What Are the Prospects for Gaza Ceasefire as Israel Expands Multifront Attacks?

As Israeli forces launch repeated attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, expand their deadly incursion into the West Bank and threaten retaliation for strikes by Hezbollah and Houthis, we discuss ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas with Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi and former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. Despite apparent divisions among Israeli leadership over the terms of an acceptable deal — if such a deal even exists — all of the Israeli proposals are “united by an assumption that Israel is going to be maintaining overarching control of the Gaza Strip,” says Iraqi. Meanwhile, in the United States, what Levy calls “the Biden administration’s slavish devotion to running cover” for Israel’s genocidal assault is threatening the Democratic Party’s attempt to hold onto executive power after the upcoming presidential election.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to the ongoing Gaza ceasefire negotiations as Israeli forces continue their attacks on multiple fronts. The latest Israeli airstrike on Gaza killed at least 10 people in the Nuseirat refugee camp, one of the main areas where families are trying to take shelter in Gaza. Other Israeli attacks targeted Gaza City’s Zeitoun and Sheikh Radwan neighborhoods, where another 10 people were killed, including children, according to Al Jazeera. Residents of Nuseirat searched through the rubble of a house after the attack. This is resident Mu’men Shaheen.

MU’MEN SHAHEEN: [translated] Our neighbors here are all under the rubble, a family under the rubble, a man, his wife, their children, and the neighbors next to them. We were able to remove around nine martyrs, all of them children, in pieces. May God be sufficient for us, and that is it.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the official death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza has topped 41,200. On Sunday, Gaza’s Health Ministry published a list of the names and ages of every Palestinian killed in Gaza between October 7th to August 31st that it can account for. The first 14 pages of the nearly 650-page document lists residents killed who were under the age of 1 year old.

Meanwhile, Israel has admitted there is a high probability three Israeli hostages who died in Gaza in November, were recovered in December, had been killed in an Israeli strike. The hostages were two Israeli soldiers and a civilian: Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman and Elia Toledano.

After talks last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy reaffirmed their commitment to a Gaza ceasefire and the release of hostages. This comes as Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued a statement today to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on a possible agreement to stop the fighting with Hezbollah along the Israel-Lebanon border, saying, quote, “The possibility for an agreed framework in the northern arena is running out as Hezbollah continues to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas,” unquote.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would make Houthis pay a, quote, “heavy price” after a Houthi missile reached central Israel for the first time.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] We are in a multifront campaign against Iran’s axis of evil, which is striving for our destruction. This morning, the Houthis launched a surface-to-surface missile from Yemen into our territory. They should have known by now that we were exacting a heavy price for every attempt to harm us. Anyone who needs a reminder on this matter is welcome to visit the Port of Hodeidah. Whoever attacks us will not evade our strike. Hamas is already learning this through our determined action, which will bring about its destruction and the release of all of our hostages.

AMY GOODMAN: As Netanyahu spoke, he was wearing a yellow ribbon for the hostages. A number of the hostage families have called on Netanyahu to take off the yellow ribbon, saying it’s he who is most threatening the lives of hostages in Gaza.

For more, we’re joined by two guests here in New York. Amjad Iraqi is a Palestinian journalist, senior editor at 972 Magazine, policy member of Al-Shabaka. His recent article for Chatham House is headlined “The real schism in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks is about who decides Gaza’s future.” His recent piece for 972, “We’re already in a regional war. Only a Gaza ceasefire can end it.” And Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, is with us, former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Amjad, let’s begin with you. In this piece you wrote in Chatham, “The real schism in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks is about who decides Gaza’s future.” Talk about what has prevented a ceasefire from going into effect.

AMJAD IRAQI: Thanks so much for having me, Amy.

I think it’s easy for a lot of people to assume that what’s wrong with the ceasefire talks for these past months are these kind of technical details or that it’s some disputes around the hostage-prisoner exchange. I think most of the parameters have been quite clear for a very, very long time. What the real issue is, the fundamental divergence is about what is the fate of Gaza and the 2.3 million Palestinians who are there. That is what’s really at the heart of this.

Now, for Hamas, coming into these ceasefire negotiations, it is essentially seeking for a full Israeli withdrawal and some kind of path towards returning Gaza to Palestinian control. And it’s also signaled, for example, that it will be — it’s willing to be part of an interim government. It has signaled that it does not want to have full control over Gaza itself. And so, it is indicating that that is essentially what it’s trying to achieve.

