The Biden administration in Washington – where hope springs eternal, especially in the lead-up to a national election – is finally coming close to pronouncing the ceasefire negotiations dead.

The big question is what comes next.

Protesters and striking workers in Israel brought the country to a standstill after the bodies of six captives were recovered by the military from a tunnel in southern Gaza on Saturday.

Israeli authorities said that the captives, who include a US citizen, had been shot and killed at a close distance mere days before their bodies were found.

Days earlier, a Palestinian citizen of Israel captured in a kibbutz on 7 October was found alive in a tunnel not far from where the six slain captives were later recovered. The body of another dead captive had recently been recovered in a different area.

The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, appeared to confirm that the six found on Saturday had been executed by its fighters – or at least they were content to give that impression.

Abu Obeida, the Qassam Brigades’ pseudonymous spokesperson, stated on Monday that the fighters guarding captives had been given new instructions for how to act if the Israeli military approached.

Abu Obeida added that the new instructions were handed down after the Nuseirat incident, referring to the central Gaza refugee camp where nearly 300 Palestinians were killed during a raid in which the Israeli military freed four captives.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on military pressure rather than a deal with Hamas would mean that the remaining captives in Gaza would return in coffins, Abu Obeida said.

The Qassam Brigades also began releasing videos which it said were the final messages of the captives found slain on Saturday.

The first showed 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi pleading for Netanyahu and the Israeli government to “do what is necessary to release us now.”

Yerushalmi’s video statement, edited by the Qassam Brigades, was made under duress, given that she was being held against her will. Subsequent videos of the other slain captives reiterate some of the same messages directed at Netanyahu.

In the undated video, she says that Netanyahu agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by fighters in 2006 and held in Gaza by Hamas for more than five years.

“They are asking for less than a quarter of that number for each one of us,” Yerushalmi states before urging Israelis to take to the streets to protest.

“Everything that happened to us is because of the failure of the state of Israel and its security forces on 7 October,” she says before saying how much she loves and misses her family.

While Yerushalmi was speaking about the fate of herself and the other captives held in Gaza since 7 October, the same could be said about Israel as a whole.

The deaths of the six captives – five of them, including Yerushalmi, were slated to be released in the first phase of an exchange and ceasefire deal – will only deepen the already gaping fissures in Israeli society and accelerate the deterioration of trust between its citizens and the state.

“Moral disgrace”

Netanyahu, viewed by pretty much everyone as the party singularly responsible for preventing a deal between Israel and Hamas, has had no change of heart in recent days and is doubling down on his strategy of “maximum pressure” on Hamas.

He dug in his heels during a press conference on Monday evening, insisting on maintaining an Israeli force along the so-called Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, despite defense minister Yoav Gallant reiterating during a cabinet meeting on Sunday that the demand is “an unnecessary constraint.”

“The fact that we prioritize the Philadelphi corridor at the cost of the lives of the hostages is a moral disgrace,” Gallant is reported to have said.

Netanyahu’s hardline stance won the praise of his far-right allies Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s national security and finance ministers, respectively. Smotrich reportedly said that “if we give in to Hamas’ demands, like Gallant wants, we’ve lost the war.”

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which for months has been demanding a deal to secure the release of the dozens of captives remaining in Gaza, vowed that “the country will tremble” after Saturday’s discovery.

On Sunday, US President Joe Biden repeated his administration’s mantra that they are “working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages” and blamed “vicious Hamas terrorists” for the six captives’ deaths.

But as journalist Mohammad Alsaafin stated, Biden and his administration “chose Netanyahu’s survival and Gaza’s annihilation over all else,” including the lives of the captives in Gaza.

Little chance of a deal

Absent external pressure, there was never much of a chance for a deal when the chief belligerent – Netanyahu – has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of ending what he describes as an existential war.

The approximately 100 captives – most of them children, women and foreign laborers – released during a week-long truce in November were freed by Hamas “in return for zero quid pro quo from its point of view,” according to Haaretz analyst Amos Harel.

