What does Israel have to gain with what appears to be another charade? For one, the potential PR win to blunt the extraordinary, worldwide condemnation Israel is facing, most importantly in the United States, writes Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Hamas and Israeli officials began indirect negotiations at the luxury Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday on the details of a cease-fire plan that Donald Trumps says will end the killing in Gaza. But there is very little reason for optimism.
Trump laid out the plan last Monday in the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu, after the Israeli prime minister had a chance to make last minute edits. It seemed like it was a deal designed to fail in order to pin the blame on Hamas.
Israel is desperately losing the public relations war, which Trump has openly acknowledged. He said, “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.” Israel has acknowledged it too, given the amount of money it is spending on U.S. social media “influencers” and the Zionist deals to purchase TikTok and CBS News.
Israel has to make a show of wanting peace. Blame for the continuing carnage has to be shifted to Hamas. So the Trump-Netanyahu deal was presented as take-it-or-leave it. It is essentially an offer to surrender: give up your weapons, give up the hostages and give up political power to a “technocratic” Arab body that will be put under a governing board run by Trump himself (and Tony Blair of all people.)
In exchange, Hamas would get back more than 1,000 Palestinian hostages being held by Israel. And the occupying IDF would withdraw from parts of Gaza but not completely from the Strip. That’s it.
Trump gave Hamas a deadline of Sunday to accept surrender or said he would back Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza. The idea is that after it was expected Hamas would reject such a one-sided deal, it would be blamed for rejecting “peace” so that the “job” — genocide and ethnic cleansing — could continue.
The job is going on anyway as Israel ignored Trump’s order to stop bombing Gaza during the negotiation, as it continues killing Palestinians, though the numbers of dead are declining as the talks continue.
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where negotiations are taking place. (Joe Lauria)
Gaza, where Israel continues to bomb, 325 miles away. (Jaber Jehad Badwan / Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hamas Responds
Instead of rejecting this terrible offer and thus playing into U.S. and Israeli hands, Hamas shrewdly said it was ready to deal. It threw the ball back into Israel’s court, muddying the waters as to who would be blamed if, as anticipated, peace does not come.
Jeremey Scahill of Drop Site News reported:
“A senior Hamas official told Drop Site that the group’s leadership understood that ‘this proposal was not put forward to find an end to the war. It is either total surrender or continue the war. Take it or leave it.’ They viewed it as ‘catastrophic in the short and long term, for the resistance and for the whole Palestinian cause.’ But on a strategic level, Hamas officials and other Palestinian leaders knew that formally rejecting Trump’s offer would be disastrous. The public narrative would almost certainly portray Hamas as rejecting peace even after a broad coalition of Muslim and Arab countries had endorsed it.”
Hamas says it will disarm and turn power over to an Arab-led technocratic government, but did not rule out having a say in the future governance of Gaza. Details of Israel’s withdrawal from parts of Gaza and who would provide security in the areas Israel does vacate are among the sticking points being discussed indirectly at Sharm el-Sheik.
Al Jazeera reported on Tuesday that these are Hamas’ demands after day two of the talks, quoting a Hamas official who said:
- “The second day in Sharm el-Sheikh focused on withdrawal maps for Israeli forces and scheduling the release of Israeli captives.
- The Hamas delegation demanded linking the stages of the release of Israeli captives to the stages of the withdrawal by Israel’s military.
- The delegation stressed the release of the last Israeli hostage must coincide with the final withdrawal of the occupation forces.
- The delegation underscored the need to receive international guarantees for a final ceasefire, including the removal of all Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s territory.”
A History of Israeli Treachery
The Palestinians know exactly who they are dealing with. Al Jazeera also reported:
“Hamas’s top negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, says the Gaza-based group does ‘not trust the occupation, not even for a second,’ Egyptian state-linked Al Qahera News reports. ‘Therefore, we want real guarantees,’ al-Hayya said, accusing Israel of violating two ceasefires in the war on Gaza. ‘The Israeli occupation throughout history does not keep its promises, and we have experienced it twice in this war.’”
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, during earlier negotiations in January wrote in his piece, “The Ceasefire Charade”:
“Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game.
It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace.
It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.”
There is every reason to believe this will happen again this time.
What does Israel and Netanyahu have to gain with what appears to be another charade?
First, the potential PR win to blunt the extraordinary, worldwide condemnation Israel is facing, most importantly in the United States. Without U.S. weapons, money and diplomatic cover, the Greater Israel project would ground to a halt.
Netanyahu is keenly aware of the importance of social media to win over Americans who are abandoning a genocidal Israel in droves.
The second thing to gain is an end to continued anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel regarding the hostages. Given the plethora of official statements of intent by Israeli officials since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s real war aims are clearly not to free the hostages or defeat Hamas, but to commit genocide and ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians so that Israel can make Gaza part of Greater Israel once and for all.
The chutzpah of Israeli officials publicly declaring their criminal intent and their actual war aims is a thing to behold, fed by decades of maximum impunity. It apparently has not begun to sink in with some of them that this impunity is at last vanishing.
The Wall Street Journal reported that extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted any easing of the killing in Gaza while the talks for the hostage release goes on.
And extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir threatened to pull his party out of Netanyahu’s government if Hamas “wasn’t destroyed after the release of all of the hostages.”
Ben-Givr knows that it is too early to destroy Hamas because what excuse would there be to continue the ethnic cleansing operation and the total takeover and annexation of Gaza? Defeating Hamas is not the principle aim of the war.
