Netanyahu Putting Final Nail In Biden Peace Plan's Coffin

The testy exchange reflected not only a deep Gaza policy division but also long-standing mistrust between the two leaders. The hostility goes back to the administration of president Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice-president.

In front of the US Congress, at the invitation of rival Republicans, Netanyahu had spoken out against Obama's nuclear weapons control agreement with Iran. The Iran accord had been meant to stand as Obama's top foreign policy achievement. Instead, it was canceled by Trump, who won the 2016 presidential election.

The current testy relations between Biden and Netanyahu are also bound up in competing domestic political needs of each.

Biden recently quit his candidacy for reelection after top Democratic Party leaders told him he was going to lose. A major foreign policy win would at least show he is something other than a hapless lame duck. Biden is proposing not just a ceasefire but historic peace negotiations.

Shortly after Hamas's October 7 invasion, Biden proposed talks between Israel and some sort of Gaza-West Bank negotiating team that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a revival of the so-called“two-state solution” that had been official, if lately dormant, US policy for more than three decades.

Shortly after the war in Gaza broke out, Biden declared:“When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and, in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.” If he had succeeded in arranging such negotiations, Biden would have vaulted into the pantheon of high-profile Middle East peacemakers joining

• President Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement; and
• President Bill Clinton oversaw the signing of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which were designed to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state (statehood, however, never happened).

Among Biden's obstacles is Netanyahu, who has staunchly rejected Palestinian statehood over his 40-year political career. Recently, he asserted that such an outcome would“endanger the existence of the State of Israel.” Peace talks will not become a jewel in Biden's foreign policy crown, and he has dropped mentioning them.

But Middle East conflict abhors a vacuum, and Netanyahu has post-war plans of his own, which he has already put into motion. He replaced the defunct Biden project with a mission to establish a permanent military occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu has advertised the project primarily as a means of deterring any future October 7 recurrence. But it would also create“facts on the ground” that would make a Gaza branch of a two-state solution a physical impossibility.

Though not publicly announced, concrete aspects of the project have already sprouted inside the devastated enclave. Israeli military engineers have leveled trees and buildings in a strip about a half-mile deep inside Gaza's eastern and northern border with Israel.

The clearing is apparently designed to create a free-fire buffer zone. All told, the operation has consumed about 16% of Gaza territory.

Israeli forces have also constructed an east-west road across the center of the enclave that stretches from Israel to the Mediterranean Sea. The route is meant to slice the Gaza Strip in half and form an internal boundary between the heavily populated city of Gaza in the north and communities in the south on the way to Egypt. Travelers would be inspected by Israeli guards at crossing points and surveilled from tall observation towers built to ease surveillance.

In addition, Netanyahu proposes to occupy a ten-mile-long east-west strip along the border with Egypt. Failure to get approval of that demand, he said in his televised Monday speech, made him reject a ceasefire deal.

Control of the zone, known by the code-name“Philadelphi Corridor,” would allow Israel to inspect goods crossing overland from Egypt as well as allow electronic and physical monitoring and destruction of tunnels underneath. Versions of such tunnels have long been used to smuggle weapons and other contraband to Hamas.

However, Netanyahu did not mention what may be an insurmountable obstacle to occupying the Philadelphi route: Egypt, one of Washington's interlocutors with Hamas. A 2005 accord between Israel and Egypt put Palestinians in charge of the Gaza side of the border. Egypt's President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is resisting any change to the agreement.

In effect, Netanyahu is trying to reverse history. Until 2005, Israel had occupied the entire Gaza Strip in the same manner it currently occupies parts of the much larger West Bank. In the Gaza enclave, Israel had installed 21 settlements that housed a population of 8,000 Israelis.

However, steady, if low-intensity, violence aimed at the settlers persuaded the Israeli government to abandon the project, tear down the Gaza settlements and pay off inhabitants to return to Israel. Controls offshore and along the fenced-off border seemed adequate-until October 7.

Military reoccupation would fix something Netanyahu considers a mistaken retreat.

Some Israeli commentators justify Netanyahu's plan with further embellishments, saying it is needed to persuade Palestinians to cooperate with Israel's security demands and give up on statehood.

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“We must set a goal of de-Hamasification of Gaza,” wrote Gabi Siboni, an Israeli researcher at the Institute for Strategy and Security in Jerusalem.“Just as it took many years to cleanse Germany of the remnants of Nazi rule, we, too, must be ready and willing for this long and arduous task. Achieving this goal will not be easy and will require a years-long military, political, educational, economic and legal struggle.”

Other observers see Netanyahu's project as a way not only to resolve the conflict with Hamas but also to intensify the pacification of a restive West Bank.

The analysts regard a Gaza military occupation as a pared-down imitation of Israel's physical dominance of the West Bank, which is a spaghetti-pattern web of roads, walls, fences, trenches and berms that separate scores of Israeli settler communities and military outposts from Palestinian towns, villages and farmland.

But more is being done in the West Bank in tandem with the war in Gaza. Israeli troops are carrying out what they call“preemptive” raids in the major towns of Tulkarem, Jenin and Nablus. The incursions include the construction of wide roads into tightly built-up areas to ease the entry of tanks and other military vehicles - much like the east-west road in Gaza.

The low-intensity West Bank conflict has taken 480 Palestinian and nine Israeli lives, compared with the Gaza death toll of more than 40,000 Palestinian and around 1,500 Israelis.

“Think of it as the West Bank. The idea is that Israel doesn't need a whole brigade inside a city,” said Eyal Lurie-Pardes, a researcher at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. Instead,“they are stationed outside the central population, but always have the ability to make small incursions,” he explained.

Others take a more apocalyptic view of Netanyahu's plans for Gaza and the West Bank.“Many of us take the real objective to be the endless Israeli presence and takeover and the liquidation of Palestinian presence there,” said Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Qatar.

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