Why Israel’s Critics Stopped Pretending To Want a Ceasefire
Seth Mandel for commentary.org
The pro-Hamas protesters both outside and inside the Democratic National Convention may be poor folk singers and off-key banjoists, but at least they are honest.
The banner briefly unfurled by activists inside the convention while President Biden was speaking said “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.” Outside, it was the usual band of explicitly genocidal Hamas fans singing the praises of the October 7 slaughter. Well-connected Pennsylvania Democratic activist and Kamala Harris delegate Morgan Overton, meanwhile, was quieter but no less honest about it. She backed a Pittsburgh BDS petition that would, as the Washington Free Beacon reported, “cripple the city’s Jewish organizations and punish its largest hospital system.” (The petition was shelved for this election cycle amid a dispute over signature requirements.)
The specific demands made by Overton and her fellow signatories: that Israel end its campaign in Gaza and agree to a final settlement of the conflict that creates either a one-state solution (in which the Jewish state would be dissolved) or a two-state solution that Hamas opposes.
What happened, you might ask, to the ceasefire? Isn’t that the cause animating the progressive throngs in the streets? Aren’t they motivated by a sincere desire to see peace?
Well, no, obviously not. But why would they completely drop the CEASEFIRE NOW organizing principle they’ve been disingenuously running with since October 7? The answer is because Israel indirectly called their bluff. (I say “indirectly” because it’s not as though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making decisions based on what tentifada pups claim to want.)
The narrative all along, and pushed relentlessly by the Biden administration, has been that Netanyahu is the obstacle to a deal. But that narrative crumbled when the New York Times obtained internal documents related to the ceasefire negotiations. It turned out that Netanyahu was surprisingly conciliatory, and while his own negotiators wanted him to give up even more for a deal, they conceded that Bibi had reasonable demands: namely, that returnees to northern Gaza not be armed and that Hamas not be permitted to retake control over its crucial resupply tunnels to Egypt.
While plenty of folks still disagreed with Netanyahu’s positioning, it was no longer tenable to say he was negotiating in bad faith or deliberately trying to torpedo the talks. Hamas and its supporters reoriented their talking points.
Then Secretary of State Antony Blinken, forced to concede Bibi wasn’t the villain, handed the Israelis another test in the form of a compromise proposal intended to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas. Israel accepted these terms. Hamas flipped out, taking credit for an attempted mass suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and mobilizing terrorists in the West Bank in the hopes of expanding the war to yet another front.
Netanyahu “confirmed to me that Israel accepts the bridging proposal,” Blinken said. “It’s now incumbent on Hamas to do the same.” Blinken said the same in private, according to Israel’s Channel 12. “We have a way to measure if the prime minister is committed to a deal,” the secretary reportedly told families of Israeli hostages. “And this time our assessment is that he is.”
On his way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago yesterday, President Biden confirmed to reporters that “Israel says they can work it out… Hamas is now backing away.”
Without any credible way to absolve Hamas of blame for the lack of a deal, the terms must change. The protesters, their supporters in the Squad faction of Congress, their mentors at “elite” universities—by and large these folks merely want Israel’s defeat, whatever the specific methods.
Of course, if they really wanted a ceasefire, they would have been horrified by October 7 and angry at Hamas, since there was a ceasefire in place that Hamas broke by slaughtering over a thousand innocents, ensuring there’d be a significant response. To a true ceasefire supporter, let alone a person of any moral fiber, Hamas’s attack would have been the great unforgivable crime of the century.
But the rallies in support of Hamas by progressive groups and on campuses began immediately after the massacre. Not only were these groups willing to forgive Hamas for destroying a status quo ceasefire, many of them were downright jubilant at the death and destruction caused by the terror group.
Since it’s never actually been about a ceasefire, it has been easy for the “pro-Gaza” protest movement to pivot in its demands. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ringleader of the Democratic anti-Zionist caucus who has long demanded that the U.S. go far beyond a ceasefire and take action against Israel, had a prime speaking slot at Harris’s nominating convention last night.
There’s some value, of course, in all this dropping of pretensions. The Democratic Party with Harris as its standard-bearer is telegraphing a posture change; some in the party, such as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, are hinting that such a shift could come sooner than later. It turns out that all it might take for Israel’s critics to drop the “ceasefire” charade is an actual ceasefire.
It is inconceivable that there are individuals who do not yet understand the only thing that will satisfy Hamas is the complete destruction of Israel.