After weeks of highly complex negotiations involving Hamas, Israel, the outgoing Biden administration, the incoming Trump administration, and several Middle Eastern countries, stage one of the cease-fire in Gaza took effect this week. Hamas freed three Israeli hostages and Israel released 90 Palestinian prisoners, with more to come over the next five weeks before the second phase of the deal is set to begin. But the cease-fire is already on deeply shaky ground. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who presides over a thin parliamentary majority, has already faced a resignation from far-right minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, because the agreement leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza. Phase two, which mandates Hamas returning all hostages and the permanent cessation of hostilities, would likely prompt the resignation of another ally, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, and thus the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. And while President Trump has championed the deal, it’s far from guaranteed that he will balk if it is violated.
Before his resignation last summer, Andrew Miller was the Biden administration’s deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. (Miller cited personal reasons for his departure, though he was also skeptical of Biden’s approach toward Netanyahu.) I spoke with him about whether the cease-fire could last, what the repercussions might be if it doesn’t, and how the Trump administration may reward Israel’s far right in the future. We also discussed why Biden could not bring himself to take a tougher line on Netanyahu over the past 15 months.
Most observers seem to believe that there is little chance of the peace deal surviving until the second stage — which would effectively end the war — because that would leave Hamas in charge, which would be too much for Netanyahu to concede. Do you agree with that gloomy consensus?
It’s more than just conceding. It’s that his political interests require keeping Smotrich in the coalition. And it’s not just that Smotrich is opposed to the specific terms of this cease-fire; he’s opposed to any cease-fire. He wants to continue the war, formally occupy Gaza, presumably start rebuilding settlements, and apply additional pressure on Palestinian population in Gaza such that they have an incentive to “voluntarily” leave Gaza for neighboring Arab countries. So there’s no zone of agreement between Smotrich and really any type of post-conflict scenario, even if the Palestinians and the Arab states were prepared to agree to a continuous Israeli presence in Gaza and to no Palestinian Authority role in governance — let alone Hamas.
So the only thing that would satisfy him is settlements?
Yes. He does not want to cede that territory at all. And he’s been less consistent than Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir has always spoken of Gaza being part of Eretz Israel, and that there should be settlements. Smotrich has gone back and forth between “Yes, Israel needs to control Gaza,” but de-emphasing the settlements, to at other times saying, “Yes, of course, once we have control of Gaza, we need to start building the settlements.” They will go the same way as he hopes the settlements in the West Bank will go, which is annexation, in his mind. And I think that’s the primary reason Smotrich chose to go along with the agreement. He sees an opportunity for this government to formally annex parts of the West Bank, and potentially for the Trump administration to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty in that territory. And in the grand scheme of things, that figures more prominently for Smotrich than Gaza does.
That may explain why he signed off, but I’ve been wondering what’s in it for Bibi to even get anything done at all. Is it just that Trump wanted this to happen, or is there something more?
I think there’s another dimension — a possibility for cooperation with Trump that Netanyahu and others have long dreamed of, including with Iran. In this period over the next 42 days, we’ll probably see a fair amount of discussions or rumors about Israeli-U.S. conversations regarding the Iranian nuclear program and whether there should be military action. I think Trump does want to explore whether diplomacy is possible, but he’s still going to return to maximum pressure, and that differentiates him from his advisers. His advisers support maximum pressure because they want to bring down the Islamic Republic. I don’t think Trump gives a damn frankly who governs Iran. He just wants an agreement and he views maximum pressure as the way to get there. For Netanyahu, though, and those around him, they’re much more aligned with Trump’s advisers, where they view the Islamic Republic itself as the primary obstacle. So this presents them with an opportunity to potentially take military action against the nuclear program and to pursue courses of action aimed at the dissolution of the Islamic Republic.
That’s important, but I think there’s another reason why Netanyahu couldn’t just say no to Trump. And that is Trump is probably the one political actor in the United States that Netanyahu can’t outmaneuver within U.S. domestic politics. The Republican support for Trump is so absolute at this point, and he has such control over the party that he could come out tomorrow and say, “I think we should invite every person from Mexico and El Salvador in,” and a large percentage of the Republicans would vote with him. And I think the same is true of Israeli-Palestinian issues. Netanyahu is an astute observer of American politics, and recognizes he’s not going to be able to outmaneuver Trump in the same way that he thought he could outmaneuver Biden, then Obama before him.