At the time, Harel states, Hamas thought that the exchange would lead to a more favorable second deal without Israel conquering southern Gaza. But a second deal was not reached and Israel launched its ground offensive in Khan Younis and Rafah, killing tens of thousands more Palestinians and sparing no area of Gaza.

In the meantime, the US brokered negotiations between Hamas and Israel while continuing to fund, arm and provide diplomatic cover to the latter.

That the six captives found dead on Saturday were returned to Israel in body bags rather than alive is a grim if predictable outcome of the months-long ceasefire charade that has only served to prolong Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It was Washington, which has provided some 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel since 7 October, that insisted that a ceasefire be negotiated between a government perpetrating a genocide and its victims, rather than imposed through the enforcement of international law.

For Israel and the US, the initial purpose of the ceasefire negotiations “was to serve as a fig leaf for Israel to continue with its genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip,” according to analyst Mouin Rabbani.

The US paid lip service to securing the release of Israeli and foreign nationals held captive in Gaza. But at the same, Washington’s insistence that a ceasefire be reached through bilateral negotiations, while it undermined demands for a ceasefire from the UN Security Council, only prolonged their captivity.

More recently, the ceasefire negotiations also served to delay a response from Hizballah and Iran to Israel’s assassination of resistance leaders in Beirut and Tehran – provocative acts seemingly aimed at provoking a wider war with Iran as sought by some in Tel Aviv but opposed by Washington.

The renewed American push for ceasefire negotiations at the end of August also allowed the US military to send reinforcements to the region in anticipation of retaliatory strikes from Hizballah and Iran.

The negotiations charade meanwhile allowed US vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris to throw a bone to hecklers protesting the genocide by claiming that the administration is working day and night to reach a deal, when she refuses to call for an arms embargo to end the slaughter.

Negotiators talking amongst themselves

The breakdown of ceasefire talks was a long time coming.

While Hamas participated in the so-called Cairo Summit in late August, it sat out of the talks in the lead-up toward that high-level meeting.

Hamas instead insisted on a plan for the implementation of the proposal that it agreed to in early July only for its chief interlocutor and leader Ismail Haniyeh to be assassinated in Tehran later that month.

Hamas’ non-participation before the Cairo Summit left the “mediators to talk amongst themselves,” as former British diplomat Alastair Crooke put it in an interview on the Judging Freedom show.

Meanwhile, Washington reversed past progress by foisting on Hamas a proposal accommodating Netanyahu’s new demands.

Unnamed Israeli officials described by the Ynet news outlet as being close to the negotiations said that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken undermined the talks by asserting that the ball was in Hamas’ court and by projecting false optimism for domestic consumption around the time of the Democratic National Convention.

The proposal already agreed to by Hamas is in line with the three-phase plan outlined by US President Joe Biden at the end of May and UN Security Council Resolution 2735, adopted in June, welcoming Biden’s ceasefire proposal.

Hamas’ non-negotiable demands are the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, the right for Palestinians to move freely within the territory and the opening of the crossings to let in desperately needed aid and goods so that people can start rebuilding their lives after nearly a year of genocidal war.

The New York Times reported in mid-August, based on a review of unpublished documents detailing Israel’s negotiating positions, that it was Netanyahu who extensively maneuvered behind the scenes to scuttle a deal, while painting Hamas as the intransigent party.

What Netanyahu wants

During the latest push for a deal, Netanyahu added conditions that he knew would be deal breakers for Hamas, frustrating his own negotiating team while the Americans continued to blame Palestinians for the impasse.

White House National Security Spokesperson John Kirby reiterated this talking point on Thursday, stating that “the biggest obstacle to getting a ceasefire deal is Hamas,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

Netanyahu has also insisted on maintaining troops in the Netzarim corridor to inspect Palestinians returning to Gaza’s north, as well as maintaining direct control over Rafah crossing, the latter demand rejected by Egypt.

