Gaza ceasefire deal matters more than deterrence

The US is trying to nail a deal between Israel and Hamas that would end the fighting in Gaza for up to two months, while an exchange of mainly Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners takes place.

By Marc Champion

The US is trying to nail a deal between Israel and Hamas that would end the fighting in Gaza for up to two months, while a phased exchange of mainly Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners takes place.

We don’t know much more than that yet, but what’s clear is that the Siren-like call of finding a once-and-for-all military solution to Israel’s security problems is leading inexorably to escalation elsewhere. Only a cease-fire in Gaza will break that cycle.

Israel says “significant gaps” remain to be closed before the US-brokered agreement can be sealed. That’s doubtless true because this was never going to be easy.

The hostages are the only leverage Hamas has, so they will extract the highest price they can before giving them up. Any cease-fire would also bring greater military advantage to Hamas, which the Israel Defense Forces have put under enormous pressure.

But ultimately, Gaza represents just one of Israel’s strategic challenges; in the larger picture, the world’s only Jewish state has much more to gain by scaling back the fighting.

To begin with, the hostages should be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top priority, swiftly followed by getting as much humanitarian aid into the strip as possible.

That should eliminate the suspicion that his goal in the war is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza — the only realistic once-and-for-all solution to such ethno-territorial disputes. This is more common than many think. It happened to ethnic Armenians in Azerbaijan just last summer.

It happened to hundreds of thousands of Georgians, driven from their homes by Russia-backed separatists in Abkhazia in 1992 and South Ossetia in 2008.

It’s happening now in occupied areas of Ukraine. And it’s what international intervention prevented Serbian forces from achieving in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Unless Israel wants to join that hall of infamy, it needs to accept there is no magic military bullet for Hamas and the Palestinian question. This is a tough road on which the force of arms is just one among many tools, arguably less important than involving Arab States such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt in the attempt to break Palestinian reliance on Hamas and Iran.

There will be plenty of time to hunt and squeeze Hamas terrorists. In the meantime, Israel is losing more than it can gain: The scale of destruction in Gaza means even Arab states that loathe Hamas cannot work with Israel to crush it.

By now, the reasons to end the war also span well beyond Gaza, as it’s damaging the global economy, via commercial shipping that can no longer safely use the Suez Canal, as well as the US-aligned order in the Arab Middle East that’s so crucial to Israel’s safety.

Only a few decades ago, these countries went to war to destroy Israel. The risk of further escalation is being demonstrated on an almost daily basis, and in each case, avoiding wider conflict depends on an end to the fighting in Gaza, at least at its current scale.

It’s evident, for example, that Hezbollah doesn’t want an all-out war with Israel, or it would have launched one already from its base in Lebanon.

But even Israel’s defense minister has acknowledged there will be exchanges of fire across the northern border so long as there is war in Gaza in the south and the pressure within Israel to eliminate the threat from Hezbollah and its arsenal of 1,50,000 missiles continues rising.

So too is pressure increasing in Israel and now the US to finally deal with Iran. After more than 160 strikes by Iran-backed militias against US forces in the region since October 7, the inevitable happened over this past weekend: Drones hit a US military base on the Syria-Jordan border, killing three American soldiers and wounding at least two dozen more.

An umbrella group for Iran-backed militias in Iraq claimed responsibility, and the calls from Iran hawks in Congress to hit Iran hard and directly in a definitive response were near instantaneous. President Joe Biden pledged to “hold those responsible to account".

The US of all countries should know by now that this kind of deterrence against rogue militias and regimes is a white whale. The most recent evidence for that comes from the Houthis, a militia the US and UK have been striking in Yemen, to deter it from attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

The US felt it had no choice but to act, drawing a line in the sea. There is now less shipping traffic in the Suez than before this strike-back, because it’s even less safe. The Houthis say they’ll stop firing only when the war in Gaza stops, and there’s little reason to doubt them.

The US could invade Yemen to remove the Houthis, just as it went into Afghanistan to remove al-Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001. But this would likely end the same way. US troops withdrew from Afghanistan 20 years later, closer to defeat than victory.

The 2003 shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq was also supposed to solve multiple problems around the Middle East once and for all, yet US troops are still there in 2024, having spawned issues more intractable than the ones they went in to deal with.

Even then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew he had no chance of solving Iran by force — a mountainous state with over four times the population of Iraq.

That Iran has a vile and aggressive regime is not in question. Its claim to have had nothing to do with ordering Saturday’s attack could even be true, but it will impress few.

It arms Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, as well as the militias that hit US forces on Saturday night. Leaders in Tehran reveled in the savagery that Hamas meted out to Israeli civilians on October 7. So hitting Iran directly and hard is appealing.

But it’s likely the regime would believe it had to retaliate against any direct American attack, triggering further escalation. “The US has never had deterrence against Iran,” Ali Vaez, Director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, said.

“The reality is that even when the US had 1,50,000 troops and had toppled the regime next door in Iraq, Iran was sending weapons into Iraq to kill US soldiers.’’

This isn’t really a question of who occupies the White House, though in an election campaign season, few will acknowledge it. Donald Trump on Sunday responded to the killing of three Americans on Truth Social, saying such an attack would never have happened on his watch. It did.

Iranian proxies struck a US air base in Iraq in late 2019, killing an American defense contractor. Trump’s administration responded with multiple strikes on the militia, and the assassination of a top Iranian general.

Five days later, Iran rained 12 ballistic missiles on another US base in Iraq in response, causing head traumas to hundreds of US servicemen. Then as now, there’s every indication that Iran, like Hezbollah, preferred to avoid all-out war, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fight one.

Just like politicians making decisions in Washington, they fear looking weak more than they fear the uncertain consequences of escalation.

The uncomfortable fact is that, today rogue states and militias have more means than ever before to conduct asymmetric warfare against even the most powerful militaries in the world.

That’s what allowed Hamas to overwhelm Israel’s sensor-rich security wall on October 7, the Houthis to fire with cruise and anti-ship miles at international shipping, and Iraqi militias to kill American soldiers sleeping in their tent deep inside a protected security zone on Saturday.

The US will feel it has to respond after Saturday’s drone strike, and it should. But escalation dominance is much easier said than achieved, so it should stay stay focused on the immediate perpetrators rather than force Iran to up the ante, as dissatisfying as that will be to many.

What’s much more likely to end the attacks by the Houthis and other Iranian proxies is a halt to the war in Gaza that has unleashed them. Before October 7, US troops in Iraq and Syria had enjoyed an unusually long period free from attack.

Israel and its partners, including the US, should focus on ending the carnage that’s creating such fertile ground for escalation.

The war that Hamas began on October 7 has, to the best of our knowledge, claimed close to 28,000 Palestinian and Israeli lives so far. The challenge of fixing Gaza is huge, as recent allegations of Palestinian United Nations relief staff aiding the October 7 attacks show. But if Gaza is allowed to metastasize into a wider regional war, that horrific number could come to look small.