The Biden plan to end the war in Gaza is a white flag in disguise. It may be that his aim is to eliminate Netanyahu to create a precarious situation that would be hailed as a strategic victory by Hamas. From “free Gaza from Hamas” we would move to “free Israel from Bibi”, with congratulations from Hamas Khamenei Erdogan and Putin. There has already been a truce and an exchange between Palestinian prisoners and hostages, and it can be repeated even with the backing, which was not lacking, of the government of Jerusalem and Tsahal. It would be a new alleviation of the moral and political tension around a country besieged by the international lie, with an anti-Jewish background, according to which the war in Gaza is not a legitimate attempt at self-defense, the aim of which is the eradication of Hamas and the control of the Strip until to the delineation of a truly new government framework without the authors of the October 7 pogrom, but an attempted genocide against the Palestinians.
But a humanitarian truce is one thing, an exchange is another, the fanfare request, sounded by the UN and many Western heads of state, for a negotiated end to the war, on their terms, with the Sinwars and the Mohammeds is another thing Deifs holed up in the tunnels with the hostages, supported by many fronts, from the Ayatollahs to the Houthis to Hezbollah up to the campuses in revolt for a Palestine “free from the river to the sea”. If the problem is that the world has turned against Israel in a war of self-defense, and that the American electoral challenge must take this into account, Israel cannot be expected to bow to this defeatist pattern. There may be a negotiating transition, not the end of the war and its sacrosanct objectives, with fireworks from Rafah to Tehran to Beirut.
The problem does not concern Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the extremist right that was necessary for Netanyahu to form a government majority after five elections in four years. It is a general political and moral scheme, valid on any similar occasion. Anyone who remembers the case of Moro’s kidnapping (1978) knows what the arguments of the so-called firmness front were. Italy cannot be hostage to the terrorists of the Red Brigades, the massacre of Via Fani and the spring campaign of the Bierre, with many deaths, involved the denial of the status of interlocutors to Moretti’s men who killed and detained the “prisoner political”, implied the refusal of a negotiation, the salvation of the state and the security of Italian society were at stake. The party of the negotiation had the only humanitarian argument: the rescue of the hostage could perhaps have been worth a unilateral humanitarian act of the state, for the Vatican the payment of a ransom in money, for the disgraced head of the UN Kurt Waldheim a diplomatic recognition of the Bierre , not an agreement to leave alive, legitimized, the armed party that preached and waged civil war. TO Gaza, as in all wars of defense against aggression, is not possible to give in on this point: provisional and partial accommodations can be discussed, not the end of the war and the resigned renunciation of its objective with the victory of Hamas.
Biden and his men should have thought about it first. Before going on the ground, embrace the head of government, legitimize the war of self-defense against Hamas. They had to immediately prevent, if it were in their power to do so, the war to liberate Gaza from Hamas. It was not possible to do it that way, as Tom Friedman suggested, simply because there was and is no alternative to that undertaking of destruction of a vast and branched terrorist band strong in an ideology of radical Islamist nihilism, ready to sacrifice even lives of one hundred thousand Palestinians, as stated verbatim by Sinwar, and to use hostages and civilians as shields. Discovering today that there is an alternative, that it can be played out in Israel’s internal political struggle, cynically using pity for the hostages and the desire for peace of any kind, is a mistake, worse, a mistake that is a cheat. Anyone in Netanyahu’s place would have to deal with the majority of Israelis, even if prostrate by the length and tortuosity of a terrible war, which wants not the end of the war but the total formalization of the existential enemy. However, if the price of a few electoral decimals in Michigan is the loss of the Jewish state, the price is neither fair nor possible.
