The U.S. tacks hard toward a Mideast ‘moment of truth’

By David Ignatius

Let’s try a thought experiment: Imagine the Middle East as a pool table surrounded by a raging fire. The United States, amid this inferno, is about to attempt a complicated three-cushion shot with balls that we’ll call “Saudi Arabia,” “Israel” and “Hamas.”

If successful, this bold stroke could switch on the sprinklers and extinguish the flames. But some of our imaginary balls are explosive. And one more thing: There’s a clock ticking.

This sounds like a daredevil act out of Las Vegas, right? But it makes an apt metaphor for an intense diplomatic push by the Biden administration. Unlikely as it might sound, this high-risk shot might be the best way to put out the raging inferno of the war in Gaza.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to travel to the Middle East soon. He’ll probably stop first in Saudi Arabia, where he hopes for a renewed pledge from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to normalize relations with Israel if — and only if — Israel ends the Gaza conflict and commits to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza and the West Bank.

Blinken is then likely to travel to Israel, where he’ll meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader, mired in war, deeply wants a breakthrough peace deal with MBS, as the Saudi leader is known. But at the same time, Netanyahu and his hard-line coalition refuse the Saudis’ conditions of a quick end to the fighting in Gaza and a path to Palestinian state.

Here’s President Biden’s game: He wants to make Netanyahu an offer his coalition can’t accept politically — but that the prime minister, whose legacy as a historic Israeli leader has been shattered, personally might not be able to resist. If Netanyahu embraces the Saudi proposal, his coalition will fracture, and he’ll need to find new partners. If he refuses, his government might be toppled by rivals who embrace the U.S. formula for ending the war.

Martin Indyk, twice a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and perhaps the United States’ wisest observer of the Israeli-Arab conflict, offers a colorful metaphor of his own to describe the U.S. diplomatic gambit. “Biden wants to make Bibi swallow the frog (and do the deal), or gag on the frog (and make way for another government).” Either way, the United States hopes, the impasse will be broken.

What chance is there that Netanyahu would shake hands with MBS? You might think it’s zero, given his repeated public rejection of a Palestinian state. But an Israeli who knows him well says that Netanyahu realizes he faces a serious choice, and that he will weigh the political factors carefully. To be blunt, becoming a peacemaker with the Saudis might be Netanyahu’s only way to avoid lasting infamy over the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas.

Timing is critical. The United States has told Israel that the Saudi normalization deal must get rolling within the next two months. That’s partly because MBS is demanding, as part of the normalization package, a treaty providing NATO-like guarantees for Saudi security. Because it’s an election year in the United States, such a deal would likely have to get Senate ratification by June before it gets buried in campaign politics.

But we haven’t gotten to the hardest part yet. None of this complicated diplomacy can really begin until the fighting in Gaza ends. That’s the last element of the three-cushion shot. CIA director William J. Burns and White House aide Brett McGurk, guided by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have been working with Israeli officials and Qatari and Egyptian mediators to craft a hostage-release deal.

It would be a phased swap: Over many weeks, Hamas would trade the roughly 136 remaining Israeli hostages and the dead bodies it holds in exchange for what it could call a cease-fire. Israel would call it something different — a freeze, or an extended pause — but such turns of phrase are how diplomats make their living.

That hostage deal is tantalizingly close, according to U.S., Israeli and Arab sources. But it might take weeks to finalize. Once the guns fall silent, a broad de-escalation is possible: The Saudis could move toward normalization, a border deal between Israel and Lebanon might be possible, and progress toward an eventual Palestinian state could begin.

“The only way to calm Gaza is the hostage deal,” says one person who’s involved in negotiations, stressing that it’s the key to reversing the cycle of violence that has brought the Middle East to the brink of all-out war. The reason he’s hopeful is that Israelis see release of hostages as an overriding priority after the trauma of Hamas’s terrorist attack.

Israel keeps pounding Hamas in its underground Gaza kingdom to try to persaude its military leader, Yehiya Sinwar, to make a deal. A new approach is flooding Hamas tunnels with sea water from the Mediterranean, a tactic that was considered early in the war, then shelved because of technical and environmental problems. It has now been revived with some new techniques.

Israel still doesn’t have coherent plans for the “day after” the war ends. Its governance plan for Gaza — involving clans, merchants and local power brokers — sounds to me like a formula for creating a chaotic ungoverned enclave on Israel’s borders. U.S. officials hope that Israel will eventually recognize that the only sound plan is a U.S.-backed mission to train security forces of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority — which officials are beginning to describe as the “RPA.” That force could be ready in eight months to a year.

Then there is the problem of stopping settler violence and relocating as many as 200,000 Israelis from a future Palestinian state. Biden took a strong step Thursday by sanctioning four Israeli West Bank settlers who committed violence against Palestinians. That’s just a start, but it enhances U.S. credibility with Palestinians as peace broker.

“The moment of truth is not quite here yet,” says one official who has been involved in the complex negotiations. But it’s coming. What U.S. diplomats envision is an unwieldy structure with unsteady partners, risky bets and untested resolve — with an American president with strategic vision but political weakness. There’s a lot that could go wrong, but, given the bleak alternatives, it’s worth a shot.