++What history can â and canât â tell us about the hope for a Gaza ceasefire. +
++The last time that Israel and Hamas engaged in hostilities that had the potential to ignite a larger war was in May 2021. At the time, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan flew to Cairo and worked with Egyptian officials to negotiate a ceasefire. He drew from his own experience: In November 2012, as an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he and his Egyptian counterparts had locked in a ceasefire after a different outburst of conflict. +
++So I found it revealing about where this war currently stands, and how different it is from the past, when Clinton dismissed any possibility of a ceasefire while speaking last week at Rice Universityâs Baker Institute. âPeople who are calling for a ceasefire now do not understand Hamas. That is not possible,â she said. âIt would be such a gift to Hamas, because they would spend whatever time there was a ceasefire in effect rebuilding their armaments, creating stronger positions to be able to fend off an eventual assault by the Israelis.â +
++Historically, these ceasefires have worked for both Israel and Hamas, until they havenât. +
++But the previous logic of Israel-Hamas wars no longer holds after the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and 242 people were taken hostage. That has fundamentally altered Israelâs security thinking: It now wants to eliminate Hamas entirely. Israelâs existential catastrophe has changed its approach to security, as weâre seeing through its intensive bombardment of Gaza and its ongoing ground incursion, with more than 9,000 Palestinians killed, including 3,000 children. +
++âThe technique before was to convince the Israelis that Hamas can be under control,â Nabeel Khoury, a career US diplomat focused on the Middle East who retired as a minister-counselor, told me. âIsraelis are way beyond that. They want something much more radical than what happened in the past.â +
++The fact that nearly everyone powerful in the US is also rejecting a ceasefire now doesnât mean one is impossible. What it shows is that Israel just doesnât want one, period, and the US has largely followed Israelâs lead. +
++The old paradigm of ceasefires between Israel and Hamas appears to have been broken, but that doesnât mean that the many examples of the two parties engaging in talks and upholding agreements are not relevant. Even with Israel locked in what it sees as an existential battle with Hamas, the door isnât, and canât be, totally closed to diplomacy. +
++There are lessons about who can exert pressure; who has the expertise to work with Hamas; how these talks happen behind closed doors; and, crucially, how the US can play a key role in Israelâs decision-making. +
++With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting Friday that Israel will continue its military operations in Gaza âwith full force,â it seems that a ceasefire will only come from a US initiative. Biden hinted as much and discussed the need for a humanitarian âpauseâ and the release of hostages when interrupted by a protester at a Minnesota event on Wednesday, and the next day Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to the Middle East. As the death toll among Palestinians has grown, the Biden administration has continually readjusted its language with a recognition of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the need for a political process that would culminate in a Palestinian state. +
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Jonathan Ernst/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
++But perhaps the most important lesson to take from those ceasefires past is that they were, in a certain sense, failures: They couldnât hold in the long-term because they were not tied to a bigger political framework that could lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They ultimately proved unsatisfactory both for the situation of Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout the occupied territories, and for Israelâs own sense of security. That they were ceasefires alone meant they wouldnât lead to anything that could secure the future for Israelis and Palestinians. +
++However this immediate violence ends â Israel declaring victory, a ceasefire, or something else â ultimately the war will only be resolved by difficult diplomacy and US leadership toward a Palestinian state. +
++How previous Israel-Hamas wars have ended, briefly explained +
++Since 2007, Hamas and the state of Israel have existed in a âviolent equilibrium,â as Tareq Baconi of the Palestinian research network Al-Shabaka describes it. That year, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip after winning the 2006 Palestinian elections; Israel then imposed a crippling blockade on the territory. That led to extreme rates of poverty in Gaza; over 60 percent of people need food assistance, and access to health care is extremely limited. About a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza, and nearly 80 percent of youth, are unemployed. +
++âWhat we see is every few years, or really every few months, a situation occurs where Hamas fires rockets at Israel, when the restrictions of the blockade become too stifling, and essentially force an escalation where a ceasefire is eventually negotiated, and Israel is forced to ease restrictions into the blockade,â Baconi said recently on The Dig podcast. +
++A review of the recent Israel-Hamas wars shows that after each conflict stopped, that violent equilibrium was restored. At times there were peace talks, but they were not really tied to a bigger political process that could lead to a larger settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. +
++Israelâs Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 lasted 22 days. In the conflict, 1,400 Palestinians, among them at least 759 civilians, were killed, as well as 10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked to secure a ceasefire. âWe need urgently to conclude a ceasefire that can endure and that can bring real security,â she told the UN on January 6, 2009. âThis would begin a period of true calm that includes an end to rocket, mortar, and other attacks on Israelis, and allows for the cessation of Israelâs military offensive.â +
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Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