Now, for the Israeli side, it’s quite opposite. It’s very little interest in seeing Gaza return to the Palestinians. And Israeli officials, the generals, the politicians, have been putting forward various what they call day-after plans. And these range from a long-term deployment of Israeli troops to having Arab states come in with peacekeeping forces to even establishing Jewish settlements. And these are heavily contested, but these are all united by an assumption that Israel is going to be maintaining overarching control of the Gaza Strip. And this is not just something that’s theoretical, it’s something that they’re actively doing on the ground, literally shrinking Gaza, through buffer zones, through military corridors, including along the Gaza-Egypt border, what’s known as the Philadelphi Corridor. So, this is actively, essentially, redesigning the occupation of Gaza. This is what’s really at the heart of it.

And Washington has very clearly sided with the Israeli side of that equation, that is more willing to allow Israel to create those new facts on the ground and to try to give time for the Israelis to establish that, more so than it is willing to give Gaza back to the Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the Philadelphi Corridor. Daniel Levy, you have Yoav Gallant. Both Yoav Gallant and the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are being investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Court of Justice. But I’m looking at a piece in The Times of Israel, “PM nearing move to fire Defense Minister Gallant, replace him with Gideon Sa’ar.” Gallant has disagreed with Netanyahu over saying the Philadelphi Corridor is that important.

DANIEL LEVY: Yes. And it’s good to be here in person.

What you have is a division between the Israeli prime minister and much of his Cabinet and the defense minister and elements of the security establishment, not over what Amjad was just describing to you, which is the long-term sense of a permanent Israeli presence in Gaza, indeed over the conduct of this war, but where they disagree is over whether there should be an acceptance of a deal which, at a minimum, would give a pause to get hostages out and, I would say, would also give some respite to a military which has been on this extensive deployment, is struggling, in fact, to replenish its ranks in terms of reservists. Prime Minister Netanyahu worries that any pause could make it more difficult for him to resume the war and could lead him to lose his coalition.

Netanyahu wants an open-ended war, an open-ended war in Gaza, an open-ended war in the West Bank. Since 28th of August, Israel has been conducting a more extensive — they’re always operating, but a more extensive, more destructive military operation, including against infrastructure, in the West Bank and an open-ended war on the northern front with Hezbollah in Lebanon. So he’s at odds with those guys. He wants to get rid of not only his defense minister, but some of the senior military echelon, in order to complete his takeover of the Israeli elite. Again, the differences matter. The differences aren’t that significant when it comes to Palestinian rights. They matter in terms of the immediacy, of the intensity of the genocide.

What’s interesting in the last weeks, and you referenced that yellow pin that Prime Minister Netanyahu was wearing and the criticism from the families of those Israelis being held in Gaza — what’s interesting in recent weeks is the extent to which the U.S. efforts have also sided with Netanyahu in this internal disagreement with his defense minister, with the hostage families, with the security establishment. I think mostly that’s because of the Biden administration’s slavish devotion to running cover and preventing accountability for Israel, slavish devotion to Israeli narratives. There’s probably some amateurishness and some unintentionality thrown in there, as well. But that is where we are.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do think this is going on? I mean, you’re not normally here in the United States, but you are here right now, so you can see very directly the coverage of U.S. politics. Leading up to the Democratic convention, when the Democrats were concerned of a repeat of 1968, mass protests, particularly around the issue of Gaza, inexplicably, they announced that they were OK’ing, what, $20 billion more weapons for Israel. And it was right before, supposedly, President Biden was pressuring Netanyahu for a ceasefire, but they OK’d this tens of billions of dollars of weapons before they were pushing him to OK a ceasefire — which, of course, he didn’t. And, of course, if he falls from office, if there isn’t an open-ended war, he could go to trial and end up in jail, which might lead us to understand why Netanyahu is pushing so hard to keep all of this open and not have a ceasefire.

