By Lara Jakes
The last, best chance for a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinian authorities came in 2008. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was prepared to give up territory in the West Bank, and allow some refugees to reclaim land. He was even willing to relinquish control of Jerusalem’s Old City to an international committee as part of recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state.
And then the potential deal fell apart, for reasons that Olmert still finds difficult to explain. “This was something that would have changed the Middle East,” he said in an interview about his failed talks with the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. “He was not ready to take any risk.”
Abbas has said he was not given a proper opportunity to examine the proposed map of the West Bank and asked for more time. Days later, Olmert resigned under a cloud of corruption accusations, and the deal died.
No one in Israel today is thinking about such peace talks, amid fears that a sovereign Palestinian state would find it easier to mount another attack like the one Hamas undertook on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and setting off the war in the Gaza Strip.
Diplomacy has taken a back seat to military force, reflecting years of distrust and failed deals that have all but cemented the belief among the adversaries that neither side will negotiate in good faith. Officials and experts doubt those attitudes will be reversed any time soon.
Among democratic nations, it is widely agreed that Israel has a right to defend itself from the so-called ring of fire it faces from Iran and its proxy fighters in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that want to destroy Israel.
But last week’s deadly pager and walkie-talkie explosions against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon — followed by the strike Friday in Beirut targeting a senior Hezbollah commander that killed at least 45 people — have fueled concerns that Israel is pivoting from cease-fire negotiations to free hostages in favor of military action that could escalate the regional conflict.
“The right path, the right steps, is certainly doing the hostage deal, first and foremost, and nothing else,” Efrat Rayten Marom, a left-leaning member of the Israeli parliament, said in an interview Wednesday. “We have to do everything in our power to bring them home now.”
Her son, a soldier, is deployed to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where more than 60,000 Israeli residents are waiting to return home after leaving last year when Hezbollah began shelling the area to protest the war in Gaza.
“We have to deal with the north because Hezbollah is there,” Rayten Marom said. But “there was a plan, a strategy, to finish the war in the Gaza Strip, first and foremost, and then to deal with the north.”
Diplomacy no longer seems to be a priority, she said, under the increasingly combative policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I think it reflects this government’s opinion and policy, generally,” Rayten Marom said. “Netanyahu, with his extremist coalition partners, chose and still are choosing this path.”
Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment last week. On Wednesday, responding to reports in the Israeli news media, his office said it strongly denied “the claim that he has torpedoed any deal whatsoever due to political considerations.”
Nevertheless, a few hours earlier, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, confirmed that “the center of gravity is moving north,” referring to the new focus on Hezbollah.
But, he added, “We have not forgotten the hostages and we have not forgotten our missions in the south — we are committed to our duties and we are carrying them out simultaneously.”
The sophisticated attacks in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday killed Hezbollah operatives, but also several civilians, including children. The blasts wounded thousands, spreading panic across Lebanon, and prompted international concerns that Israel had risked further escalating tensions in the region. Reeling from those attacks and the strike Friday, Hezbollah responded Sunday with a missile barrage that went deeper into Israeli territory than most of its previous salvos.
“I consider this situation extremely worrying,” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in a statement Wednesday. He called on “all stakeholders to avert an all-out war, which would have heavy consequences for the entire region and beyond.”
Even Israel’s most reliable ally, the United States, sounded alarmed that negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza — efforts it is leading, with Egypt and Qatar — would now be sidelined by the pager attacks. Negotiations were already complicated by Israel’s targeted assassinations of the top leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad.
“Anything of that nature, by definition, is probably not good in terms of achieving the result that we want, which is the cease-fire,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Egypt on Wednesday, when asked if the attack in Lebanon would make the Gaza talks more difficult.
He left the region shortly afterward without stopping in Israel. Another U.S. envoy, Amos Hochstein, was in Israel on Monday to urge the government against escalating tensions with Hezbollah.
The pagers in Lebanon began exploding the next day.
Brett McGurk, a White House adviser on Middle East policy, said Friday that while the United States agreed Israel should defend itself from Hezbollah, “we have disagreements with the Israelis about tactics and how you measure escalation risk.”
“We want a diplomatic settlement in the north,” McGurk told the Israeli-American Council in Washington, in remarks reported by The Jerusalem Post. “That is the objective, and that’s what we’re working towards.”
Israel’s diplomatic contacts with adversaries are generally delivered through intermediaries, mostly Arab states in the Mideast, but also the United States and countries in Europe.
It does not negotiate directly with Hamas or Hezbollah, both of which want to eradicate Israel, and both of which Israel considers terrorist organizations, as does the United States. It also does not negotiate with Iran, which supports both groups as well as the Houthis in Yemen.
Israel and its allies say it is unrealistic and naive to expect diplomatic efforts with groups that are trying to end its existence. “This is a different ballgame when you’re handling this situation, when you have a ring of fire — when you have Hezbollah and Houthis and Iran and Hamas, all these threats all around you,” Rayten Marom said.
Elliott Abrams, an Israel expert who was deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and is now a senior Middle East fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview that attempts at diplomacy with Iran would never amount to “more than a cease-fire, as long as Iran’s ambitions don’t change — and that ambition is to destroy Israel.”
But Walid Kazziha, a retired professor of Middle East policy at the American University in Cairo, said Israel’s hallmark since its creation in 1948 has been to use military or economic means to coerce its neighbors.
“If you live by hard power alone, you die by hard power,” Kazziha said in an interview Wednesday. “To be able to survive in this world, you’ve got to have soft power,” he said, referring to diplomacy, “so that people feel you’re useful.”
Either way, a number of officials and experts in Israel believe Hezbollah will continue its frequent strikes until the fighting ends in Gaza and Israeli hostages are freed in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Even if Israel were serious about negotiations, a peace deal appears out of reach in no small part because of the, at best, rocky relationship between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that is led by Abbas. (A later effort during the Obama administration also fell through, in 2014, as did a proposal from the Trump administration, which was roundly rejected by Palestinian officials.)
But Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said it was at least time to focus on negotiating an end to the war in Gaza and finding a compromise with Hezbollah that allows citizens to move back to their homes in northern Israel.
“We have exhausted all the benefits that we can get from a military operation, so we have to stop now and get back all the hostages” in Gaza, Olmert said. “It think it’s in the interest of Israel. We have to do it.”
“Look: I prefer negotiations every time, all the time, than fighting,” he said. “Fighting is inevitable and unavoidable. But it has to be the last resort.”
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