Today, Explained - Ceasefire?

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Protesters, politicians, and the pope are calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, but the US and Israeli governments remain opposed. Vox’s Jonathan Guyer and Jon B. Alterman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies explain what happens next. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Isabel Angell, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we enter month two of this war between Israel and Hamas, protesters all around the world are chanting ceasefire now. It's coming from Jewish protesters too. We are proud Jewish people standing in solidarity with Palestinians demanding a ceasefire immediately. But it's not just protesters. It's the Pope. It's the UN Secretary General. And the unfolding catastrophe makes the need for a humanitarian ceasefire more urgent with every passing hour. It's the Queen of Jordan. I think Israel deserves more from its allies than just unequivocal support.

I think it deserves some uncomfortable truths. Because if you are a real friend, you support your friend when they're right, but you also tell them when they've crossed the line. But Israel and the United States aren't having it. The possibility and impossibility of a ceasefire coming up on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals.

Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. You're listening to Today Explained. Sean Ramos-Firm here with Jonathan Geyer, who writes about U.S. foreign policy for Vox. We asked him if all these people calling for a ceasefire, from protesters to politicians to the Pope, are really asking for the same thing. Well, I think they're all seeing the same thing, which is 10,000 fatalities, 25,000 injuries, 60 or 70% of Palestinians in Gaza have been internally displaced. So everyone's seeing this tremendous tragedy and violence in Gaza, and people want to see humanitarian aid get in and some sort of pause. I mean, there's the whole semantics here is a humanitarian pause, the same as a humanitarian ceasefire.

But the real thing is there's just not enough water, electricity, food, basic goods for Palestinians in Gaza who have been for 31 days under bombardment. And that's why we've started to see the Biden administration kind of incrementally, minutely shift its language from categorically rejecting any call for a ceasefire, with now the president himself, Biden, saying there needs to be a pause. Secretary of State Tony Blinken sort of saying there needs to be some kind of humanitarian update to what's happening. And it seems like that is in large part in response to these massive protests. Obviously, a huge factor here for Israel, one of many, is the hostages who remain in Gaza. How do they factor in to calls for a ceasefire or humanitarian pause, what have you? So there's a paradox here, Sean, in that Israel is not going to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas unless these 240 or so hostages are released. Well, there'll be no ceasefire, general ceasefire in Gaza without the release of our hostages.

At the same time, Hamas is not going to release the hostages, as they've said, unless there is a ceasefire. Why don't you just release the hostages, as they've said, unless there is a ceasefire. Why don't you just release the people who are abducted? Okay, we want, first of all, we want to stop this daily death in Gaza, daily killing in Gaza. It is our priority now. But there's real risks to these Israeli and international dual national hostages. We know that something like 40,000 housing units in Gaza have been destroyed. With this scale of fatalities of over 10,000, it's just not clear yet whether some of these Israeli and international hostages have been caught in this rubble, in this tragic conflagration.

Hamas military's wing says nine hostages, including four foreign nationals, were killed in IDF strikes in the Gaza Strip over the last day. We've established there's all sorts of entities, political groups, political leaders, the Pope, the Queen of Jordan, whomever, calling for a ceasefire. Who's in the opposite camp? Is it just the United States and Israel? So there was a United Nations General Assembly vote. The resolution was calling for humanitarian truce. It passed by a long shot. The result of the vote is as follows. In favor, 120.

Only 14 countries were against it. Among them, United States and Israel, but also Croatia, Czech Republic, Guatemala, and then several Pacific Island countries, Fiji, Micronesia, Marshall Islands. What was interesting is also 45 abstentions, among them Ukraine. Draft Resolution AES-10L25 is adopted. But truly, the United States is Israel's most prominent, most powerful backer.

And I think the case could be made that without the United States' support, this military campaign and gossip wouldn't go on very long. If the United States stands with Israel, we will not ever fail to have their back. We'll make sure that they have the help their citizens need, and they can continue to defend themselves. Okay, so the United States is the most important ally. What exactly is the stated position of the United States? Something called a humanitarian pause?

