Israel got a warning from London yesterday, but it’s not the one that’s been widely reported.
Benny Gantz, who presents himself as Israel’s opposition leader and is, for now, a member of the triumvirate unity war council governing the country under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been traveling to Western capitals to burnish his credentials for his inevitable rematch against Netanyahu. As of now, Gantz’s party is far ahead of Bibi’s in the polls, but Gantz understands that Israelis need to be able to picture him in the big chair.
Unfortunately for Gantz, his trips to Washington and London haven’t exactly gone as planned. In Washington, he was read the riot act over Israel’s supposed mishandling of aid delivery to Gaza, and the administration made a point of letting Vice President Kamala Harris scold him on behalf of the Democratic Party’s base.
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His next stop was London, where his meetings carried much the same message. But the subtext was very different, and it’s important for Gantz to pick up on such things.
The designated schoolmarm in London was David Cameron, who is currently foreign minister but was prime minister several years ago and is part of the Conservatives’ plan to turn around their polling numbers. Cameron is doing to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak what Gantz is trying to do to Netanyahu: pretending to be prime minister so he can begin shaping policy.
That is why Sunak “dropped in” on the meeting between Cameron and Gantz, so as not to leave the wrong impression about who is in charge. But he still fell into Cameron’s trap because he was forced to play Good Cop to Israel while Cameron believes the role of Bad Cop will have more support among the public.
Poor Benny Gantz might not have had any idea what was going on in the room, but hopefully it was explained to him later. Because the role-playing game conducted by Sunak and Cameron was meant to convey a threat. Cameron sees public opinion as moving against the war in Gaza. Whether he’s right is almost beside the point; this signals a rift in the Tories over Israel.
How should Gantz interpret this? As a reminder that, as far as the West is concerned, Israel does not have all the time in the world to finish off Hamas. Neither Sunak nor Cameron particularly cares how this war ends. Gantz and Netanyahu don’t have that luxury. The reason Hamas is disingenuously manipulating the U.S., Israel, and Qatar on the hostage negotiations is because their only goal is to run out the clock. That’s it—that’s the whole strategy now.
And if that weren’t enough, the Israelis are about to get another fire lit under them at Joe Biden’s State of the Union address tonight. The president is expected to order the construction of a temporary seaport in Gaza that will be used to ferry humanitarian aid from Cypress.
Why should this inspire Israel to commence the last act of the war? A few reasons. First, because of the motive for the announcement: It shows that Biden is still trying to appease the unappeasable within his coalition. In that, it will fail. Nobody cheering “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is going to change their mind thanks to a hastily constructed port that will simply serve as a more dangerous way of getting aid to Palestinian civilians. Which means when it fails to move the needle of progressive opinion, Biden will try something else to make them happy. Israel needs to accept that this ball is now rolling downhill, and they’re standing at the bottom.
The second reason is logistics: U.S. troops off the coast guiding and guarding U.S. wartime infrastructure projects—i.e., a big fat target—reduce the operational field for Israel.
Lastly, if anything goes wrong and American troops are killed, there is no telling what election-year politics will do with that.
The Democratic National Convention is going to be a powder keg this summer. Now that we are, for all intents and purposes, entering the general election, the war in Gaza will stalk the candidates at every stop, at every press gaggle. Donald Trump is nothing if not mercurial, so the Israelis cannot assume he won’t find counterproductive ways to hit Biden on the issue.
Kamala Harris and the other Americans threw a lot of words at Benny Gantz. So did Rishi Sunak and David Cameron. But they all amount to the same thing: Get moving.