Blinken Wants To Sell Us a Bridge

The so-called bridging proposal is not a serious effort to secure a ceasefire

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.

As many critics of U.S. policy have said, the administration has made ceasefire negotiations into a new hollow “peace process.” In such a process, the negotiations go on indefinitely while the Israeli government keeps establishing new facts on the ground. Because the U.S. will not put any meaningful pressure on Netanyahu, he has no reason to change course. He sees that the administration is still eager to go out of its way to accommodate him despite all the times he has humiliated and defied them.

The Biden administration would probably like to claim that it has achieved something here during the week of the Democratic convention so they have something to boast about, but all they have done is reward Netanyahu for his intransigence and recklessness. A permanent ceasefire in Gaza is desperately needed for the sake of the millions of people being deliberatedly starved, but Blinken’s proposal doesn’t get us any closer to it. There has to be a major change in U.S. policy to secure a ceasefire, but there is no sign of it happening anytime soon.