The Biden team, they haven't really defined what they mean by a humanitarian pause here, but we can see them kind of continually adjusting and reshaping their rhetoric, recognizing just how severe the situation has become and just the cost of it continuing. It is certainly accurate to say that President Biden brought up the idea of humanitarian pauses with the prime minister. That is something that we've been talking to him and to his war cabinet about for quite some time. My sense is what the U.S. administration is most concerned about is that Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't have a measurably achievable plan. His two stated goals for this military campaign are to eliminate Hamas

and get the hostages back. And in many senses, those are in contradiction with one another. And without an exit strategy or a day after plan for Gaza, some experts are saying there may not even be a day after in Gaza, given the scale of the attacks so far. What would have once been a bustling street in Gaza is now a gray, burnt landscape. So has Prime Minister Netanyahu been swayed at all by the Biden administration asking for a humanitarian pause? Well, all indications show that Netanyahu is doubling down and putting out trial balloons of a military occupation of Gaza after Hamas is eliminated. I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility because we've seen what happens when we don't have it.

And this sort of bear hug method that Biden has pursued, which is holding Israel close and supporting it in international forums while being kind of critical and maybe setting guardrails in private situations, doesn't really appear to be working, especially as the conflict enters its second month and the Israeli attacks on Gaza continue unabated. Calls for a ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen. You know, on paper, Jonathan, calling for a ceasefire doesn't feel like super divisive. What you're saying is, let's stop killing people. How is it landing in this super divisive conflict? Divisive is the watchword. I've seen protesters, including Jewish American protesters who are calling for a ceasefire, being called pro-Hamas, being called anti-Semitic. I've seen a number of former Trump officials really railing on this point.

And maybe it goes without saying, but I do think it's important to note that this kind of dissent, this kind of political activity is totally within the bounds. I mean, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Secretary of State, negotiated the ceasefire. This is very much within the bounds of U.S. policy. What makes this time different? So I spent a bunch of time looking through ceasefires 2009, 2012, 2014, and as recently as May 2021, when Biden and his team were in office. Obviously, Israel's calculation has really changed here after the atrocities of October 7th. It's no longer the old policy of you can keep Hamas in power and kind of incrementally deal with them. The stated policy

now is to get rid of Hamas. And the hostage crisis obviously exacerbates tensions, raises emotions, and changes the strategic calculus here. But what I found most interesting is, you know, these ceasefires, they hold up until they don't. And I was trying to figure out, you know, what can make it work? Why haven't they worked? And what experts told me, current and former officials who were involved in these negotiations, is that they never worked because there wasn't a bigger political process, a political horizon that could lead to a Palestinian state. So at the end of the day, these ceasefires weren't tied to a bigger goal that could bring stability for Israelis and Palestinians.

Okay, so it sounds like the ceasefires that might work are the ones that actually lead to a long-term solution, as impossible as that might seem in this particular moment. Tell me what seems much more possible is that this goes on. What happens if we don't get a ceasefire and we're in month three, month four, month five of this? I fear it's going to look a lot like today, but worse with civilians, Palestinians in Gaza dealing with the worst parts of it. Already supplies are so meager for people in hospitals, for everyone in Gaza is truly suffering. The potential for a broader Middle East war is real.

Hezbollah, the militant group in Lebanon that resorts to terrorism quite frequently has stayed out so far. They're a relatively pragmatic actor, but they may get involved. I'm equally concerned about countries like Egypt and Jordan, which are not democracies by any stretch of the word. But if there are mass protests in the streets, it could really expose how brittle these regimes are. And that's why we've seen the foreign minister of Jordan, the queen of Jordan and others speak quite forwardly about the need for a ceasefire. Jonathan Geyer, Vox. We're going to ask if anyone in the region really wants this conflict to escalate when we're back on Today Explained.