DANIEL LEVY: And it’s ideological. I don’t want to leave that out of the equation. It’s political, it’s coalition, it’s Netanyahu is the indispensable wartime leader, but this is also driven by the Greater Israel, permanent-displacement-of-Palestinians ideology, in terms of what you referenced,

I don’t know of a definition of the word “pressure” which accords with the idea that America is exerting any pressure on Israel to end these activities. What we saw, and I think there was — unfortunately, characteristic when it comes to this issue — deceit and dishonesty from the administration by creating this sense, “Hey, we’re getting close. There are ceasefire talks,” just to coincide with the Democrat convention. However, they have placed themselves in the very precarious position that Netanyahu — I don’t know that this is going to happen, and probably won’t because he has other considerations. But here we are, less than 50 days from an election, where his next moves could still impact your election over here. I think when you look at this from the perspective, if I may, of Americans, I don’t think there’s much of a constituency, there’s much capacity on the Republican side to try and leverage this issue to impact their candidate. I think that still does exist on the Democrat side.

And I would also, if I can, just look to the future, Amy, because these people, whatever the outcome of the election, those who have been most in charge of this policy, a policy on trial very soon, one imagines, at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, already condemned at the International Court of Justice, they will now be out of office. And how will they be treated, both legally and socially politically, as the people who were complicit in this? How will Secretary Blinken be received when he leaves office, within legal realms, has to be? Because that will send a signal to future officeholders. There should be a stigma and a cost associated with complicity, legal culpability in these kinds of crimes.

And we saw a horrible reminder, not new, but a horrible reminder, to Americans, something we know already, but when Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the dual national, Turkish American, was killed, perhaps by American weapons, Biden immediately ran to give cover to the Israeli side. We saw again that one kind of American life is treated differently to another when it comes to these dual nationals. The administration is absolutely right to wrap its arm around those dual national Israeli Americans being held, but where are they when it comes to wrapping its arms around, embracing, reaching out to these families? It’s happened before: Shireen Abu Akleh, Rachel Corrie. And it happened again.

And there is a price to pay here, not just in the U.S., because the international norms that are being violated are going to haunt us and have implications around the world for years to come. Israel is not the only bad actor. It’s not the first bad actor. Others do bad things in the world. But the extent of what has been done over these last months and the extent of America preventing accountability, when it comes to calling a U.N. agency like UNRWA a terrorist organization, a piece of legislation going through the Israeli parliament right now, when it comes to ignoring ICJ rulings, when it comes to the International Criminal Court, when it comes to using starvation as a weapon of war, when it comes to this mass destruction, we are going to be living globally with the consequences of the trampling of these norms for a long time, I’m afraid.

AMY GOODMAN: I should say that both of you are here in the United States. You spoke at a Jewish Currents conference, the magazine Jewish Currents, which was supposed to be at Brooklyn College, but in the end they said that they couldn’t have the meeting there, and, interestingly, they ended up having it at a synagogue on the Lower East Side.

Amjad, you write in your piece that the Biden administration’s policy towards Netanyahu has only reinforced the sense that the U.S. is Israel’s lawyer. Talk about coming to the United States, seeing these elections, and the position the U.S. has taken, even for the Democrats, who are in power right now, at the risk of losing the election, because there are not only large Arab American communities in a number of the swing states, but it is the Black community in the United States, which overwhelmingly has sided with peace in the Middle East. A thousand Black bishops or Black ministers wrote to the Biden White House saying they haven’t seen this kind of solidarity since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Young people, overwhelmingly, the young Jewish community in this country, the encampments across university campuses, whether or not universities allow for this kind of discussion. What have been your observations? And what does it mean for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Israel?

AMJAD IRAQI: I mean, it’s been very interesting for me. I’ve obviously been following this from afar and, just in the few days that I’ve been here, having a lot of conversations with the activists and thinkers and writers and journalists. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary, the movement that’s been building up for many years now and just to see it really come out in full force both on the streets of New York and D.C. and Michigan, etc., to listening how the media is covering it, and even though it’s still a battle, but you’re seeing these really radical shifts and the fact that, you know, things like the “uncommitted” movement is trying to create that impact.

So, it’s really astounding to watch these debates. And in that, you are seeing these kind of intersectional angles to see how much there is that disconnect between the American public, which, even at its most minimum, is asking for something like a ceasefire, something like basic respect for Palestinian rights, and that the Democratic establishment, which we’re seeing very evidently, is just refusing to acknowledge that and is preferring to, essentially, side with a kind of foreign policy that the Republicans themselves are fully on board with, which should probably be a red flag if there really is that kind of bipartisan consensus. And there’s many ways to unpack this, but that really needs to be something that the Democratic Party needs to reflect on, of how much it has been contributing to a larger geopolitical status quo.