There’s much more potential upside in terms of what Israel can do with American support. But ultimately, Netanyahu is less capable of going up against Trump tête-à-tête than he is Biden or Obama before him. And that’s not just a product of their tactics. It’s just the fact that Trump has absolute control over this party. Even when Biden and Obama were at the height of their popularity with the Democratic Party, they still had to worry about Republicans, and Netanyahu has never really worried about Democrats. He’s always been concerned about both his own right flank in Israel and the right flank in the United States.
So it’s probably safe to say that if Trump hadn’t won, we wouldn’t be looking at a cease-fire right now, given everything you’ve just said.
Yeah, I think it’s unlikely we would’ve reached a cease-fire at this time unless there was a change in the U.S. approach.
Trump has positioned himself as the pro-peace guy, and if this deal does fall apart as many people expect it to, a raging war may continue under his watch. Do you think he’d push hard to restore the cease-fire?
I don’t think Trump is indifferent to what happens after the first stage. I think there are two reasons why he cares. One is that the way the deal appears to be structured, there is an expectation that agreement on phase two will happen within five weeks, and the last release of hostages will not take place until after that. So there’s a risk, if there isn’t an agreement that last hostage release doesn’t happen. And if that hostage release includes Americans, it’s going to be a problem for Trump. It’ll be an affront to his ego and to his stature if he can’t get all of the Americans out. And I think the deal was designed this way for that very reason, to create a greater incentive to try to reach agreement on phase two.
Another reason he does care is that he views this all as a distraction from his primary objectives, the state of the American economy and the global economy. The continuation of this conflict isn’t good for either, one more directly than the other, but it’s not something he wants to deal with. Also, I still think he’s going to aggressively pursue some type of normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize, in part because Obama received one, and he recognizes that Saudi Arabia is unlikely at this point to play ball if the war is raging. In the event that there is a breakdown, I can’t say that the most likely outcome is he’ll come down hard on Netanyahu. And it may be a breakdown because of Hamas, not just Netanyahu. But I don’t think it’s quite as facile he cut the deal once and now he’s just going to walk away from it. He may ultimately walk away from it, but it’s not without a cost to him if he does.
Bibi then might be torn between his coalition — which will desert him if he follows through on a phase-two cease-fire — and Trump. Would domestic politics win out there?
Ultimately, Netanyahu is going to prioritize staying out of jail over assuaging the president. This is the very type of situation that he has tried to avoid throughout his career. He always wanted optionality, so that he wouldn’t be faced with what is effectively an ultimatum, should Trump try to enforce the terms of the agreement. But that’s exactly what he would encounter if Trump does seek to extend it.
In that environment, it’s going to come down to whether Netanyahu is able to offer Smotrich something with the blessing of the United States, that would be enough to keep him in. And I think that would have to be more than just settlements. That would probably have to be the United States pledging to recognize Israeli sovereignty in areas of the West Bank by a certain date. And even then that may not be enough, because Smotrich may be concerned that there won’t be implementation, or about the political criticism that would encounter for agreeing to something that is antithetical to what he said his position is would be too great.
But that’s really the only play available to Netanyahu if he does find himself caught between the coalition and Trump, which would be to try to get that agreement. It’s conceivable that the Trump administration could agree to something like that. My thoughts on annexation are similar to Iran, where I think Trump wants to give it one last shot to see if he can negotiate something, then and only then would he agree to recognize Israeli sovereignty.
You mean negotiate the big deal with Saudi Arabia? Because those kinds of settlements would be a nonstarter in that deal.
Exactly. If you start off by recognizing that’s going to completely shut things down, but I think he’ll probably want to take another shot at it, and that would preclude making such an assurance. Maybe there’s a way to thread the needle and say, “Give me six months to try to do something.” You can never say no with Bibi, because he is such an adept politician and I think he does understand what Trump’s needs are. And Trump, I think, understands Bibi quite well. I think Trump in some ways has fewer illusions about Bibi than most American presidents when taking office. But I still think that it’s more likely than not the cease-fire does fall apart. The way it wouldn’t fall apart would be through some type of side payment related to the West Bank.