The Israeli prime minister also wants veto power over which Palestinian prisoners are released in a deal, and for freed Palestinian prisoners to be expelled from their homeland – a condition that would be vehemently rejected by Hamas and Palestinians more generally.

On Friday, 30 August, Netanyahu’s cabinet “decided to retain army presence in the corridor as part of a hostage release agreement,” with only defense minister Yoav Gallant voting against the measure, according to Haaretz.

In the closed-door meeting, Gallant reportedly told Netanyahu that his insistence on holding the Philadelphi corridor would “kill all the hostages” – presaging the fate of the six captives found dead the next day.

Netanyahu appears to have made his peace with his choice.

According to Haaretz columnist Aluf Benn, Netanyahu considers the Israeli captives in Gaza “to be a media nuisance, a battering ram by his political opponents, and a distraction from the goal: A prolonged occupation of the Gaza Strip.”

“In practice, a long-term arrangement for ‘the day after’ is being drawn up. Israel will control the northern Gaza Strip and drive out the 300,000 Palestinians still there,” Benn writes.

“The Israeli right envisions a Jewish settlement of the area, with vast real estate potential of convenient topography, a sea view and proximity to central Israel,” Benn adds.

The recolonization of northern Gaza will happen incrementally – “acre by acre, mobile home by mobile home, outpost by outpost - just like in Hebron, Elon Moreh, and Gilad Farm” in the West Bank, according to Benn.

The south of Gaza “will be left for Hamas, which will have to care for the destitute residents under Israeli siege, even after the international community loses interest in the story and moves on to other crises.”

Another indication of Netanyahu’s plan for indefinite deployment in Gaza is the new appointment of a brigadier general to head the re-established Israeli Civil Administration in the Gaza Strip – “mirroring a similar apparatus in the West Bank,” according to international law expert Itay Epshtain – with both generals reporting to Smotrich.

The battle in Gaza has become a war of attrition in which the force that can last the longest will emerge the victor. And with Israel running out of soldiers and equipment, while Qassam is surely replenishing its ranks, the likely outcome is not in Israel’s favor.

Why Netanyahu wants war

With negotiations at a dead end, Palestinian resistance factions may be viewing a full military confrontation between regional resistance groups and Israel as the only practicable way to bring an expedited end to the genocide in Gaza.

In a letter from the Palestinian resistance published on Islamic Jihad’s Telegram channel on 20 August, Palestinian fighters appeared to call on their counterparts in Lebanon to step up from their role as a support front and fully participate in the battle to liberate Palestine.

“It is time to advance toward the opening of the gate of Khaybar once again and work to eliminate ‘Israel’ from existence,” the letter states.

But Hizballah, which holds that the destiny of Palestine will be fought and won by Palestinian hands, is eager to avoid a full-scale confrontation and has carefully calibrated its responses to Israeli provocations to avoid giving Tel Aviv a pretext to start one. Iran has done the same.

Meanwhile, Hizballah is also maintaining a war of attrition that, along with the ongoing resistance from Hamas, has already severely damaged “Israel’s economy, international relations and social cohesiveness,” according to former Israeli military ombudsman General Yitzhak Brik.

The Israeli military, already stretched thin and taking heavy losses in Gaza, is wary of provoking a war with Iran. As Brik puts it, the Israeli military “does not have enough forces to fight a multifront war.”

Everyone, friend and foe alike, seems to be in agreement that Netanyahu, who constantly vows “total victory” in Gaza, has no interest in reaching a deal with Hamas to free the captives and end the war.

Many have pointed to Netanyahu’s self-interest in further delaying his corruption trial as a primary motivator for prolonging the war. But there’s more to it than that.

As Alastair Crooke explained on Judging Freedom, “what [the Israelis] are looking for is a new Nakba, the process of expelling all Arabs from the land between the river and the sea.”

