Woody Allen once quipped that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up. From a negotiator’s perspective, he was only half right; success more often than not depends on showing up at the right time. Anyone trying to make sense of U.S. President Joe Biden’s tortured attempt to sell Israel’s peace plan needs to take a hard look at time and timing and how each of the three major players calculate it.
In essence, we have three separate clocks ticking at different relative rates. Two of those clocks belong to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar; they are set for delay and obfuscation. The third rests on the fireplace mantle in the Oval Office; it runs fast, gears meshed with urgent political exigencies.
Right now—and perhaps for the foreseeable future—these three clocks are out of sync. And the prospects for coordinating them are dim. Indeed, for Netanyahu and Sinwar, time is an ally. For Biden, time is an enemy ticking down against an Israel-Hamas war that he’s desperate to end and has little immediate prospect of doing so. Even if the two sides manage to commit to some version of the comprehensive plan put forth by Biden and Netanyahu, it’s more than likely that they’ll only be able to implement the first phase. With less than zero mutual trust, even that would be nothing short of a small miracle.
Based on our experience, Middle East negotiations tend to have two speeds—slow and slower. And these are not traditional negotiations. The principal Palestinian decision-maker is entombed somewhere in Gaza, or possibly Egypt; neither of the two leaders has any confidence that the other will comply with an agreement, no matter how limited; and the negotiations are being carried out indirectly by parties—the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt—whose goals are not always strictly aligned.
The inconvenient reality is that the two leaders making the real decisions are in no hurry to make the tough compromises required for war termination. Indeed, one of our bosses, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, used to call this kind of negotiation “dead cat diplomacy,” where the goal was less to reach an accord and more to ensure that if the negotiations failed, the responsibility—the dead cat—would be left at the other’s doorstep.
To complicate matters, there is no unitary Hamas. As in other such conflicts—the Syrian civil war, for example—two organizations have evolved. One is outside of the combat zone, outward facing, and, at least on the organization chart, the leadership. The other is inside, at the coalface, doing the fighting. Gradually, the perspectives and interests of these cadres diverge, and the outsiders’ control over the conduct of the war erodes. The fight becomes the prerogative of the insiders. The tail wags the dog. Israel, Qatar, Egypt, and the United States deal with the outsiders, who can promise perfume but deliver only cordite.
The key insider, Sinwar, has two clocks. The first registers the time that it will take for a combination of forces—American, international, domestic Israeli—to pressure Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire that leaves Sinwar himself alive and able to claim control of Gaza without fear of renewed Israeli attack. This would, indeed, be a historic victory for Hamas despite the horrific cost. As of now, it looks as though Sinwar’s clock will run out faster than Netanyahu’s.
But Sinwar has talked of another clock, one that is more Dali than Big Ben. This is a clock that never runs out, because it displays the infinite time frame of an Israeli occupation of Gaza, which will bleed Israel diplomatically, militarily, and financially—forever. At this stage, it looks as though Sinwar is prepared to shift, and in his fevered dreams perhaps, even to oversee the switch from the first clock to the second.
Netanyahu is no ordinary Israeli leader. Now the longest-governing prime minister in Israel’s history, he’s also been on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust for four years running in a Jerusalem district court. To have any chance of avoiding a conviction or a plea deal that would drive him out of politics, he must stay in power. And right now, that means keeping the most extremist government in Israel’s history afloat.
Having presided over one of the two worst intelligence failures in Israel’s history, and the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, he cannot end the war without a major victory. And he can’t maintain the support of his extremist ministers by conceding that Hamas will somehow survive to play a role in postwar Gaza, or endorse the return of the Palestinian Authority or a Palestinian state, the price that the Saudis and Americans expect him to pay for normalization with Saudi Arabia.
Even though the three-stage proposal that Biden outlined and delivered to Hamas via Qatar is an Israeli proposal blessed by the war cabinet, Netanyahu knows that it would never gain the approval of his two extremist ministers. But Netanyahu can always pivot. Yair Lapid, who heads the second-largest party in the Knesset, Yesh Atid, has offered him a “safety” net should the two extremist ministers bolt. More likely, Netanyahu will play for time, hoping that Hamas’s response to the cease-fire proposal is a deal-breaker.
Based on the U.S. reaction to Hamas’s changes, he may be right. The Knesset goes into summer recess on July 25 and doesn’t reconvene until October. If he can hang on until then without a coalition crisis, who knows what might happen—another hostage rescue; death of Hamas senior leaders; or perhaps the election of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Biden’s main challenge is political. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago kicks off on August 19; the election is a mere five months away, and voters have typically made their decision by Labor Day. Biden’s clock, therefore, looks more like an egg timer. And independent voters and soccer moms, the two constituencies that he needs to win over, favor Israel’s side in the conflict, while his volatile base is rooting for the Palestinians.
Gaza, of course is not the only item on many of the voters’ minds and is certainly not the most important—with the exception of groups such as Arab Americans and possibly first-time voters for whom Trump is an unappetizing alternative. But it can take the air out of the room just when Biden really needs it. Yet his lack of leverage over Sinwar consigns him to a forlorn attempt to persuade Netanyahu to accept some kind of truce arrangement that will keep things relatively quiet for at least four or five months. For this, Netanyahu will demand a high price.
Is there a way out? Right now, Netanyahu and Sinwar have created a strategic cul-de-sac for the administration. Even if Biden succeeds in persuading Hamas and Israel to accept the three-stage plan, it’s more than likely that one or both will break their commitments and not get beyond phase one—a limited hostage-for-prisoner exchange and temporary cease-fire. Netanyahu could probably sell this to his government, and Biden would jump at the chance of even six weeks of calm, hoping that after such a prolonged period, the pressures to end the war might grow.
But even if Hamas agreed, none of the core issues that are required for war termination would be settled: Hamas would retain hostages; no capable Palestinian governing structure would be created; and no security architecture that would satisfy Israel’s requirements would take hold, thus guaranteeing that Israeli military ops would continue at some level.
Maybe events unforeseen will surprise, as often happens in this part of the world. But… our experience suggests that surprises will arrive in the form of unanticipated mayhem and tragic ironies.
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