No matter what, it’s hard to imagine that Gaza will be governed by someone other than Hamas, even though completely rooting them out was the stated goal of the war.
There’s no other force that exists. Now, there are some Palestinian Authority forces on the ground, but they’re not sufficient in and of themselves. The amount of time it would take to train the P.A., even if you could help them to garner the necessary political legitimacy to do their jobs, would be well over a year. So just from a technical perspective to train new forces, there’s going to be a vacuum, and the only alternatives to that vacuum are Israeli occupation or some other type of external force.
As Secretary Blinken said in his farewell address, there are countries that have expressed interest in participating in such an interim security force. But the conditions are one, that the conflict has to be over, and two, that you can’t have Israeli forces permanently stationed in Gaza, which is going to be the case throughout phase one — where at the very least, Israel will be within an expanded buffer zone, and will maintain control over the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor. They’re supposed to withdraw over the course of phase one, but that’s probably a nonstarter for the likes of Egypt or the UAE or Morocco to deploy forces. The final criterion is some type of vision for a two-state solution. Because if they’re sending a force without the umbrella, without the cover of it being aimed at facilitating the creation of a Palestinian state, that’s something that’s not going to wash with their publics.
I also think that one factor we just haven’t grappled with — and this may be because you can’t really grapple with it — is that the level of dislocation, destruction, displacement in Gaza is so extensive. It is not clear that even society exists in Gaza. I’m not talking about civilization but an organized society. People are not in their homes, and they’re not organized the way they normally are. How do you put that back together, when they’re going to be returning to ruins in many cases and won’t be able to resume their lives as they were before? And in that type of security vacuum, it’s even easier for Hamas or for other groups of the same ilk to assert authority because the threshold or the standard to have influence is lower. Not only is there no security force capable of contending with them, there really aren’t organic social groups that are capable of dealing with them. It’s broken in every sense of the word.
As we speak, Joe Biden has just departed the presidency. I know you were critical of the administration’s policies after you quit the State Department last year, specifically how much leeway they gave to Bibi. How are you thinking about it all at this moment?
I’m happy that there is a cease-fire, even if it is a single phase. The cessation of violence is important. The release of hopefully up to 33 Israeli hostages during this period is important. It’s an achievement, and it’s welcomed. And I give the administration credit for being so dogged and persevering and pursuing this. I think it’s possible that a different approach, in particular one in which the administration opposed Bibi but supported Israel, could have potentially moved not just Israel to negotiate differently but may actually have made it easier for us to go to other Arab countries and say, “You really need to turn the screws on Hamas. We’re doing it with the Israelis. You need to step up with Hamas.”
They didn’t have love for Hamas, but it was much more difficult for them to contemplate public action against Hamas without there being any degree of accountability for what was viewed as Israeli abuses against Palestinians. The response you’ll get from the administration is that if we had shown any daylight with Israel, it would have emboldened Hamas. And so even if Israel was more willing to negotiate, Hamas would’ve doubled down and they would’ve raised their terms. That’s possible. It’s conceivable. And we did observe that Hamas viewed opposition to Israeli actors as being directly to their benefit.
My thinking was simply that in this particular case, there was a way to balance our support for Israel with our fundamental disagreement and opposition to Netanyahu’s policies. And it’s not all or nothing. The people calling for a complete prohibition of arms or bar going to Israel — I was never supportive of that, both because I believed in supporting Israel’s security and because I think that could have played into Hamas’s hands. But a more targeted, more surgical approach to expressing our opposition and to imposing consequences may have been enough to change the dynamics within the Israeli government without leading Hamas to harden its posture.
I thought that given the consequences for Palestinians, for Israelis, for the region, for the United States, given all the suffering that’s taken place, we need to try everything that’s available to us. And we never tried that approach, at least not fully tried it. So it’s an untested hypothesis, which might not have worked, but we’ll never know because the Biden administration just wasn’t willing to go there. And it wasn’t out of malice or indifference to the Palestinians. I think they genuinely believed that what I was counseling would be counterproductive.
