There is a measure of desperation in Biden’s ceasefire plan

The US president and Israeli prime minister are anxious to get out of a war destroying their political prospects. Yet Biden said that Hamas’s military power has been diminished to the point where it could not repeat its October 7 assault, suggesting that Israel has achieved its goal and can now leave Gaza. The tensions between the following main players have to be resolved: the US and Israeli governments; Biden and Netanyahu; Netanyahu and several far-right Jewish ultranationalists in his government; the Israeli government and Israeli citizens who reject its ideology from well before October 7; the Israeli government and many Israeli citizens who support the demands of captives’ families to end the war and free them; Biden and a large swath of his Democratic Party base who demand that he reverse his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, or they will not vote for him in November; Biden and the many Democrats and Republicans who want to continue the Israeli genocide; the US leadership, and most of the world’s people and governments who support equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis and oppose the US-backed genocide; the Israeli government and Hamas whose respective core goals are nearly, but not fully, met in the Biden proposal; and the US government and Hamas who now negotiate indirectly, but remain antagonistic on most issues related to Palestine-Israel and US hegemony in the region. If the first of the plan’s three stages happens, hard negotiations will then have to tackle the toughest issues, like what form of Palestinian governance ultimately takes charge in Gaza, what security guarantees regional and global powers give Israelis and Palestinians, and how they permanently resolve the most contentious underlying issues – like ending Palestinian refugeehood, containing Zionist settler-colonialism, and peacefully coexisting as separate sovereignties in one land or adjacent states. On the issue of Palestinian governance, Biden made an intriguing point in his Friday speech when he said that “at this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7th”, meaning Israel has achieved a key goal of seriously degrading Hamas and it could now stop the war and leave Gaza.