There was a time when fanatics like Smotrich and Ben-Givr were on the fringes of Israeli society and properly viewed as the unhinged ideologues that they are. But they and others like them now sit in the government. They are the inheritors of the dream of a Greater Israel of the Zionist founding fathers including David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister.
Since then, Israeli leaders have pursued the goal by piecemeal. The initial 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their land was a start. More land was seized in 1967 and 1973. But now the Israelis are closer than ever to achieving their diabolical dream.
So if Netanyahu can get the remaining hostages back and squelch the protests, he will bask in a short-term political victory.
That will leave the unresolved issues in Sharm el-Sheikh of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas’ disarmament, and the make-up of an Arab-backed government.
As long as Israel and the United States demand Hamas’ surrender to a regime led by Donald Trump and Tony Blair the chances of a deal are practically nil. Tel Aviv will then blame Hamas and will resume the genocide.
One wonders how much of this Trump understands, so engrossed as he is with his own image and winning an elusive Nobel Peace Prize. When the deal fails following the prisoner exchanges, and when Israel’s full-scale ethnic cleansing resumes, does anyone doubt that even if Netanyahu may have cost him the Prize that Trump won’t back him 100 percent to “finish the job?”
An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, after Israeli forces withdrawal and as a temporary ceasefire took hold, Jan. 21, 2025. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0)
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Peace and ceasefire are not the same thing. The relief of a time without bombing brought transitory images of euphoria among Palestinians, but there are many ways of dying, such as not escaping the yoke of colonization from outsiders. The only road to peace is leadership within the Palestinian culture that can guide healing for generations. Israel knew that nascent leadership existed, hence the selection of targets.
It depends on how much the DT “understands”… that’s telling right there. He conflates, confuses, and contradicts with almost every utterance, and dude won’t ever shut up. The Emperor Has No Marbles. The DT was already proudly ignorant of basic facts and history, now he appears to be on the verge of full blown mental illness. Sy Hersh commented on that yesterday.
Sadly, the most likely way for the genocide to stop would be for Israel to attack Iran again. The response from Iran would likely destroy Israel’s capability to bomb and genocide.
Larry Johnson and others have suggested that if other great powers like Russia and China took the lead on a global embargo against Israel, it would end the genocide etc. However, others have said that it would anger the reckless, mentally ill emperor and could end in a nuclear war.
Many analysts say that Israel will attack Iran again soon, and the response will be devastating.
I agree with you about DT’s “mental unwellness.” However as a retired mental health professional with many years of experience treating Alzheimer’s patients and their families, I think it is likely that DT has dementia. Not sure if it is Alzheimer’s, though his father died of the disease. DT has all the hallmarks, and his dysfunction is progressing rapidly. “It definitely is the time for the 25th amendment, but his blindly loyal and incompetent cabinet sadly is not up to the task.
LOL at “The response from Iran would likely destroy Israel’s capability to bomb and genocide”
What more will it take to prove to you that Iran is a paper tiger? Israel has been openly conducting operations in Iran for the past year with little more than symbolic protests from Iran. Israel has decapitated and destroyed all of Iran’s proxy militias with little more than strongly worded letters from Iran. Iran will do nothing because Iran is toothless. Even if they weren’t toothless before October 2023, they certainly are now.
You know what did stop Israel? Bombing Qatar, because that pissed off Israel’s sugar daddy Trump and all their Gulf neighbors. Trump and the Gulf monarchies were OK with Israel’s incursions into Iran because they all view Iran as an enemy. But they were very much NOT OK with Israel’s incursion into Qatar because Trump views Qatar as a ‘generous’ and valued friend and the Gulf monarchies Qatar as one of their own. That’s what kicked off this whole new ceasefire push.
The Peace Prize is to be announced on Fri., which explains Trump’s insistence on a deal “in the next couple of days or all hell will break loose”. Even if Trump wins (heaven forbid, though i suppose the Committee is under a lot of pressure to award it to him – as big a farce as giving it to Obama), it won’t matter to Bibi et.al., because their goal of achieving a “Greater Israel”, without any Palestinians, hasn’t changed and will proceed apace ….
If he doesn’t win, who will he blame, Hamas or Israel – probably the former, although he will be pissed at Israel for failure to “finish the job!” as commanded.
Either way, the killing and starvation will continue until external forces are applied to make him stop. To that end a Uniting for Peace resolution in the UNGA, with the measures it advocates, such as Columbia’s Petro has called for, is the only potentially bright spot in the picture …
Let it be done …
It’s not possible to “make deals” with people that you know you can not trust. It would be extremely foolish. And we KNOW that we cannot trust Israel, and especially not zionists.
Peace deals and cease fires are almost made between enemies who don’t trust each other. That’s kind of the whole point. War is just diplomacy by other means … and vice versa. Diplomacy has to start somewhere. If you just stick to your guns and say ‘Israel cannot be trusted’, the war will never end. At some point, you have to agree to sit down and negotiate with a hated enemy if you cannot vanquish them on the battlefield.
Never trust zionists and the west
Very helpful article . The Scahill quote is a gem of insight into Hamas tactical thinking . You don’t mention key event Zionist assassination of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s meek acceptance of the Zionists ‘ manipulation of the public narrative post – assassination , to try to rebuild MAGA and Christian fundamentalist support for Israel . Netanyahu is now driving Trump forward . Netanyahu is the charioteer holding the reins , Trump the harnessed horse . Putin sees this too. @tonykevin
What is the alternative? Continue fighting until one side exterminates the other? I’m guessing you might not like how that ends.