to make a full Israeli withdrawal credible, to secure the ability of Palestinians to access and move back to all parts of Gaza and to ensure access for aid – rejecting the illegal conditionality the plan seeks to impose on the entry of humanitarian assistance.

The plan refers to an International Stabilisation Force (ISF). There were a number of changes to the original 21-point plan, which pulled the conditions further in the direction of Israeli unreasonableness – one was to further condition the terms of deployment of the ISF and its relationship to the attempted new structures of colonial governance in Gaza, which the paper seeks to impose.

The idea of an ISF itself is problematic, but done correctly it could set a precedent for offering protection to Palestinians and for preventing Israeli military freedom of action – one that could even be replicated in other Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel is not keen on the idea for those same reasons, and would seek to reconfigure it into a collaborative extension of the IDF.

But it is worth exploring whether the terms of reference for the ISF can be delineated to genuinely provide protection for Palestinians. And an ISF is the kind of concrete thing which Trump likes to parade. The President of Indonesia has publicly offered to make a major troop contribution (President Prabowo mentioned 20,000 troops in his UN speech). This would be one area to drill down on.

The response to the establishment of a non-Palestinian governance and economic regime for Gaza, with the involvement of the U.S. president and of Tony Blair, should mostly be one of prevention, avoidance and creating a path back to Palestinian owned and legitimized structures. As it stands, this sounds like the charter for a 21st century version of the Dutch East India Company.

Again, this is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, because there is nothing positive about what is being proposed. It is, in fact, potentially, and this will be Israel’s intention – an attempt to create a further layer of international occupation of the Palestinian people, in addition to that of Israel, that will first be applied in Gaza and then be replicated in the West Bank. This will be Israel’s intention, and that is the subtext to what is being attempted here. The fact that the effort by the eight states to pull this structure, at least partly into a more Palestinian-led direction, and to push West Bank structures into Gaza, was rejected is the reveal here.

But in order to make an alternative more viable, there is a need to address the long-neglected realm of Palestinian political renewal. That is different from undertaking the kind of reforms dictated by Israel, the U.S. and their allies – a trap which the Ramallah Palestinian Authority has unsurprisingly fallen into or even embraced. This means giving Palestinians the political space to reconcile, unify and generate structures legitimately representative of Palestinians, wherever they are, capable of pursuing a strategic project that challenges the status quo and offers a Palestinian alternative.

If one puts the three baskets together, this is a plan to guarantee the continuation of conflict, perpetuate existing insecurity and injustice for Palestinians, and indeed to encourage Israel further down the path of zero-sum overreach which is likely to generate further blow back even to the detriment of Israelis themselves.

In other words, any engagement that this plan should be based on a clear understanding of what one is trying to achieve, as well as to avoid, while simultaneously maintaining pressure on Israel and building alternative pathways.