The last time that Israel and Hamas engaged in hostilities that had the potential to ignite a larger war was in May 2021. At the time, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan flew to Cairo and worked with Egyptian officials to negotiate a ceasefire. He drew from his own experience: In November 2012, as an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he and his Egyptian counterparts had locked in a ceasefire after a different outburst of conflict.
So I found it revealing about where this war currently stands, and how different it is from the past, when Clinton dismissed any possibility of a ceasefire while speaking last week at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “People who are calling for a ceasefire now do not understand Hamas. That is not possible,” she said. “It would be such a gift to Hamas, because they would spend whatever time there was a ceasefire in effect rebuilding their armaments, creating stronger positions to be able to fend off an eventual assault by the Israelis.”
Historically, these ceasefires have worked for both Israel and Hamas, until they haven’t.
But the previous logic of Israel-Hamas wars no longer holds after the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed and 242 people were taken hostage. That has fundamentally altered Israel’s security thinking: It now wants to eliminate Hamas entirely. Israel’s existential catastrophe has changed its approach to security, as we’re seeing through its intensive bombardment of Gaza and its ongoing ground incursion, with more than 9,000 Palestinians killed, including 3,000 children.
“The technique before was to convince the Israelis that Hamas can be under control,” Nabeel Khoury, a career US diplomat focused on the Middle East who retired as a minister-counselor, told me. “Israelis are way beyond that. They want something much more radical than what happened in the past.”
The fact that nearly everyone powerful in the US is also rejecting a ceasefire now…
Read the full article here
