Opinion: Ceasefire Talks and the Changing Goalposts

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Nine months into the war, and the latest complaint is that Israel is making it harder to get a ceasefire in Gaza, because Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government is adding new demands in the ceasefire negotiations.

The talks between Israel and Hamas have continued for months, facilitated – if that’s the right word, and it may not be – by Egypt, the United States, and Qatar. Hamas complains that Israel has been moving the goalposts in recent weeks, issuing new demands that make it harder to come to an agreement.

Is that true? And if so, is it fair?

In a way, the complaint can be discarded easily with one simple acknowledgment:

Of course the proposals will change. That’s how peace treaty negotiations work. You can always accept a proposal on the table when it’s on the table. If you don’t accept it, you cannot expect that same proposal to be offered the following month, or even the following day.

If Hamas is really unhappy that some points that Israel offered months ago are now off the table, and other conditions are in the current proposal that weren’t there before, it’s nobody’s fault but Hamas’. They could have accepted an earlier offer; they chose not to.

As long as Hamas continues to refuse to accept what’s offered, Hamas should assume that the conditions offered will change – maybe to their advantage, maybe to their disadvantage. They have no grounds whatsoever for complaining about it.

Hamas, after all, started the current war on October 7, by violating a cease fire, by encroaching on Israel’s territory, and by committing some of the most reprehensible, inhuman crimes in history. This is all on them.

That being said, we must consider who is managing these talks.

In any peace talks, the dream is that the facilitators are neutral parties. Are they, in this case?

Egypt is a neighbor, with about as friendly and honorable a government as the region has, as long as General el-Sisi remains in control. But Egypt has a serious concern: they are rightly worried that the worst undesirables of Hamas will leave Gaza and move into Egypt. Egypt naturally doesn’t want that. They can’t say the quiet part out loud, but every time Israel eliminates another Hamas unit, Egypt understandably breathes a sigh of relief. Egypt is therefore not necessarily anxious for the war to end prematurely.

Qatar is an outright enemy, a partner of Iran, well-known for playing both sides against each other diplomatically. Qatar spends a mint, sponsoring the jihadist philosophy, if not specific jihadist acts, all over the world. Qatar has been spreading billions of dollars around U.S. universities for decades, turning our own children against us in our colleges and grad schools. Qatar is no neutral middleman; Qatar and Hamas are both arms of the Iranian bloc.

And the United States have been exhibiting a split personality of late; the majority of Americans are pro-Israel, but the Biden-Harris regime is largely pro-Hamas. It has recently become obvious that the Biden-Harris White House has been leaking secrets about Israel to the Iranians. Israel no longer dares trust the United States, despite decades of close friendship.

With “neutral facilitators” like this, is it any wonder that these peace negotiations have not yet borne fruit?

Next, what are the new conditions that Israel has allegedly added in recent weeks (these, it must be admitted, are all suspicions, from media reports, because the talks are confidential)?

It is reported that Hamas is upset that Israel added a requirement that the southern border of Gaza will permanently remain under Israeli control after any peace agreement. Another of the new conditions angering Hamas involves restrictions on the amount of land in northern Gaza that displaced Gazans will be allowed to return to; Hamas expects its territory to be increased, not decreased, after all this is over.

For their part, Israel maintains that these are not new conditions, and the Hamas side is irresponsible in classifying them as such. Israel says these are just clarifications of existing issues, which rings true.

But if these two points are new, are they reasonable?

Well, what has been happening for the past few decades, and what has been revealed as this war has progressed?

Massive tunnels have been found throughout Gaza; non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been exposed smuggling arms into Hamas at these key border points, and Hamas has been found to have installed infinitely more weapons caches, launch sites, and other control centers across the country than Israel had even suspected before.

Of course, conditions have to change, as these new revelations have been exposed.

Hamas has been given countless chances for a ceasefire, and has rejected the offers continuously since November.

Hamas has to be shown that there is a cost to pay in postponing a deal.

If Israel lets it be known that Israel will get more generous as the months go by, then Hamas may as well keep postponing any agreement. Only if they realize that what they see is the best deal they’ll ever be offered, and it might get worse and worse if they delay, only then might they realize that they would be best served by signing whatever Israel offers, right away.

Israel needs to admit, to themselves and to the world, once and for all, that this entire 17-year Gaza experiment has failed utterly. The idea of giving Hamas the authority to run a government has turned out to be nothing but what every sane observer expected from the start: thus empowered, Hamas operated a rogue government, a group of islamofascist money-launderers at the top, making life miserable for their own people, waging a continual and illegal war against their benefactors and neighbors – the innocent people of Israel.

If we want there to be peace, Iran’s surrogate Qatar has no business at the table.

If we want there to be peace, Israel needs to be in complete control of Gaza’s borders going forward.

And if we want there to be peace, some new method must be devised to provide the people of the Gaza strip with a reformed and peaceful leadership class in place of Hamas – a class dedicated to developing for their people a peacetime economy, free of the corruption, brainwashing, and constant war that Hamas has promulgated throughout its tenure.

What are the odds of the press reporting these common-sense points?

Slim to none.

Because most of all, if we want there to be peace, the anti-semitic, pro-terrorist world press would have to be reformed as well.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo