The Daily Populous Saturday January 18th, 2025 night edition
Authored by theatlantic.com and submitted by theatlantic

A good deal is one in which everyone walks away happy or everyone walks away mad. The moods must match. By this standard, the deal between Israel and Hamas is good but not great: Both groups are relishing what they are getting, and choking a bit on what they have given up. Israel is choking more than Hamas. There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But for Israel and Gaza, the past 15 months have been a miserable failure, and from the perspective of negotiation, the only good news is that both sides taste some of the bitterness.

No hostages have been freed yet, and the cease-fire doesn’t start until Sunday, so all reports so far remain speculative and optimistic. The terms resemble those leaked over the past week. Israel will release a large number of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas will release in tranches the remaining hostages, living and dead, whom it seized on October 7, 2023. Nearly 100 remain. The two sides will stop fighting for 42 days, with the aim (again, speculative) of making that cease-fire permanent and ending the war. The unaccounted-for Israeli hostages include civilians, among them the Bibas children, who were nine months old and 4 years old when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, after the slaughter of their grandparents.

Hamas’s failure even to acknowledge whether these children are alive, or to allow welfare checks by the Red Crescent, has done much to convince Israelis that negotiation with the group is pointless. Why talk with someone too sadistic to let you know whether they have shot a baby or fed him? Taking civilian hostages is a war crime, and negotiating with a group that brags about taking them is more like negotiating with the Joker than with Nelson Mandela. The act of kidnapping a child is particularly taxing on one’s moral imagination. It’s no surprise that negotiations have faltered so far. Negotiating demands trust, and it’s hard to trust someone who snatched a baby.

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From the beginning of the war, Israel has struggled to define its goals—in part because it is, as a country, so divided about its nature and purpose that any real goal articulated would be unsatisfactory to a large portion of its population. It was left instead with reassuring but vague slogans. “Free the hostages” was a defensible one from the start—the objective was just, and within Israel’s rights—but it concealed many harder strategic questions. What if freeing the hostages involved freeing murderers and terrorists from Israeli prisons? Evidently it does. What if their freedom was conditional on letting Hamas survive and rule Gaza?

Evidently it is. Gaza is wrecked, and tens of thousands of its people are dead. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws. If the intention is to end the war, then the war will end with Hamas bloodied but unbowed. Israel estimates that only two of Hamas’s battalions remain intact, but the analyst Seth Frantzman, a professional Bad News Bear on this topic, has listed the evidence that perhaps a dozen battalions’ worth of Hamas fighters have survived. Moreover, the plans for a post-Hamas Gaza amount to squat. For more than a year, Israel and its allies have been pondering a role for the Palestinian Authority, or the Gulf States, or Egypt in providing security forces in a post-Hamas Gaza. I wonder about the mental health of those proposing this option. Are these security forces in the room with us right now? So far there is no prospect that any such group will materialize, or that anyone will want to send soldiers into a rubble-strewn urban combat zone, to contend with Hamas fighters who are themselves reluctant to disarm.

Hamas will celebrate this deal, because it will survive, and by its survival it will demonstrate the failure of the other slogan Israel adopted, which was “Destroy Hamas.” That slogan, too, was easy and just. But like “Free the hostages,” it left all the big questions unanswered, and looming ahead of it like thunderclouds. The first question was whether Israel was willing to inflict collateral civilian casualties, and absorb military casualties, at a level that experts thought would be necessary to accomplish its goal. This question is partially answered: Israel has by its own account inflicted many civilian casualties, and taken remarkably few military casualties of its own. (Before the war, analysts predicted thousands of Israeli soldiers dead in tunnel-clearing operations.)

The second question about the slogan was whether Hamas’s “destruction” meant what it seemed to mean. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it, it sounded a lot like eradication, so that Hamas would cease to exist in any form, the way ETA and the Red Army Faction have. It would lose and close up shop, without even maintaining a token website or leaving a masked dead-ender broadcasting from a basement somewhere. The other possible interpretation of destroy would be merely to destroy Hamas’s ability to perpetrate another attack like October 7. The latter, reduced version of the slogan offered a better chance of success. But it is also less satisfying, and no longer fits on a bumper sticker.

When I talked with Israeli national-security officials last year, the most realistic of them spoke of Gaza’s future as resembling the West Bank today. The Palestinian population would live unhappily, but under the day-to-day administration of a Palestinian government. Israel would go in regularly on missions to kill or capture Hamas members. This vision is consistent with the more limited version of Israel’s goal for Hamas: to reduce it to a permanent but manageable problem. A cease-fire in Gaza, as of right now, will leave Hamas in power at a level well beyond manageable for Israel. It will probably postpone large-scale fighting rather than end it for good.

There has always been one further Israeli goal—less often articulated publicly, but shared by most Israelis and certainly by their government. That is to establish regret among Gazans for the October 7 attacks, and deterrence for future ones. Deterrence means asking Hamas, Do you enjoy the fruits of your actions? It means asking Gazans, Are you willing to accept what Hamas has dragged you into? The most distressing thing about this hostage deal is that Gazans might regret the results of the October 7 attack, but Hamas is still celebrating it. Hamas is a military organization; militaries fight, and Hamas just fought a better-armed opponent to a draw.

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Tempering this enthusiasm is a downward trend in its allies’ fortunes. In the days after October 7, Israel was skittish and concerned, because it looked possible that Hezbollah would take advantage of the country’s post-raid shock to enter the war from the north. It was not obvious that Israel, having failed to defend itself against an attack in the south, could withstand a much more formidable one in the north. After Israel’s largely successful war with Hezbollah at the end of last year, and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israel has removed, at least temporarily, two major potential distractions. Hamas now knows that it has Israel’s undivided attention—and that prospect may have motivated it to consider offers of negotiation that it rejected months ago.

In the end, the most promising aspect of the deal is that it breaks a streak of nearly a year, during which the war in Gaza went on and on, without any clearly articulated end point or plan. Israel fought Hamas and degraded it. But fighting is a tool rather than an objective; a cease-fire at least gives civilians on both sides a spell of relief, and a moment to pause and figure out what they want out of what comes next.

SteveInBoston on January 17th, 2025 at 21:11 UTC »

I would debate that this has been a miserable failure for Israel. Israel has remade the entire mid-east power structure. Hamas is seriously degraded and won’t be able to do an attack like that again for decades. The leadership of Hezbollah has been decimated and there is a chance of a rebirth for Lebanon. Assad in Syria is out and there is a possibility of a new relationship with Israel. At any rate, the arms pipeline from Iran to Hezbollah is gone. Iran as a power is also seriously weakened. If the war with Hamas ends Saudi Arabia will form a new relationship with Israel. It remains to be seen how this all develops, but there is a chance of a completely changed (for the better) mid-east.

Own_Thing_4364 on January 17th, 2025 at 20:14 UTC »

Seems about as good of a conclusion as one could hope for when dealing with an enemy that will never recognize your right to exist. The only way that will change is when the population itself gets tired of the status quo and is ready to see a governing force that is more interested in governing than in fighting.

theatlantic on January 17th, 2025 at 20:09 UTC »

Graeme Wood: “A good deal is one in which everyone walks away happy or everyone walks away mad. The moods must match. By this standard, the deal between Israel and Hamas is good but not great: Both groups are relishing what they are getting, and choking a bit on what they have given up. Israel is choking more than Hamas. There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But for Israel and Gaza, the past 15 months have been a miserable failure, and from the perspective of negotiation, the only good news is that both sides taste some of the bitterness.

“The cease-fire doesn’t start until Sunday, so all reports so far remain speculative and optimistic. The terms resemble those leaked over the past week. Israel will release a large number of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas will release in tranches the remaining hostages, living and dead, whom it seized on October 7, 2023. Nearly 100 remain. The two sides will stop fighting for 42 days, with the aim (again, speculative) of making that cease-fire permanent and ending the war … ”

“From the beginning of the war, Israel has struggled to define its goals—in part because it is, as a country, so divided about its nature and purpose that any real goal articulated would be unsatisfactory to a large portion of its population. It was left instead with reassuring but vague slogans. ‘Free the hostages’ was a defensible one from the start—the objective was just, and within Israel’s rights—but it concealed many harder strategic questions. What if freeing the hostages involved freeing murderers and terrorists from Israeli prisons? Evidently it does. What if their freedom was conditional on letting Hamas survive and rule Gaza?

“Evidently it is. Gaza is wrecked, and tens of thousands of its people are dead. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws ... Hamas will celebrate this deal, because it will survive, and by its survival it will demonstrate the failure of the other slogan Israel adopted, which was ‘Destroy Hamas.’ That slogan, too, was easy and just. But like 'Free the hostages,’ it left all the big questions unanswered, and looming ahead of it like thunderclouds … ”

“In the end, the most promising aspect of the deal is that it breaks a streak of nearly a year, during which the war in Gaza went on and on, without any clearly articulated end point or plan. Israel fought Hamas and degraded it. But fighting is a tool rather than an objective; a cease-fire at least gives civilians on both sides a spell of relief, and a moment to pause and figure out what they want out of what comes next.”

Read more here: https://theatln.tc/wE32XBMw