The U.S. nudges Israel toward an off-ramp from war

By David Ignatius

An Arab proverb warns that you should “think of the going out before you enter.” That’s proving painfully true for Israel in the Gaza war, where it still doesn’t have a coherent exit strategy. 

Israel wants a decisive defeat of Hamas to prevent it from ever again mounting a horrific terrorist attack like the one on Oct. 7. But that’s still a somewhat distant goal after three months — with Hamas dug into an underground city beneath Gaza shielded by Israeli hostages and the international community demanding a cease-fire to save Palestinian civilians.

The Biden administration is trying to help Israel mark a pathway out of the conflict by working with its key moderate Arab allies. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is completing a tour of the region in which he’s receiving pledges of support to rebuild Gaza, postwar, from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt — on condition that Israel agree to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. An exit ramp is clearly marked. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so far refuses to make the required commitment to a Palestinian state. So the U.S.-engineered endgame is stalled. Blinken has wooed the Arabs, but he can’t seem to budge Netanyahu whose wariness reflects the views of many Israelis who are still traumatized by Oct. 7 and dread Palestinian sovereignty.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, keeps working to prevent Gaza from spiraling into a wider war — and that’s getting harder, too. President Biden & Co. talked Israel out of attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon immediately after Oct. 7. 

But Hezbollah rockets have turned northern Israel into a string of evacuated ghost towns, and Israeli officials say flatly that if Hezbollah doesn’t create a buffer zone along the border, Israel will mount an all-out attack to drive it back. 

Can U.S.-led diplomacy avert this wider conflict? 

U.S. officials have been exploring every channel, with some success. Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, have signaled through intermediaries since October that they don’t want full-scale war. But Iran and its proxies are adept at playing a double game. Hezbollah says it’s ready for talks to resolve Lebanon-Israel border disputes when the Gaza fighting stops, but it keeps firing rockets at northern Israel. And the Houthis, an Iranian-backed force in Yemen, have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea — disrupting a key global maritime route. If these attacks don’t cease, officials warn, the United States will soon take military action against the Houthis, and Israel will eventually pulverize Hezbollah in Lebanon. At the end of that dark path is a confrontation that has been brewing for 45 years between revolutionary Iran and its mortal enemies, Israel and the United States. The Iranian government probably doesn’t want that fight, but the shadowy Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that conducts Iran’s covert operations in the region might.

How can the crisis be defused before it gets worse? Israel has taken a first step by reducing its military operations in Gaza. When Israeli troop withdrawals are finished late this month or early next, as little as one-quarter of its initial invasion force might remain in Gaza. Israel commandos would enforce a siege of the tunnels and attack Hamas fighters who tried to escape them, but the Israelis would avoid the high-intensity attacks on civilian areas that have enraged global public opinion. Maintaining order as Israeli troops withdraw will be a nightmare. 

Netanyahu doesn’t want the Palestinian Authority to run postwar Gaza, so his government is considering a plan to let local Palestinian leaders administer services district by district. It’s a recipe for chaos and corruption, like the “village leagues” the Israelis sponsored in the West Bank in the 1980s. And because that would obstruct a Palestinian state, Arab nations probably won’t cooperate — leaving both Israel and Gaza in limbo.How can the United States and its allies encourage Israelis to open the path toward a Palestinian state that so many mistrust? One sweetener would be real reform of the Palestinian Authority, with a new leader who can take over governance from an ineffective President Mahmoud Abbas and a new cabinet that’s committed to fighting corruption and improving services.

The real prize for Israel would be normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, the Sunni world’s richest and most powerful country. Blinken got a commitment from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he’s ready to openly embrace Israel — but only after the war ends and Israel accepts a pathway to a Palestinian state. MBS, as the crown prince is known, wants to be a 21st century version of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, in an opening to Israel. 

But he doesn’t want to pay the price in domestic unrest, and eventual assassination, that Sadat did. As the Biden administration struggles to contain the fallout of the Gaza war, it is encountering the same paradox that has haunted Middle East policy for a half-century: The United States is the only outside power strong enough to shape the region militarily and politically. But it can’t impose solutions, especially on a close ally like Israel. 

The United States is still, despite all its setbacks, the “indispensable nation” in the Middle East. Yet it’s also a prisoner of events it can’t control — above all the abiding mistrust and violence between Israelis and Palestinians