I mean, the way that Daniel has also described this recently in interviews, this war on Gaza and the regional conflagration, as Daniel says, this is also America’s war. It is not actually deescalating anything. It is actively contributing to sending weapons, funds, diplomatic cover for a war that is doing the exact opposite of everything that the Biden administration is saying, literally giving protection to a Netanyahu government which Biden and Blinken themselves say is a very problematic government, literally giving cover to an occupation which America claims to want to whittle down and end but is in fact providing everything that will ensure the exact opposite. It is saying that it does not want a regional war, but it’s actively launching airstrikes in Yemen, is giving Netanyahu standing ovations here in Congress, is attacking the ICJ and the ICC, is doing everything that is undermining the Biden administration’s declared purposes.

And so, regular citizens here in the United States are seeing through this. They’re seeing those contradictions, and they’re demanding consistency in the values that the Democratic Party claims to espouse and the policies that it enables.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is at risk of losing the election. I mean, you have now the Green Party candidate Jill Stein leading Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan.

AMJAD IRAQI: Yeah. And this is the dialectic that the Democratic Party, if it claims to be representative of different kinds of communities in the United States, needs to actually listen to these voters and needs to understand that this is where public opinion is shifting. And if it’s refusing to do that and it’s still maintaining that brick wall between this idea — ideological, strategic, political — of where America needs to stand vis-à-vis Israel, then I’m afraid the Democratic Party is only going to be losing those kind of voters and those kind of communities. And Gaza and Palestine is one major test of that, but it certainly expands to a lot of other avenues.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us a description of what’s happening in the West Bank right now. I mean, you’ve got, since October 7th, nearly a thousand [sic] people arrested, hundreds of people killed. This isn’t Gaza. This is the West Bank. If you can explain what you think Israel wants to accomplish here?

AMJAD IRAQI: From the very beginning of the war, the Israeli state, the Israeli army and the Israeli settler movement has taken this as a full opportunity to entrench its control over the West Bank. You’re having a massive increase in settler violence, which has been increasing for years, but this has again been expedited massively since October 7th. The Israeli military is crossing all lines, not just in Area C, which is the main areas that the Israeli military controls, but is actively invading cities and refugee camps in Jenin, in Nablus, in Tulkarm. It is really going all out to essentially enshrine and expand its de facto annexation that has been going on for a very long time. And this is being accompanied on the ground with pushes in the Israeli Knesset by the Israeli government to pass new laws and bills and new policies, especially by people like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who’s also essentially the de facto governor of the West Bank, to, essentially, enshrine this one-state reality and to make it as permanent as possible. So, this is — and what’s happening in West Bank is intricately tied to what’s going on in Gaza. It’s not just isolated in one place.

AMY GOODMAN: I misspoke: I said 1,000 arrested.

DANIEL LEVY: You said — yeah. Yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Ten thousand —

AMJAD IRAQI: Ten thousand, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Palestinians have been arrested, most held without charge. A number of reports, from many different groups, have said people are being tortured, people are being killed, people are being raped in jails. Daniel Levy, what you thinks Israel wants to accomplish there before the end of this? Do you see them annexing the West Bank?

DANIEL LEVY: De facto, we are very deep into that process. The Israeli government is making good on its own coalition guidelines. And let me remind you what those guidelines say: The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel. That was set out long before October 7th. It was a government with those guidelines that the Biden administration handed entry to the visa waiver program, tried to get normalization with Saudi Arabia. So, that was the way that Biden backed the axis of Israeli extremism. And we now see it coming to fruition.

And it’s not coincidental that there is a scorched-earth policy in the West Bank, because the intentionality here is to either force Palestinians out or make life there so miserable and make this a kind of humanitarian aid basket case for years and decades to come, that we don’t talk politics. We focus on can we get this assistance in, that assistance in, or both. That is what is going on. That is what we need to keep our eyes on. And this is the permissive environment that the U.S. has created, and it backs the settler extremism, which is backed by the state.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, and Amjad Iraqi, Palestinian journalist, senior editor at 972 Magazine. We’ll link to your piece at Chatham House, “The real schism in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks is about who decides Gaza’s future,” and your pieces in 972 Magazine, the most recent, “We’re already in a regional war. Only a Gaza ceasefire can end it.”

That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.