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Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images
++This all came on the eve of President Barack Obama coming into the White House. He initially prioritized talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and put limited pressure on Israel to halt the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank. Despite that, little progress was made. +
++That ceasefire held until November 2012, with an eight-day conflict between Israel and Hamas; 167 Palestinians and six Israelis died. Clinton was secretary of state, and Sullivan played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire. +
++That truce broke in the summer of 2014, when a 50-day war between Israel and Hamas left 2,251 Palestinians dead, among them 1,462 civilians, and 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians. Talks between Israelis and Palestinians had collapsed the spring before and have not relaunched since. +
++Each time, the US and Egypt have played important roles in cementing these ceasefires, even as Egypt and Israel restricted movement in and out of the occupied territory of Gaza. Since the US designates Hamas a terrorist group, it depends on third parties for talks with the militant group. âNegotiating between Israel and Hamas has been one of the niche kind of activities that Egypt specialized in,â Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat, told me. âFor the last 16 years, the Egyptian policy on Gaza has been a stopgap â de-escalate.â In more recent years, Turkey and Qatar have also held indirect talks with Hamas. +
++When the Biden White House faced another Israel-Hamas conflict in May 2021, US officials followed the playbook from the two wars that happened under Obama â prevent UN Security Council resolutions and work the backchannel with Hamas. The war lasted 11 days in May 2021, killing 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The lesson Biden took from the Obama years was that all clashes with Israel must happen in private if at all, that there should be no daylight between the countries, and that conflict between allies is detrimental to the point of being unbearable. +
++So Bidenâs method to ending the May 2021 conflict was quiet diplomacy with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The US blocked United Nations resolutions and stood by Israel, to a point. Biden âheld his tongueâ when he learned that Netanyahuâs military operation had âno defined objective,â as journalist Franklin Foer recounts in his book The Last Politician. After four phone calls between the two leaders, Biden was blunt to Netanyahu: âHey man, weâre out of runway here ⊠Itâs over.â And then it was. +
++Whatâs different this time +
++This Middle East war could last longer than any recent previous conflict between Israel and Hamas. The scope of Hamasâs attack, the ensuing Israeli bombardment and ground incursion, and the level of the death toll is already much more drastic than previous rounds of violence. +
++The understandable focus on the destruction of Gaza and the tremendous loss of human life there perhaps obscures what has really happened from an Israeli point of view. âI donât think thereâs enough appreciation of the impact of October 7,â Fishere, who is now a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, told me. âFor Israel, this is a new moment. This is not a repetition.â +
++Netanyahu says Israelâs goals are the elimination of Hamas and the return of hostages. +
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Gili Yaari/NurPhoto via Getty Images
++But itâs not at all clear how Hamas could be removed with force alone â and should it be, what party would govern Gaza. US and Israeli officials have floated trial balloons in unattributed quotes to the press that include a new Palestinian Authority, Egypt stepping in, or a multinational force, and Biden has urged Israel not to take over the territory. +
++None of those would be good options. Any day-after plan for Gaza would require some buy-in from Hamas leadership â an agreement that its military wing and affiliated forces like Islamic Jihad would drop their weapons. +
++This is the paradox: The ferocity of October 7 has convinced Israeli leadership that it must utterly destroy Hamas, yet there is little evidence it can achieve that goal. In the past, Israel was satisfied with damaging the militant group before settling into a ceasefire state. But this time, Israel is not seeking the kind of cessation of hostilities that defined the end to four previous rounds of conflict. âThe only possible ceasefire would be a ceasefire that disarmed Hamas,â Fishere says. âAnd I donât think anybody can offer that.â +
++But there is another difference to this war: Hamas is holding 242 hostages, a number that dwarfs previous instances of hostage-taking. That gives Hamas leverage, and pretty much precludes Israel from agreeing to unilaterally stop its assault on Gaza. +
++In public, there seems to be no path forward: Hamas has said that it wonât negotiate over the hostages until there is a ceasefire, and Israel seems to say it would only go for a ceasefire with unconditional release of hostages. +
++What has been floated is a temporary ceasefire â a situation where Hamasâs hostages are exchanged, in essence, for a respite from the fighting and, likely, the release of Palestinian prisoners. +
++The exact mechanics of such exchanges are closely held secrets. The Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin worked directly with a Hamas interlocutor to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, who in 2011 was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and Hamas members. âNegotiating for the release of hostages may also be less popular this time around,â Baskin wrote in an opinion column for the New York Times earlier this month. The price for the hostages would be just as high as before. +
+++Israel has a moral responsibility to bring home all of the hostages. Israel failed to provide security for them. The proposal: all of the hostages for all of the Palestinian prisoners is very difficult to accept but Israel must consider it & if yes, it has to be done quickly. +
+â Gershon Baskin ۏ۱ێÙÙ ŰšŰ§ŰłÙÙÙ (@gershonbaskin) October 30, 2023 +
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