Friday, May 09, 2025
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Trump’s Mideast Shifts Leave Everyone Guessing
Seth Mandel: Trump’s Mideast Shifts Leave Everyone Guessing
Now come two more reports of muddled messaging, throwing even more confusion into the air right before Trump travels to the Mideast. Trump has talked tough about the prospect of an Iranian nuclear deal, all but saying that if a deal fails, the U.S. will do with force and fire what Iran won’t do on its own: dismantle its illicit program. After Witkoff initially seemed open to letting Iran enrich its own uranium (up to a point), which would reproduce one of the flaws of Obama-era policy, he backtracked. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the backtrack: No enrichment should be allowed, none. On Tuesday, Trump reiterated that if Iran insists on trying to obtain a nuke, “it’s going to be a very sad thing, and it’s something we don’t want to have to do but we have no choice: they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.”Biden team sought to ‘get rid’ of Netanyahu for opposing Gaza plans
But on Wednesday, when the president was asked if Iran could still have a civilian nuclear enrichment program, he responded: “We haven’t made that decision yet.”
And now the Wall Street Journal reports that nobody actually believes Trump’s declaration of a cease-fire with the Houthis: “We are not going back any time soon,” said Nils Haupt, a spokesman for a major German liner. “It’s a good development, but it needs a lot of security guarantees for the Red Sea to be considered safe for big merchant ships.” The Journal adds that the agreement “makes no clear mention of ending attacks on commercial shipping.”
The Defense Department seemed to acknowledge as much, telling reporters that there has been no official determination on what kind of naval escorts will be arranged to ensure the security of vessels traversing the Red Sea shipping lanes and surrounding area. Meanwhile, Houthi drones are still flying overhead. “It will take some time before the southern Red Sea is safe, and we are working on it,” a Pentagon official told the Journal.
Once a system is in place, moreover, it’ll likely take months, at the very least, of consistent security before major companies switch back to their old routes. In that period of time, anything can happen, including a failed Gaza cease-fire deal and the full resumption of the war.
At the same time, the president will be negotiating with Iran. How much will he be willing to crack down on Iranian proxies like the Houthis? If the Iranians need leverage during the talks, what’s to stop them from letting the Houthis fire away again to put pressure back on the U.S.?
On top of all that, Witkoff is playing with fire by using the hostage families to pressure Netanyahu, which will only introduce more tension and volatility into domestic Israeli politics—and who knows where that will lead, exactly? Not Witkoff. Or Witkoff. Or Witkoff or even Witkoff.
So it’s too soon to say Trump is leaving Israel behind. But it’s not too soon to say that his control over events is tenuous and his penchant for unpredictability often inspires the same in other parties, and therefore Israel should figure out how to end the war in Gaza on its own terms before anything else changes.
The Biden administration considered ways to “get rid” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he wouldn’t go along with their plans for the Gaza Strip, according to an investigation by Channel 13.The West’s two-tier international law doesn’t harm just Israel
“The White House got tired of Netanyahu and started to roll around a revolutionary idea ... how to get rid of Netanyahu,” claimed Raviv Drucker, who hosts the channel’s HaMakor programme.
The broadcast, titled All the President’s Men involved in-depth interviews with nine members of Biden’s team – including former US ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides, former national security advisor Jake Sullivan, former White House national security communications advisor John Kirby and former senior Biden aide Ilan Goldenberg.
According to the report, the administration became aggravated by Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss the end goal of Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, specifically who would take charge of the Gaza Strip after Hamas had been ousted.
The Biden team proposed handing security control of the Strip to a foreign force, which would then turn it over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Goldenberg said.
“We actually had a pretty good program of training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank ... But in the short term you needed something, probably Egyptians, Arabs ... to come in and temporarily hold it because those Palestinians wouldn’t be ready for a while,” he recalled.
However, reflecting on the administration’s assessment that Netanyahu was standing in the way, he suggested that the Israeli leader didn’t want to discuss the “day after” because it would open a “Pandora’s box” and risk collapsing his governing coalition.
Netanyahu has been under significant domestic pressure from the more right-wing elements of his government to continue the war until Hamas is destroyed and to refuse PA control of Gaza.
Goldenberg, who now serves as senior vice president and chief policy officer at J Street, told the programme: “There were a lot of people who are talking about, including in the Oval Office, at times, the idea of... the president going out and giving a speech.”
There is absolutely no sense in which Israel was in occupation of any of Gaza when Hamas launched its attack on October 7, 2023. And the territories its army has occupied since, mostly a buffer zone near the perimeter and a few key corridors, don’t have very many civilians living in them.
Authority that has been “established and can be exercised” would imply that Israeli forces run the schools, collect the taxes, arrest criminals, operate courts, etc. It’s hard to imagine a territory being occupied by one army without soldiers on the ground and where another local force amasses an arsenal of rockets, fields 20 or so battalions under its command – and is able to hold dozens of hostages for more than a year.
The claims about international law regarding both demographic and territorial issues also doesn’t meet the basic standards of scrutiny. Wherever there is war, civilians flee. Our normal impulse in such situations is to try to end the war, and where that is not possible, to ensure that civilians who wish to leave can do so.
It was under this banner that so many humanitarian organisations mobilised during the Syrian Civil War to press Western governments to accept the millions of Syrians fleeing the conflict when it broke out in 2011. The same impulse was manifest a decade later when almost 7 million Ukrainians fled Ukraine.
On territory, too, the argument makes no sense and isn’t grounded in any actual international law. UN member states are obligated to respect each other’s recognised borders, but the line between Israel and the Hamas-ruled enclave is no such thing. It is an armistice line drawn in 1949 (and adjusted slightly one year later) that reflected the Israeli and Egyptian positions at the end of the 1948 war. The text of the Israel-Egypt armistice, like that of the Israel-Jordan and Israel-Syria but notably not the Israel-Lebanon one, makes clear that “the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either party”.
By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.
It’s annoying to hear international law invoked against Israel in so many different contexts to condemn actions that are entirely consistent both with actual international law and with the practices of other states at war. But it’s not the hypocrisy that should bother us most.
These commitments have real impacts on the course of the war, and in nearly every case they run counter to the stated objectives of the countries insisting on them.
They made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.
Making it impossible to defeat Hamas in the war it itself launched in 2023 won’t bring peace to Gaza; it will only ensure that the next war will be even bloodier.
Buy 
.png)
.png)