The removal of Palestinians from their homeland so that they may be replaced with Jewish settlers has always been the single organizing principle of the state. Its retaliation following the 7 October attack provided a chance to accelerate this process.

“The aim was always Gaza first, [then] the West Bank and then the complete clearing of the area,” Crooke said of Israel’s opportunistic post-7 October strategy.

Therefore, Netanyahu has no interest in removing troops in Gaza, and would resume the slaughter after any prisoner swap “because Gaza needs to be cleared of the Palestinian population” to realize his cabinet’s greater plan, according to Crooke.

Netanyahu’s cabinet desires regional war that will draw in the United States to fight on Israel’s behalf and destroy Iran and Hizballah and other regional groups allied with the Palestinian resistance.

After receiving a record-breaking number of standing ovations during his address to the US Congress in July, Netanyahu has done everything he can to provoke a regional conflagration – an observation made by Alexander Mercouris during a recent episode of his show The Duran.

These provocations have included the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran (attributed to Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its responsibility), hours after the killing of Hizballah senior commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut (Israel did claim responsibility in that case), and by repeatedly sabotaging the US-led ceasefire negotiations.

According to analyst John Mearsheimer, those in Israel who are pushing for regional war likely see it as a historic opportunity to expel more Palestinians from their homeland, like the episodes of ethnic cleansing that occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967.

A war would provide cover for “thinning out” the Palestinian population in Gaza – reportedly one of Netanyahu’s strategic goals – while the destruction of Iran would mean the loss of the primary source of material support for the Palestinian resistance.

Eliminating any exercise of Palestinian self-determination – whether it is through armed resistance or otherwise – is imperative for an Israeli government that categorically rejects any compromise with the Palestinians.

For Israel, “victory is if you eliminate a possible diplomatic solution of a Palestinian state” in favor of apartheid or ethnic cleansing, as analyst Glenn Diesen stated in conversation with Mearsheimer and Mercouris on The Duran.

Netanyahu empowers Israel’s arsonists

Netanyahu has undercut dissent from the military – which still enjoys the confidence of the Israeli public, however eroded – by empowering figures in his far-right ruling coalition.

He’s allowed Ben-Gvir, a follower of Meir Kahane who makes little effort to hide his thoroughly illiberal Jewish supremacist beliefs, to build his own militia by giving him control over Israel’s national police, border guards and prison service, independent of defense ministry oversight.

Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, recently wrote to Netanyahu stating that the leaders of violent Jewish extremists “want to cause the system to lose control, causing indescribable damage to Israel.”

They are guided by an ideology that holds that “it’s easier to destroy the existing social fabric than to mend,” Bar elaborated. Their world view draws a dividing line “between Judaism and democracy” and jeopardizes “the state’s security and its very existence, while undermining confidence in the state’s institutions.”

Bar also said that more stunts like Ben-Gvir’s recent visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque complex on the Jewish holiday of Tisha b’Av, bringing hundreds of Jews to pray with him in a provocative violation of the fragile status quo at the holy site, could lead “to profuse bloodshed and change [Israel’s] face unrecognizably.”

Underscoring this real threat, professors Yoram Peri and Gabi Weimann write in Haaretz that Ben-Gvir’s demand to allow Jews to pray at the holy site and build a synagogue there “covers up a longer-term goal: to demolish al-Aqsa mosque and establish in its place a Third Temple.”

Under Ben-Gvir, according to Peri and Weimann, “the dream of a Third Temple is gradually materializing,” with the temple “intended to be the ultimate expression of Jewish sovereignty.”

Ben-Gvir has meanwhile doled out thousands of guns to Israeli Jews in Israel and the West Bank while settler violence against Palestinians and their property surges – increasing “the risk of igniting a nightmare scenario,” according to Eyal Lurie-Pardes, a visiting fellow with the Middle East Institute.

