Mother Jones

On Friday, the Israeli security cabinet voted to approve a ceasefire and hostage release deal. It’s expected to pass the full cabinet later on Friday. Hamas supports the agreement, according to the New York Times.

It's "expected," by me, to go in the toilet either before or after being formally approved, and then the killing continue. Have these serious scholars of the mideast not been paying attention to Netanyahu?

Edit: It's worth mentioning that there are stories in the Israeli press saying that Israel should agree to a cease fire, which would give them an opportunity to return home, rearm, rest and refit, and then they can get started again under some kind of pretext having gained some goodwill on the world stage. I'm a little bit skeptical that they even are willing to stop killing for that long, but if the ceasefire is a done deal, the killing is definitely set to get started again within a few months. Because why would it not?

There is already, and will continue to be, debate over who secured a ceasefire deal: Trump or Biden. But early reporting strongly indicates it was the incoming president who made the difference. In Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent progressive newspaper, Amos Harel wrote bluntly, “negotiations would not have reached their final lap without Trump.” He added, “For years, people have been saying that Netanyahu is the sum of all his fears; it turns out that Trump scares him even more, perhaps justifiably so.”

The Washington Post shared a similar perspective from an unnamed diplomat who said the recent negotiations had been “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Biden seemed to push back on Wednesday by saying, “This is the ceasefire agreement I introduced last spring.” Yet, in doing so, he undercut his own point—underlining that it was the person pushing, not the plan, that had changed.

If you assume this one is going to succeed, which is a weird thing to assume.

One does not have to reconstrue Trump as a champion of Palestinians and their struggle for sovereignty to accept his role in securing a ceasefire. His record is clear. Trump’s first administration pushed forward a range of hardline pro-Israel policies that sidelined Palestinians—notably moving the US Embassy to Israel and pursuing the Abraham Accords. (Both were continued by the Biden administration.)

Trump has now picked for Ambassador to Israel former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who once said “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” There also isn’t a clear sense of what Netanyahu may have gotten at Palestinians’ and others’ expense in exchange for agreeing to the ceasefire. And from a Palestinian perspective, there are many reasons to be skeptical about how Trump will respond if Israel violates the ceasefire, refuses to take the steps in future phases of the agreement to end the war indefinitely, or takes extreme steps like trying to formally annex parts of the West Bank.

Yes. I completely agree with all of that. Why then did you write a couple of paragraphs from the point of view that Netanyahu is scared of Trump giving him consequences? I actually won't argue with you about the parts excoriating Biden for not doing more. But the idea that Trump is the one who's decided to give consequences, and that fixed Israel and Palestine when others couldn't, is a incredibly stupid idea that I'm now seeing for the second time in the press.

This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.

It's tangential to this main point, but this is a weirdly bookish way of saying it. The facts are pretty straightforward: There are around 46,000 dead people whose specific identities are known, and at least a hundred thousand and probably many hundred thousand who are dead, but the information isn't neatly organized, because the country is in ruins. You don't need to make it sound like there's any ambiguity about that second thing.