As thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters marched outside the Democratic party’s Chicago convention demanding the U.S. end support for Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is engaged in a new round of ceasefire talks in the Middle East. Secretary Blinken announced on Aug. 19 that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to an American so-called “bridging proposal” for a Gaza ceasefire deal.
But, representatives of Hamas responded by declaring that any ceasefire agreement must result in a permanent end to Israel’s Gaza war, accusing the U.S. of “merely buying time for Israel to continue its genocide.” Hamas urged the world to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu to sign the original deal proposed by President Joe Biden on May 31, which was supported by the United Nations Security Council on June 11.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jennifer Loewenstein, former associate director of Middle Eastern Studies and senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here, she examines the current status of Gaza ceasefire talks and the looming threat of a wider regional Middle East war after Israel’s assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders provoked angry calls for retaliation. Loewenstein is also founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and currently active in Jewish Voice for Peace-Tucson and the Arizona- Palestine Network.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: These negotiations are all a cover for Israel to continue doing exactly what it wants. It’s also a process. The process here is more important than the actual talks to delay any kind of retaliation on the part of Iran and Hezbollah, both of which said they would not do anything until these ceasefire negotiations had ended and hopefully brought something good.
But the ceasefire negotiations are not going to end in a ceasefire agreement. And that is because Netanyahu doesn’t want a ceasefire. He’s stated as much very plainly over the last 10 months and certainly in the last two months. So what happened is that the proposal that the United States claimed Israel wrote, which Israel rejected, was accepted by Hamas to Netanyahu’s great despair.
And as a result, Netanyahu added more conditions. And Hamas, of course, opposed those conditions. And this is where we are now. Now, Blinken is in Israel now, or at least on his way to Egypt. And he basically says that they’ve got a bridging proposal that Netanyahu accepted. But if we look at what the proposal is now, the conditions that are in it are conditions that Hamas would never and should never accept.
It doesn’t include a permanent ceasefire. It doesn’t include a comprehensive withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. It allows Israel to retain control of the Philadelphi Corridor. It allows Israel to retain control of the Netzarim junction, which will control the flow of people from the north to the south of Gaza and vice versa. It would deport a number of Palestinian prisoners released in the exchange deal outside of Palestine.
Humanitarian relief would be made conditional on the approval of all these terms by Hamas and the negotiations on the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip and lifting the siege will be left to the results of the discussions that will follow implementation of the first phase. None of these clauses or additions are acceptable to Hamas. There should be a permanent ceasefire and a permanent withdrawal from Gaza by Israel and it should relinquish control of the Philadelphi Corridor. And it should get the heck out of Netzarim.
SCOTT HARRIS: And, Jennifer, I did want to ask you about this. What, if any, links are there in the current Gaza ceasefire negotiations with the prospect of retaliatory strikes from Iran and Hezbollah? Is there any kind of implicit promise that if a ceasefire is declared in Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinians civilians is stopped, that Iran and Hezbollah will take their threat of retaliation off the table?
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: It’s very unlikely. And once again, we have to give this gold star to Netanyahu, because in this respect, he has managed to cause the Gaza war to transcend the fact that Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon — that these powers were only attacking Israel or responding to Israel because of a solidarity front with the Gazans. But by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Fouad Shuker in Beirut, both Hezbollah and Iran have promised retaliation.
Now what Iran has said was that a ceasefire would delay its response, — not stop it, delay it — until when, none of us know. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is already getting quite impatient. I believe we’ll probably see a strike by Hezbollah before Iran and that is because besides being impatient, they just released a significant amount of video from an underground mountain city in which they have some of (unintelligible) missiles.
And along with that video was the message that this is only the tip of what we have. We have some stuff that’s much, much stronger than this. The message to Israel was essentially, if you retaliate against our strike, this is what you’re looking at.
And going back to your question, it’s very unlikely that either one of them will not retaliate following these two assassinations, regardless of whether there’s a ceasefire or not.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Jennifer Loewenstein (17:35) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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