You’ve compared the situation to family members you’re close with — that it’s healthier to criticize them when needed than to stay silent. But it seems like Bibi knew there was never going to be any real pushback from the Biden administration. Doesn’t that take away any leverage the U.S. might have had?
Right. I think the leverage was there in three ways. One is that the Israeli public at one point in time was so supportive of President Biden, and Netanyahu’s ratings were so low, that even if Netanyahu could challenge Biden in the United States, Netanyahu could lose to Biden in Israel.
At the beginning, Biden stood by Israel but warned it not to overreach, the way America did after September 11. Then that just went by the wayside.
Yes, exactly. And I think that was the ideal time where it would’ve made sense to establish parameters, that, “We are going to support you to do X, Y, and Z, but we’re not going to support A, B, and C because that’s not in our interest, and we really don’t think it’s in your interest either.” That moment existed and we didn’t try to leverage it for anything. It was simply an expression of concern that Israel may make the same mistakes that we did. I also think that at that point in time, there were members of the coalition, including Golan as defense minister, Eisenkot, Gantz, others, who may have felt supported and may have felt emboldened by the president, giving them more cover to challenge Netanyahu. So they may have been able, together, to pose an actual political threat to Netanyahu’s coalition where it would’ve been more than just an expression of opposition. They may have had the means to destabilize the coalition if they had sought to do so, but they couldn’t afford to be less pro-government than the United States was.
And I think that narrowed what they were able to do. In private, the messages we were getting from others were very much of a kind with what we were advocating. So there wasn’t a fundamental disagreement there. And also, while Netanyahu would’ve been able to create problems with Biden, Biden had the Democrats completely where he needed them to be. The fact that you had Chuck Schumer, of all people, give a speech from the Senate floor saying that Benjamin Netanyahu needs to step down is an indicator that the politics within the president’s caucus were different than they had ever been before.
In the end, is the main reason Biden didn’t go further on this just a matter of his personal affinity for Israel?
It was very hard for him to even entertain the prospect because it was so incompatible with history, with Israel, his perception of Israel. There was a refrain at times that this is not how we treat other allies. I didn’t hear any of this directly from the president — other people made that argument — and that’s legitimate criticism. The difference is that our allies normally don’t do these types of things. And actually, when our allies have engaged in actions that are both detrimental to the United States and we think detrimental to their own interests, we’ve used enormous pressure. In a Foreign Affairs article I wrote — ancient history now — I reminded people that Eisenhower threatened to collapse the pound sterling over the Suez war. And this was Britain, which 11 years before we had just won the World War together. That was a special relationship, yet Eisenhower was willing to go to a place with the U.K. far beyond anything that we were even contemplating with Israel, which would’ve crashed the British economy. But we’ve seen before that there is a precedent for the United States exercising influence and leverage with partners and allies when the stakes are sufficiently great. I think President Biden understood the stakes, but I just don’t think he could go there.
It is a genuine affinity. Any notion that this was driven by domestic politics, I think, is completely wrong. So is the criticism of the administration that we caved to the progressives when we did take steps such as withholding the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs. That had nothing to do with intraparty actions. It was much more tactical, it was much more directly related to where things stood with efforts to negotiate, much more about how we had seen that weapon be used in practice and a desire to not see it continuing to be used in the same way. Of course there was consideration of domestic politics in some instances, but that was just to account for them. It wasn’t that domestic politics dictated what we were going to do.
What about the criticism that Biden just didn’t care about Palestinians suffering as much as Israeli suffering?
I don’t think the president was indifferent to the Palestinians. And I certainly don’t think he harbored any malice or animus toward them. I think it’s safe to say that he felt a special connection with Israel and that meant his affinity, his affection for Israel, was greater — not just than for the Palestinians but than for a lot of other countries, including probably some NATO allies. So I think it’s fair to say that there was an imbalance in that respect. I don’t think it was ethnic or racial, though. I think this was much more about his lifelong commitment to Israel, his familiarity with Israel, and his personal beliefs regarding who was responsible for the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. And he is much more inclined to say it was the Palestinian leadership’s fault, as opposed to Israel either being the primary reason it didn’t happen, or contributing to the fact that a Palestinian state wasn’t achieved. So he has a clear view on that historiographical debate, and that informs how he looks at responding to these situations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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