Israel’s path to self-destruction

Even the Council on Foreign Relations is publishing dire warnings over Israel’s current trajectory.

“The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent and destructive path,” Ilan Z. Baron and Ilai Z. Saltzman, both professors at US universities, state in a recent article for the council’s highly influential Foreign Affairs publication.

Baron and Saltzman acknowledge that back in 1968, following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula, scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that “the national pride and euphoria” that followed that military conquest would only “bring [Israel] from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic ultranationalism.”

This extreme ideology would ultimately result in “brutality” and the undoing of the Zionist project in Palestine, Leibowitz anticipated.

“An illiberal Israel would also become a pariah state,” Baron and Saltzman write. Even if the US continues to provide economic support, other key governments “would cease to coordinate with Israel on security matters, maintain trade agreements with Israel, and buy Israeli-made weapons.”

That would leave Israel entirely dependent on Washington “at a time when more and more Americans are questioning their country’s unconditional support for the Jewish state,” the professors add.

(The Israeli air force is already dependent on US aid, a senior officer recently told Haaretz, saying that without American weapons, the military could only sustain the war in Gaza for a few more months.)

Meanwhile, according to Baron and Saltzman, “the state would increasingly lose its monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and divisions could inflame to the point of civil war.”

The riots at the Sde Teiman military base after soldiers suspected of raping a Palestinian detainee were arrested and questioned are a harbinger of where Israel’s body politic is headed.

Baron and Saltzman project a “weakening of the central authority of the state [that] could presage a more shocking unraveling” – a process that may already be underway.

This will leave the government unable or unwilling “to fulfill any of its other traditional political responsibilities, including the provision of security and a stable legislative system of governance that guarantees accountability.”

Even if a civil war is avoided, an Israel “at odds with itself” would “still prove unstable, and the economy would collapse, leaving Israel a failed state,” according to Baron and Saltzman.

They assert that such a scenario isn’t inevitable and that it’s not too late “for Israel to save itself from its own demise and find another way forward.”

But many Israelis, recognizing the state’s downward trajectory, are already leaving or wish to do so.

A quarter of Israeli Jews and more than a third of Palestinian citizens of Israel “would leave Israel and emigrate to another country, if given a practical opportunity to do so,” according to a survey reported on by Haaretz in July.

The results of the poll “reflect a steady distrust with Israel’s political and military leadership,” the newspaper added.

Gil Fire, the deputy director of a major hospital in Tel Aviv, told Haaretz last month that physicians are increasingly quiet-quitting Israel. Fire said that while more attractive offers lured Israeli physicians abroad in the past, “now it’s a different vector: the social vector.”

“Countries need elites, superb professionals, and if you spit them out, they won’t be here,” Fire added. “And when they are not here, the system is liable to die out.”

US hastens Israel’s demise

The US bears no small amount of responsibility for leading Israel down what Mearsheimer might call a primrose path, providing it with unconditional support and absolute impunity as it wages a genocide against Palestinians and as Tel Aviv acts against its primary interest: survival.

In a 16-page document stating its reasons for the 7 October attack, Hamas said that the designs of the far-right government led by Netanyahu to expel Palestinians from their homeland, among other factors, required it to take what it called defensive action and prevent the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.

The US has played a key role in attempting to liquidate the Palestine liberation movement through its interminable Oslo peace process, its approach of indefinite conflict management and its push for normalization deals between Israel and autocratic Arab states aimed at sidelining the Palestinians.

These are means by which Washington has allowed Israel to consolidate its control and accelerate the colonization of Palestinian land.

This enabling of Israel by Washington provided the conditions for the rise of Ben-Gvir and his ilk – a situation that the US now recognizes to be a major security threat to Israel, even as the Americans double down on their short-sighted and catastrophic policies.

The US certainly doesn’t care about the fate of the Palestinians and is happy for Tel Aviv to carry out its final solution in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed over the past 11 months.

