Israelis push Netanyahu for cease-fire after Hamas kills hostages
September 03, 2024
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Quick Take
Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, shares insights on global political events.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week and the work year. I want to talk about the Middle East and big demonstrations, the largest social dissent we have seen since the October 7th terror attacks, since the war in Gaza has started in Israel. And the proximate reason for this was the Hamas execution of six Israeli hostages in Rafah, likely before those positions were overrun by Israeli Defense Forces. The broader point anger with the way that Prime Minister Netanyahu is continuing to prosecute the war.
And it's a big deal, it's a general strike of the largest labor union in Israel, just as everyone in Israel is coming back from vacation. And so large scale action and certainly has an impact on the economy. The anger in particular with demanding a cease-fire deal and demanding the release of the hostages who have been held now for almost a year.
This has not been seen to be an adequate priority of the Prime Minister by a majority of Israeli citizens. This is not because there are large numbers of Israelis that are in favor of a two-state solution. For the Palestinians, that's not the case. It's certainly not the case that there's any sympathy for Hamas or that the Israelis are angry that a lot of Palestinians have gotten killed. That is not the issue either. It is that they want an end of the fighting, they want the hostages back, and they want a deal done, and they're tired of the way this war has been prosecuted, especially because the Israeli defense minister, the head of the Shin Bet, other senior military officials have broken themselves with the Israeli Prime Minister and said that they do not support what the Israeli leadership is pushing for on the ground in Gaza.
There are other fights about an Israeli budget. There's the long-standing fight that was before October 7th on the independence of the Israeli judiciary itself, very strong in Israel. There's the question of enlistment and the exceptions for the Hasidim, for the far-right Israeli ultra-Orthodox, all of these things in a very divided, very fragmented Israeli political system are creating plenty of folks that are angry with the Prime Minister, but he is still there and there is no way in the near term to take him out.
Now, I don't think this labor union strike matters all that much. It was not on the basis of a labor dispute, it was a political action. And in that regard, the Israeli government took them to court. The courts ruled that they had to shut that action down. The Labor Union agreed and shut it down. There's a lot of Likud, Netanyahu's party, oriented political leaders among the labor union's leadership and so it is unlikely, I think that you're going to see a lot more of this over the coming weeks and months, but you could still see a lot more social instability, a lot more unrest. And now that you've had hundreds of thousands on the streets, which had not been occurring, while the war is on, you've kind of taken off this restriction on, well, as long as there's a war, we all need to be hanging together. We need to be supporting this Israeli war cabinet. The war cabinet's had resignations and society is back to its fractious and very loud and boisterous self in Israel.
Now, the Knesset is coming back in session, the Israeli Parliament in October, and as that happens, there's going to be a lot more fighting against Netanyahu's position, and you could possibly see a no-confidence vote to bring down his government. One of the reasons why we don't have a cease-fire is because Netanyahu understands that the way he stays in power is by keeping his coalition intact with the far right, and they strongly oppose and have consistently strongly opposed any agreement that would allow for long-term ending of fighting on the ground in Gaza. They also want continued control, some level of Israeli occupation over Gaza. They don't want self-governance of the Palestinians there. And again, we're not talking about Hamas, we're talking about any Palestinian organization.
That is, politically, you have to say that Netanyahu has done an extraordinary job in being able, a masterful job politically, in being able to maintain his position under such an extraordinary level of pressure. And with such unpopularity among the Israeli population. More broadly, there's the fact that the United States looks feckless on this issue. Biden has now come out and said that Netanyahu is not doing enough for a cease-fire. And Netanyahu's response was extremely strong, saying, publicly, both Biden and the Secretary of State and others have consistently and repeatedly said that the Israelis have accepted extremely generous terms for Hamas, it's Hamas that's refused and now Biden's saying that they're not doing enough, what's changed? Only that six hostages have been executed, and after that you're putting more pressure on Bibi. You can imagine that that makes Biden look extremely weak. And the issue here is that Biden has not been willing to be critical of Netanyahu publicly, he's only put a little bit of pressure on the Israeli leadership privately, and that makes him look weak publicly when Netanyahu makes those claims.
All of the efforts to try to get a cease-fire by the United States are going nowhere, in part because Hamas refuses the terms, and in part because the terms that the US says Netanyahu accepts he doesn't really accept when they are having private discussions. And so the US is trying to paper over a chasm between the two fighting sides. Everybody else wants to paper that over too. I mean, if you look at who wants a deal here, you would say the majority of the Israeli population, the Gulf States, the Egyptians, the Europeans, heck, the Chinese and the United States, but not Bibi's government and not Hamas.
And that's why we continue to have this level of fighting. That's also why we continue to have the Houthis attacking oil tankers, including a Saudi-flagged tanker, clearly by mistake, in the last 24 hours in the Red Sea. You've got American military, UK military, others in operation across the Gulf, and yet incapable of preventing this ragtag group of militants from Yemen to continue to disrupt global supply chain. You continue to have militants in the So-called Iranian-led Axis of Resistance attacking US and other allied targets across the region. And so it's very hard to see this war coming to an end. It's very hard to see Netanyahu leaving power in the near term. It's certainly hard to see any option for the Palestinians that would de-radicalize them in the near future.
Kamala Harris has been doing her best to say very little on this issue because of course, she is not in a good position to try to carry water for a policy that clearly has failed for the Biden administration heretofore. And that's specifically to end the fighting, to get the hostages freed, to create at least a temporary but hopefully longer-term cease-fire and to create a two-state solution. None of the things that the Biden administration has said that they want on the ground in the region are happening, and that means that Kamala has a lot of vulnerability on that policy. That's interesting because where she would clearly like to be would be in coordination with US allies. And one of the reasons why US policy on Ukraine has been much more successful in the Middle East is because it's been in lockstep with everyone in NATO, sometimes moving too slowly, but nonetheless, all these countries are agreeing on the sanctions, on the diplomatic efforts, on the military support for the Ukrainians, the training, the intelligence all being done together.
That's not true at all. You've got the new Labour government in the UK now saying that a number of weapons systems being provided to Israel would be likely used in the commission of war crimes by the IDF, and so the UK government has said that those specific weapons systems will no longer be provided to Israel. Now, most weapons systems will still be provided by the UK, so it's not like the reality of UK policy and US policy towards Israel are all that different. This is a fig leaf by the Brits, but the point is these countries are all freelancing. They're making policies by themselves, that makes it much easier for the Israelis to focus on the United States and to also take the actions they want to. If you had a more coordinated policy by the United States and all of their allies on Israel, it would be a strong policy and it would be a policy that would protect those countries politically to a much greater degree.
That's not where the US or NATO is right now. I do think that's something that Harris would want to accomplish if she were to become president come January, but we are still many months away from that possibility.
So anyway, a lot going on right now in the Middle East, certainly not working out in America's favor and not working out in the Israelis' or the Palestinians' either. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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