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at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You are listening to Today Explained. My name is John Alterman. I'm a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

John's had all the big D.C. jobs, think tank, professor, State Department, legislative aide to a senator. But lately, he's been doing lots of interviews on this war. So I'm Mr. Gloom and Doom. Our guest earlier in the show, also named John, said that if there's no ceasefire, things could certainly get worse and there's always the possibility of a regional escalation. As a Middle East expert, what do you think of the possibility for a regional escalation? Well, there's a possibility. There's two ways things could escalate. They could escalate. They could escalate because of calculation or miscalculation.

It seems to me that all the body language I'm seeing from the bad guys in the Middle East, their calculation is, doesn't really make sense to escalate, certainly right now, partly because things are going their way, partly because the risk of escalation would be greater than the reward. So I think I saw Hassan Nasrallah speak last Friday. I got the sense that he wanted to make some noise, but didn't want to get into a

real fight with the United States. All right, now we're going to have to go to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He's speaking. Let's listen in. Some claim that we are about to engage in the war. I am telling you, we have been engaged in this battle since October the 8th. I have looked at what the Iranians have said. The Iranian feeling is the ball is kind of moving in their direction. Israel is growing more isolated. The U.S. is growing more isolated because of its ties to Israel.

Everybody's talking about Iranian presence in the region and all these proxy forces they've been supporting. So from an Iranian perspective, things are actually pretty good. Why would you want to risk that and risk a fragile economy when things are actually moving in a good way? So I think the risks of escalation by calculation are relatively modest right now. The risks of escalation by miscalculation are serious and rising. You have a lot of guys with guns who are committed to deterring other people to show that they're not pushovers. One of the problems with that is partly you have a command and control problem that can the Iranians or their proxies control all the guys with guns who might have an idea to do something stupid or heroic?

That's one set of problems. You have a problem of weapons that go off in the wrong direction or kill more people than you thought would be the case. You have the problem that when the U.S. responds, if the U.S. responds to something, it can be taken not as a defensive move by the United States, but as an offensive move that requires them to act to show that they're not being intimidated, which requires the U.S. to act. And you can get into a spiral very quickly. And it's something we're going to have to be very, very cautious about.

Again, calculation, I think nobody wants it to go in that direction right now. Miscalculation, it is an enduring problem. I mean, you mentioned Iran. It sounds like they're sort of content with the status quo. We heard about the Queen of Jordan earlier in the show. What about the other Arab nations in the region? Where would they like to see this go in the coming weeks and months? So there's partly a difference between governments and people.

On the governmental side, they all hate Hamas. Hamas is all the things they most fear. It's an armed group embracing political Islam supported by the government of Iran. That's a trifecta. If you're an Arab government, that's exactly what you don't want to see. I think the Arab governments quietly would love to see Hamas destroyed. There's a different issue with Palestinians. And a week ago, or two weeks ago now, I interviewed the foreign minister of Jordan, and he almost didn't use the word Hamas. He kept talking about Palestinians. There's a lot of sympathy for Palestinians, for the Palestinian cause, as a moral issue. There's been almost complete dehumanization of the Palestinians.

And people are asking legitimate questions. Is this war going to end this? Or is it going to lead to more of this? What about 6,000 Palestinians who've died in the days since this terrible nightmare engulfed all of us. They have families too. They have names. They have faces. They have memories.

You've spent time inside the United States government. You've surely been watching the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, jet-setting around the Middle East, constantly looking very stressed out. What do you make of the job he's doing? Has he accomplished anything? I think he has. I mean, first of all, he works for the president, and then the president set the course of embracing Israel and showing, I share your pain, I feel your pain, and using that as the foundation on which you're going to try to shape Israeli policies. Today, in my fourth visit to Israel since October 7th, I reiterate that in all my discussions with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, the Security Cabinet.