Last week, Israel launched the largest military operation in the West Bank in two decades, essentially opening up another war front against the resistance, with Palestinians in that territory all too aware that nothing is stopping Israel from inflicting on them what it has done to Gaza.

Peak Zionism

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, places the genocide in Gaza within the dynamic, structural process of settler-colonialism, with genocidal extermination and annihilation representing the peak of that process.

And if the genocide in Gaza represents the peak of that settler-colonial process, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich may represent the peak of its ideological expression: Zionism.

While avoiding language pertaining to international law and Palestinians’ rights, Washington at least appears to recognize how Ben-Gvir and the stream of Israeli society that he represents are a direct threat to the state.

State Department spokesperson Matt Miller recently said that Ben-Gvir’s “ongoing reckless statements and actions … only sow chaos and exacerbate tensions” while Israel must focus on regional threats. “They directly undermine Israel’s security,” he added.

The US departments of State and Treasury have belatedly imposed sanctions against a handful of individuals and organizations close to Ben-Gvir, most recently the settler vigilante group Hashomer Yosh, which receives funding from the Israeli government, and Yitzhak Levi Filant, the civilian security coordinator of the notorious Yitzhar settlement in the West Bank.

Earlier this year, the US government imposed sanctions on several individual settlers and a handful of outposts in the West Bank (settlements not formally recognized by the Israeli government).

Washington has also blacklisted extremist groups providing support to sanctioned individuals and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

The sanctions imposed by the US will likely encourage similar and more far-reaching measures from other countries, particularly EU states.

Reuters reported on 29 August that Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said that “he has asked the bloc’s members to consider imposing sanctions on two Israeli ministers for ‘hate messages’ against Palestinians, messages that he said broke international law.”

“He did not name either of the ministers,” Reuters added. The news agency noted that Borrell had previously criticized Ben-Gvir and Smotrich by name “for statements he has described as ‘sinister’ and ‘an incitement to war crimes.’”

For Palestinians in harm’s way, all of it will seem too little, too late, like London suspending 30 arms exports licenses to Israel after a two-month review of Israel’s conduct in Gaza found a “clear risk” that UK arms may be used to violate international humanitarian law. But these measures represent cracks in the wall of impunity and will confirm Israel’s status as a pariah state.

As observed by The Guardian, “the suspensions represent one-tenth of the 350 extant licenses and do not include parts for the F-35 Joint Fighter Strike program unless the UK-supplied part is specific to a jet plane for use exclusively by Israel.”

Israel’s staunchest allies are still picking only the lowest hanging fruit. Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich run around throwing figurative kerosene on the pyre while their fellow extremist settlers light literal fires during pogroms in Palestinian villages.

As Haaretz columnist Zvi Bar’el puts it, by even allowing Ben-Gvir into office, let alone serving as kingmaker in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, “Israel’s government has turned itself into a terror organization, with Ben-Gvir acting as its military arm.”

The head of this terrorist organization, Benjamin Netanyahu, is at what defense minister Gallant says is a “strategic crossroads,” with the choice being a ceasefire deal or a multi-front war.

Netanyahu is racing towards the latter while at odds with the military and as Israeli society rapidly deteriorates from within.

Some have posited that Israel’s military rationale for the war of annihilation in Gaza holds that if Hamas cannot be taken out as the governing authority, then leave them nothing to govern.

Should Israeli society irreparably shatter, it will be Netanyahu and his far-right allies who will have nothing left to rule.

Yitzhak Brik, the former Israeli military ombudsman, recently warned in Haaretz that “the country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss.” He said that “if the war of attrition against Hamas and Hizballah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.”

He added: “Israel has entered an existential tailspin and could soon reach a point of no return.”

With so many warning signs on what Israeli analyst Amos Harel calls “the long and continuous downward slide,” the recovery of the six captives’ bodies and the ensuing domestic upheaval may indicate that the point of no return has already been reached.

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

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