Parallel to the shaky truce between the United States and Iran, a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah has temporarily stopped the fighting in Lebanon, but without settling any of the important questions behind it. That’s a shame, because prospects for a lasting resolution in Lebanon are better than ever—if only Israel would embrace the Lebanese government as the indispensable partner it could be.
President Trump has extravagant plans for the Gaza Strip. The only problem is that they bear no connection to the grim realities on the ground—nor is there much prospect that the two will align in the foreseeable future.
Trump has declared that the cease-fire in Gaza—such as it is, given that Hamas continues to attack Israeli forces, and Israeli strikes continue to kill Palestinians—has now entered Phase 2.
France, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Malta all say they are preparing to recognize a state of Palestine at the upcoming United Nations General Assembly in September. They would join another 147 UN countries that already do so. In some senses, the move is symbolic: It will not change the realities on the ground in the Middle East, at least not in the short term. But it is a major step nonetheless.
Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.
In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected.
The stunning downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad leaves not merely a vacuum of power in that country but a nearly endless list of unanswered questions. One of the most significant concerns the fate and future of the minority Alawite community, from which Assad and his inner circle hailed. The Assad dictatorship began when Bashar’s father, Hafez, seized control of the country in 1970.
On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, agreed to a cease-fire. The arrangement is a win for outgoing President Joe Biden, who has followed a hapless policy course through a calamitous year for the Middle East.
Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s goal in the Middle East has been to contain the conflict.
The killing on Thursday of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the principal architect of the October 7 attack on southern Israel, offers a golden opportunity for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare victory and begin pulling troops out of Gaza. But that is not going to happen. Most likely, nothing will change, because neither Netanyahu nor Hamas wants it to.
Netanyahu’s calculation is no mystery.
The leaders of both Israel and Hamas seem content for the war in Gaza to grind on into the indefinite future. Such is the upshot of their ambiguous, but essentially negative, responses to President Joe Biden’s peace proposal, which is now fully backed by the United Nations Security Council. And the reasons are obvious.
Although much of the world is breathing a sigh of relief that Iran and Israel appear unwilling to push their exchange of missile and drone attacks further, potentially plunging the Middle East into a wider war, the danger of another escalation has not passed. Rather, the concern has shifted to a possible Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has threatened this, and U.S. officials and others in the region fear that such a plan has been in the works for months.
A rift has opened between Israel and the United States. No breach between the two countries has been as wide or as deep since the mid-1950s, when the Eisenhower administration compelled Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. President Joe Biden expressed grave displeasure with Israel this week over the strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, and a phone call between him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was reportedly tense.
Informed Americans finally seem to understand that the macabre slogan of Yemen’s Houthi militia group—“God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam”—is more than empty rhetoric.
The Houthis are a potent Iranian proxy group, and their slogan, adapted from Iranian revolutionary propaganda, is being made manifest in action.
To no one’s surprise, Israel and Hamas have resumed fighting in Gaza after almost a week of temporary truces and prisoner exchanges. Despite American and other entreaties to limit civilian casualties, Israel appears determined to push into the south of Gaza, but its strategic thinking seems to end there, and to hold no plausible endgame in sight.