The Ceasefire in Gaza: A Turning Point for Hamas and Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attending the weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister's office in...
The ceasefire deal between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which is meant to suppress local violence, depends on the expansion of an alliance that risks even more regional violence.Photograph by Amir Cohen / AFP / Getty

If the slow-motion crisis that is Gaza ever has a turning point, then this week’s deal between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, or what’s left of it, and Hamas leaders, under siege, is what the turning would look like. Superficially, the sides are merely returning to the terms established after the horrific war of 2014, and, indeed, the deal comes after two days of bloody exchanges, kicked off by a sketchy Israeli intelligence operation gone awry—an operation that left a senior Hamas commander, six Hamas fighters, and an Israeli lieutenant colonel dead. Hamas fired some four hundred rockets into Israel, some reaching the coastal city of Ashkelon, where a Palestinian worker from the Hebron area was killed; the Israeli Air Force responded with more than a hundred and fifty strikes, including some on the Hamas television studio. Yet the ceasefire, which has been in the works since the summer, has quid pro quos that bring to mind not only 2014 but also the more formal disengagement-of-forces agreements that were negotiated in the nineteen-seventies after the October War—in this case, Hamas will tamp down the border violence in exchange for Israel’s commitment to a freer movement of goods into, and people out of, Gaza, and to more predictable fuel deliveries, to allow for more predictable electricity production. The deal is preliminary. But it amounts to clear, if tentative, steps toward a relaxing of the blockade, which has been tightening since 2007, in return for a more certain calm in Israel’s border communities.

The deal was brokered by Egypt and Qatar, with apparent encouragement from the Trump Administration. The Qataris sealed it by offering to pony up fifteen million dollars in cash to Hamas leaders, ostensibly to pay civil-servant salaries. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has been reluctant to pay these, as long as Hamas refused to disarm and to consummate a unity agreement, which would, in effect, put the P.A. back in charge of the Gaza Strip. The Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, has stood firm against Abbas, and his intransigence seems to be paying off. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, known to be affiliated with Hamas, published details of the deal, which, should the ceasefire hold, would be implemented over three years. The Hamas-led border protests, in which more than two hundred Palestinians have been killed, and more than eighteen thousand wounded, would attenuate, and Israel would gradually lift up to seventy per cent of its restrictions on goods in and out of Gaza, including at its two border crossings, at Kerem Shalom and Erez. There is more. Egypt would insure that its crossing, at Rafah, would remain open, and the Gaza fishing zone would be extended from six nautical miles to fourteen. Several thousand Gazans would be given work permits for Israeli jobs. United Nations infrastructure and energy projects would meanwhile advance, creating as many as thirty thousand jobs for Gazans. “A gas pipeline to Gaza, using gas from Israeli and Palestinian sources, is already planned and moving forward,” Ariel Ezrahi, the director of energy in the Office of the Quartet (who is also my wife’s son), told me. “This will enable the necessary energy for other critical infrastructure, such as a major water-desalination plant, which is planned for the Strip.”

Yet it is anything but clear that the ceasefire will hold: during the agreement’s first hours, Israeli naval forces reportedly killed a young Gazan fisherman. What seems clearer, and is evidence of the deal’s importance, is how various political leaders have positioned themselves around it. Netanyahu’s coalition is in its last days, perhaps its last hours. Israel’s Putinesque defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that Netanyahu is “surrendering to terror,” and immediately resigned, bringing the government’s Knesset majority to just one seat. The education minister, Naftali Bennett, has also rejected the deal, and has made it clear that, if he is not appointed to the defense post, he will quit and bring the government down. Both ministers are merely playing to form, however. Israel must hold an election in 2019, and these two have always run against Netanyahu from the ideological right, only to extort him, and then hitch themselves to him, once a coalition took shape. Before Lieberman assumed the post, in May, 2016, he famously said that, if he were the defense minister, Hamas’s leader in Gaza—then Ismail Haniyeh—would have “forty-eight hours” to return the bodies of Israeli soldiers or be assassinated. Two years later, Hamas leaders, the bodies, and the bluster are still where and what they were. Lieberman is hoping that the resignation will redeem him with his hard line, largely Russian-born voters. Bennett wants to mobilize Land of Israel zealots who had counted on Netanyahu and might now be thinking twice. With him, Bennett said, Israel would “start winning again.”

