Blinken is selling a bridge to nowhere:
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that Israel has accepted a proposal to bridge gaps in ceasefire negotiations and the next step is for Hamas to accept ahead of further negotiations expected to take place later this week.
The so-called bridging proposal is not a serious effort to secure a ceasefire. The only gap that it closes is between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government, and it does this by including even more conditions from the Israeli side that Hamas won’t accept. Netanyahu agreed to the new proposal only because he knew that Hamas wouldn’t.
In fact, according to some Israeli officials, “Netanyahu’s hard lines are actually making a deal much harder to reach.” That’s no accident. It is obvious that the prime minister doesn’t want a real, lasting ceasefire, and he never has. The prime minister has every incentive to keep the war going, and he has been trying to expand the war with attacks in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Letting Netanyahu dictate the terms is a recipe for unending conflict.
The theater of Blinken’s bridge is meant to give Netanyahu political cover and to delay Iranian retaliation for the attack in Tehran. The administration keeps running the same play so that it can claim to be working to end the war while doing nothing to pressure the Israeli government to end it. Meanwhile, U.S. arms transfers continue without interruption while Washington pretends that Netanyahu isn’t the chief obstacle to peace.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.