UN ceasefire resolution is a signal, not a sanction, for Israel
Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, speaks during a UN Security Council meeting for a vote on a ceasefire in Gaza, March 25, 2024 in New York City. The United States ultimately abstained from the vote, allowing the Security Council to pass the ceasefire resolution. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images
Dan Perry March 25, 2024
TEL AVIV — The United Nations Security Council is a forum for grandstanding and virtue-signaling, where yesterday’s powers wield their vetoes abusively, as hypocrisy and cynicism rule.
Sometimes the essence remains unsaid, and so it was on Monday, as the United States allowed the passage of a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, prompting Israel to call off talks in Washington between top defense and intelligence officials of the two allies.
The resolution, No. 2728, came after five previous ceasefire proposals failed, three by U.S. veto and two sponsored by the U.S. and vetoed by China and Russia. It upset Israel by not condemning Hamas, or specifically saying the terror group cannot remain in power in Gaza. That is something Israel will not abide — and the U.S. actually does not want.
It’s important to note that this resolution is not a sanction — it does not carry any consequence to Israel for not abiding the ceasefire — but a signal.
It is a signal that President Joe Biden has had it with the ingratitude and disrespect shown to him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and needs Israel to shift course before he can support any additional major war actions. That includes the one that most observers expect and many agree is essential: the uprooting of Hamas from its last redoubt in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
The two leaders are locked in a clash that derives as much from their own internal politics as from ideological or policy differences.
Biden faces an election this year and the Gaza war, which has killed many thousands of Palestinian civilians, has become a wedge issue for the brittle Democratic coalition he needs intact for November: Turn right and risk losing progressive and Muslim voters; turn left and lose Jews and centrists. He needs Netanyahu to ease up or he’ll have zero room to maneuver.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, does not want to face an election this year. The rank ineptitude and calamitous performance of his government are such that he would lose at the ballot box if forced to return there — and therefore lose his latitude to engineer stalling tactics in his ongoing bribery trial. But the fate of Netanyahu’s coalition depends on a pair of far-right parties that are primed to bolt the moment he agrees to any rational-world solicitations by Biden. Do not underestimate the suicidal purism of the Messianic right.
Biden’s emissaries have proposed a grand design for ending the war in which Israel is meant to be rewarded by relations with Saudi Arabia in exchange for pursuing talks on Palestinian statehood. That is a non-starter for Netanyahu’s coalition. It is also unpopular with many Israeli Jews who are traumatized by Oct. 7 and terrified such an attack could be replicated by Palestinians in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Israel’s main cities.
The U.S. is trying to give Israel the leeway it needs to finish off Hamas, despite the further carnage that will entail, in exchange for two things: First, agreeing to a plausible scenario for the Palestinians for the day after; second, a good-faith addressing of the humanitarian disaster in the Rafah area, which currently contains most of the strip’s population and more than a million displaced people.
Even to this Netanyahu replies, at least in public, with a no.
That’s because the most plausible day-after plan would be a restoration of the Palestinian Authority to power in Gaza, from which Hamas expelled it in a coup in 2007. It is hardly a perfect plan, because the authority is corrupt and widely disliked by Palestinians. Netanyahu has spent years demonizing it, with some justification: It continues to support a curriculum for students that has seemed to delegitimize Israel and justify attacks on Jews, and it provides financial support to the families of terrorists who killed Israelis.
But the P.A. has also largely kept its word, its promises and the peace in the occupied West Bank, and unlike Hamas it is committed to a two-state solution. It is, like much in life and especially the Middle East, the least bad option.
Netanyahu and his coalition don’t have much of an answer to this. They seem instead to be headed toward a permanent occupation of Gaza that would result in an inevitable insurrection, years of bloodletting and more radicalization that can only feed support of Hamas and other terror groups.
The prime minister may have pushed the envelope too far by presenting himself to the Israeli people in recent appearances as a champion of Israel’s sovereign right to bite the hand that feeds it. Biden watched his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, absorb one humiliation after another in his repeated trips to the region, and the president’s patience appears to have run out.
That is why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took the extraordinary step several weeks ago of advising Israelis to hold new elections and dump their prime minister, who Schumer said has “lost his way.” Then Biden declared this a “good speech.” Remarkable! You will struggle to find a precedent for the United States telling an ally to defenestrate its democratically elected leader.
But that’s not all. This weekend, you had Vice President Kamala Harris strongly suggest that Israel should not invade Rafah, having “looked at the map” and discovered its people have nowhere to go. Harris is wrong: The displaced could go back north, if Israel opened a safe passage corridor there. That’s what Netanyahu’s army should be rushing to do now: Let out all the unarmed people who are not on wanted lists, before any move on Rafah.
Israel also must stop projecting indifference to the humanitarian disaster gripping Gaza. Netanyahu’s proxies run around telling the media that no other country sends humanitarian aid to its enemy, then claim they are doing all they can. They are lying to the media or to themselves.
The situation in Gaza has few precedents. Millions are held hostage by a terrorist cabal using them as a human fortification while hiding in reinforced tunnels built with perhaps a billion dollars’ worth of plunder. It’s true that Hamas would commandeer and divert aid to its own purposes — so send aid to the north, where Hamas is not, and let the civilians go there to receive it.
Israel is acting like it’s trying to win an argument, not hearts and minds. And it is losing the heart of the one person in the world it needs most of all: Biden. That is why Monday’s U.N. Security Council resolution was allowed to pass. That is why more painful forms of pressure may follow, until Netanyahu cries Uncle Joe.
Coercion can be dangerous. But in this case, Israel would be better off, as would the Palestinians.
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