More interesting is the positioning of Netanyahu, who, on Gaza, has provisionally aligned himself with Israel’s military establishment, which has persistently advocated for a deal, often in opposition to Likud political alliances. Like Ariel Sharon, who, in 2003, announced that he would unilaterally pull Jewish settlements out of the Gaza Strip—and infuriated the settler hawks in Gaza whom he had previously coddled—Netanyahu seems to be pivoting toward the Army strategists who believe that the status quo in Gaza entails too high a price. Last summer, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gadi Eisenkot, openly clashed with Lieberman over the provision of humanitarian aid, which he saw as crucial for preëmpting another fruitless war. According to the daily tabloid Yediot Ahronot, a senior Southern Command officer told reporters that “Israel should consider an arrangement with Hamas in light of the organization’s bad strategic situation, its diplomatic isolation, and the growing distress among the strip’s residents, who are yearning for an economic improvement.” Otherwise, the officer implied, the military would have to keep “managing tactical incidents”—the daily exchanges of fire— which could spontaneously escalate into “strategic events,” a euphemism for another war.

Ordinarily, associating oneself with the Army’s position would do no harm to any Israeli politician. But Netanyahu has, in a way, made himself hostage to “strategic events” partly under Hamas’s control. And he’ll have difficulty, in any case, re-ingratiating himself with the defense establishment. To most military leaders, replacing the former I.D.F. chief of staff Moshe (Boogie) Ya’alon with Lieberman in the defense portfolio, in 2016, seemed irresponsible on its face. Just last week, moreover, police investigators concluded that Netanyahu’s close friend, cousin, and attorney, David Shimron, should be indicted for bribery in an irregular process of procurement of naval vessels from the German contractor Thyssenkrupp—a scheme in which defense officials I have talked to believe that Netanyahu is implicated. (The Prime Minister has denied any involvement.) Ya’alon and another former Army chief, Benny Gantz, have both made it clear that they will challenge Netanyahu in the upcoming campaign, by forming centrist parties. Still, Netanyahu’s move suggests a path, much like Sharon’s, that seems just plausible enough for another campaign—a security strategy in which he purports to gain the status quo in Palestinian territories on the West Bank by changing that of Gaza. It would not be the first time Netanyahu took a populist message to the public, won just enough votes to form a government, and forced Likud acolytes to trim their sails.

In a way, Sinwar is in a corresponding dilemma, raising expectations that improvement is at hand, making himself a hostage to a process that requires reciprocity from the other side while refusing to concede its moral legitimacy. He spent twenty-two years in Israeli prisons and speaks Hebrew. If he loathes Israel, it is not merely hypothetical to him. As I wrote earlier this year, Sinwar is the mastermind behind the border protests. He is “a ruthless pragmatist, much like a Likud hawk,” Tareq Baconi, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, and longtime Hamas watcher, told me. “Sinwar has Islamic Jihad, his own military wing, and other armed factions emerging from the border protests to contend with. He cannot seem to be making concessions, say, on the border protests without manifestly getting something in return—more imports, more electricity.” At the same time, Sinwar knows that Gazans are out of options. “If we’re attacked, we’ll defend ourselves. As always. And we will have another war,” Sinwar told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, in an interview that was widely read in Israel. “But then, in a year, you’ll be here again. And I’ll again tell you that with war you achieve nothing.”

If there is a source of hope, it is that the regional leaders who were critical to bringing the deal have persistent interests of their own. Chief among them is the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who severely pressured Abbas into accepting the P.A.’s part in this deal. Sisi, like Abbas, has contempt for Hamas—for him, it is the stepchild, in Gaza, of the Muslim Brothers. But Sisi’s economic and security challenges are immense. Half of Egyptians live either at the poverty line or below it; tens of millions know that they eat bread every day only because the Egyptian government imports wheat and subsidizes it. So Sisi is far more interested in a regional alliance with the Saudis, the Jordanians—and the Israelis—than he is in Palestinian grievances.

“Sisi knows that Hamas escalation in Gaza gets Palestinians nowhere, but it’s a great loss for him, because it inflames the Egyptian street and puts enormous pressure on the Egyptian-Israeli security partnership,” Ezzedine Fishere, a former senior Egyptian diplomat who’d been assigned to Israel (and is now my colleague at Dartmouth), told me. That partnership, including the fight against Islamists in the Sinai, has been implicit for a generation. “Now it’s explicit,” Fishere said, “and it has the added value of pleasing any American Administration, which writes billion-dollar checks and helps with critical grain reserves—particularly the Trump Administration, which fancies itself the organizer of a regional alliance against Iran.”

So, the ceasefire deal, which is meant to suppress local violence, depends on the expansion of an alliance that risks even more consequential regional violence. Then again, it’s hard to see how regional calm—in Jordan, where Palestinian refugee camps fester, or in Syria, where Iran has its own forces—does not start with local calm. Local calm means, as the Israeli Army insists, quality-of-life improvement for ordinary Gazans—what’s become the linchpin for reviving the Palestinian peace process as a whole. The dark irony in this deal is that Gaza’s suffering may be alleviated because historic Palestinian grievances have come to seem too trifling for the Arab world to bother about. For Gazans, it is the closest thing to light they have seen for over a decade.

A previous version of this article misidentified where a Gazan fisherman was shot shortly after the ceasefire.