I reiterated and made clear our support for Israel's right to defend itself, indeed its obligation to defend itself. The challenge he has is that the gap between Israel and Israeli actions and Israeli sentiments and the neighborhood is growing wider and not narrower. The Israelis are still bent on revenge, bent on deterrence, bent on teaching Palestinians a lesson. And the Arab governments are saying the violence needs to stop right now. The problem is not that Blinken isn't effective enough. The problem is the problem he's trying to solve is getting bigger and not smaller. We need to do more to protect Palestinian civilians. We've been clear that as Israel conducts its campaign to defeat Hamas, how it does so matters. It matters because it's the right and lawful thing to do. It matters because failure to do so plays into the hands of Hamas and other terror groups.

There will be no partners for peace if they're consumed by humanitarian catastrophe and alienated by any perceived indifference to their plight. When that time does come, when everyone can agree that this violence needs to stop, that there does in fact need to be a ceasefire, whether that means that the hostages are returned in a way that Israel finds amenable, or whether it means some kind of apology is happening in here. What happens next? If Hamas is somehow eradicated, what comes next in Gaza? How do we get to a point where we can prevent further violence there? So I just read a sort of chilling piece from a friend and colleague of mine, Nathan Brown, who's at George Washington University in the Carnegie Endowment, who argues that there may

never be a day after in Gaza, that Gaza may be suffering for months and years with this unstable situation, a destroyed infrastructure with no viable governance structure, that it's not clear we're going to get to that point. I hope we do get to the point. I think there needs to be a replacement for Hamas, which is importantly palatable to Palestinians as well as palatable to Israelis. I think it's going to take a long time to get there. It's going to be incremental.

Part of the problem is the Palestinian Authority is both weak and illegitimate. It needs to be both stronger and more legitimate. The PNA is crumbling. That's a reality. Not totally its fault alone. It does need to regain its standing with its people. And I think the only way that can happen is if that, in addition to reforms which are essential within the PNA, but also an ecosystem that enables it to go to its people and say, look, there is hope for you, and I will deliver this endgame for you, which means your security and your state of the freedom. I think there's an Arab role in doing that. There's a European role in doing that.

There are roles for other countries. But it seems to me that if you extinguish the flames of Hamas, you still have the embers of Hamas. And unless you're able to create an alternative for Palestinians that gives them a political horizon, that gives them a sense of they actually have a future that doesn't involve suffering and dying, unless you can supply that, the flames of Hamas or some successor are going to come back. And at this point, you know, when I talked to folks on both the Palestinian side and the Israeli side, they said, nobody's ready to talk about coexistence. But it seems to me that in the longer term, that's the only solution. It's not an easy solution. It's not a happy solution. It means people have to get a lot less than they want.

But a lot of diplomacy isn't about asserting what you want. It's about ensuring that you get what you need. And we're not at that point. People are still talking about what they want. I think we will come to a point when people are tired and frustrated and worn out enough that we can shift the conversation to what do I want, to what do I really need? And that's when you're going to have some possibilities. You know, in terms of an actual ceasefire, in my experience, Hamas has been in a lot of confrontations.

They never like to talk about a ceasefire. That's a little formal. That's old school. They'd use other words for pause, for quiet. They use tahtiyah. They use hudna for sort of a truce. They have all sorts of euphemisms for ceasefire, which doesn't require actually having a negotiation for the Israelis. But I think we will get to points where the violence will dip. The U.S. will try to negotiate it. The U.S. will try to bring other partners, the Qataris and others who are in touch with Hamas.

I think we will get there. But there's a broader question about what's the U.S. relationship with Israel going forward. That partly depends on where Israel is going forward, where Israel is in the world going forward. And a core goal of Hamas is to ensure that Israel is isolated in the world. And they see this as an isolation that can last decades into the future.

And a core tactic is to use Israeli strength to get to that outcome. And I'm not sure that the Israelis have figured out a way to combat that. John Alterman is the director of Middle East policy at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It's a big DC think tank. And even big DC think tank people have podcasts.

John's is called Babble, translating the Middle East. This one's today explained. We were produced by Abishai Artsy and Isabel Angel, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by David Herman. More tomorrow. Bye.