He also knows that a pause in fighting and wouldn’t stop Israel from pushing his group out of government. Israel could resume its effort to extirpate Hamas after the exchange of captives. Even if Sinwar and his deputies were given asylum in another country, as Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat was in Tunisia in 1982, Israel’s intelligence services could hunt him down. For now, Hamas has little incentive to quit.
What is surprising is the Biden administration has put so much effort into a doomed diplomatic formula, and that even now it appears committed to the same course. At a news conference on Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken questioned whether Hamas is “proceeding in good faith” (you think?), but nonetheless said he was “determined to try to bridge the gaps” in negotiations.
How? Israel has a political and strategic need to finish off Hamas as a fighting force in Gaza. Hamas has an existential need to survive to fight another day, the winds of global opinion increasingly at its back. The Biden administration appears to have been laboring for months on the assumption that this contradiction can be papered over with sufficiently elaborate diplomacy. The result has been a predictably failed cycle of cease-fire back and forths.
It’s time for President Biden to stop trying to bridge unbridgeable gaps and use his power to force one side or the other to submit to American will. That means either fully backing Israel’s military aim of wiping out Hamas, or else forthrightly demanding an end to the war that leaves Hamas in power. Biden has resisted taking either tack out of political calculation, but his anguished diplomatic straddling has reached the end of the line.
The first option would be the natural one. Biden could declare: My administration has spent months working with Israel to get to generous cease-fire offers. We have hoped for good faith on the part of Hamas’s leadership. That ends with Hamas’s latest refusal. Israel now has our full support for its military objective of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities, killing its leaders and disarming the entire Gaza Strip — as long as it takes. Sinwar, take note: You just passed up the best offer you’ll ever get.
As Israel continues its military operations, there’s a chance Hamas would accept a hostage deal — not because it wants peace, but because its leaders are encircled and they need a pause in fighting to run for their lives. Biden can make that date come sooner if he stops dangling the possibility of increasingly favorable terms for the terrorist group.
The second option is to try to force a permanent cease-fire on Israel with Hamas still standing as Gaza’s governing force. Biden could declare: This war has gone on too long with too many innocents killed. Yes, Hamas has rejected my deal to pause the fighting, but that’s because it believes Israel will restart the war after the pause. So, I am committing to Hamas that I will not allow Israel to restart the war. If it does so, I will cut off its military resupply and end its diplomatic backing.
That’s the other way Hamas might agree to a hostage deal: If it was persuaded that a pause in fighting would lead to a permanent end to Israel’s offensive. That way, the group would have a chance to regenerate itself and lead the Palestinian cause.
Hamas is already preparing for a postwar settlement along those lines. As a report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explains, the terrorist group is energetically laying the institutional groundwork for participation in any new Palestinian government. Hamas is more popular than its rival, Fatah, and remains the most well-armed group in Gaza. Biden would have to defend the likelihood of Hamas continuing to dominate Gaza’s politics as the price of strong-arming Israel into stopping the war.
Either of these options — going all-in on Hamas’s destruction or coercing Israel to accept Hamas’s continued power — could be justified by certain notions of justice and morality. And either would be politically difficult for Biden. The first would further enrage his vocal critics on the anti-Israel left; the second would lead to a bipartisan backlash even more intense than when he threatened to cut off arms to Israel if it entered Hamas’s stronghold of Rafah.
But as the Israel-Gaza war grinds on, there’s also a case that Biden’s current course of triangulation, impotent exhortations and endless failed negotiations is the most politically damaging, and least moral, of all. It’s time for Biden to make a choice and defend it politically: Israel’s terms, or Sinwar’s.
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