U.S. Out of the Mideast!

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that went into effect in Gaza on October 10 is unlikely to bring lasting peace in Palestine, Israel, or the broader Middle East. It resolves nothing about the underlying issue of Palestinian self-determination.

The plan itself may well fall apart. Israel has not fully withdrawn from Gaza; Netanyahu’s demand that Hamas be disarmed and Gaza demilitarized has not been met; and there is no clear framework for governing Gaza going forward.

In a news analysis in the Israeli daily Haaretz on October 12, Jack Khoury wrote, “In the end, the agreement between Israel and Hamas is primarily a deal for the exchange of hostages and prisoners and the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. It offers no answers to the broader questions of governance, security or future political arrangements.”

EDITORIAL

The accord, pushed by U.S. president Donald Trump, registers the outcome of the two-year war that started with the grotesque Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

In the ferocious war that Israel launched in response, it severely weakened Hamas — killing most of its senior commanders and thousands of its fighters — while carrying out a genocidal assault on the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza. During what was more a slaughter than a war, Israel also took new steps toward terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank and de-facto annexing more and more of that occupied territory. It decimated the leadership and fighting capacity of Hezbollah in Lebanon. And it dealt severe military blows to the Iranian regime.

Throughout, Israel had substantial help from its closest ally, the U.S. government, which not only provided a steady supply of weaponry but launched an airstrike on Iran. Today, with U.S. backing, Israel is largely dictating the terms of the deal.

Now that all Israeli hostages have been returned, it remains to be seen whether any of the later phases of the “peace plan,” other than the first, take effect. The Netanyahu government can easily restart the bombing if it decides this is in its best interests.

While Israel may have the upper hand vis-à-vis Hamas and has made major strategic gains, Washington has also tried to enhance its position in the Mideast. There, the Trump administration has its own goals, which include doing business with the Arab regimes, especially the Gulf monarchies. These goals are not necessarily identical to Israel’s. The U.S. military has increased the manpower at its Central Command (CENTCOM) to “lead the peacekeeping effort” and oversee a multinational force, likely to include troops from Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, U.S. officials told the BBC.

The Palestinian people had no real choice in the matter — and no way to make their voice heard.

Hamas finally accepted the inevitable — that if it did not agree to this plan Netanyahu’s ultra-rightist regime would escalate the genocide again, with Trump’s full support.

The most that could be accomplished at this point was a cessation of the slaughter.

“As displaced residents return to their homes and the extent of the destruction becomes clear, Hamas is trying to craft a narrative that justifies the arrangement it was forced to accept,” Khoury noted in the October 12 Haaretz article.

“Hamas can neither point to the release of any prominent figure with symbolic significance, such as Marwan Barghouti or Ahmad Sa’adat, among the 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees who will be freed. Anything that could be seen as a moral or symbolic achievement for Hamas is absent from the agreement,” Khoury wrote.

“The organization now faces a reckoning, both internally and with the Palestinian public,” he continued. This estimate is confirmed by another Haaretz article, based on interviews with many Palestinians in Gaza. (See How Gazans See Their Future With or Without Hamas.)

“Fatah and the Palestinian Authority face a similar test,” Khoury pointed out. “It is unclear whether either fully understands the depth of the national rupture. Are they truly willing to rebuild Palestinian national institutions, or will they continue to struggle for control and power at the expense of a people left without any ability to influence political decisions?”

The Palestinian people face the biggest challenges in decades in their quest for national self-determination. During the war, they earned widespread sympathy around the world for their historic determination to achieve freedom in the face of relentless Israeli aggression. But the death and destruction the Israeli military rained down on them was devastating.

Palestinians find themselves today worse off than before October 7, 2023. Many of the thousands of people streaming back toward their former homes are finding nothing, not a shred of their former lives.

The only positive outcome of the current ceasefire is the pause to the slaughter in Gaza.

While evaluating the last short-lived Gaza ceasefire in January, a World-Outlook article noted, “The war has further set back Palestinians’ prospects for achieving national self-determination, which had already grown dimmer over the last 25 years.”

In an interview published a year ago, Palestinian American scholar Rashid Khalidi offered this assessment of the Palestinian national movement.

“On the political level, the Palestinians are facing the same dilemma that they were on October 5 or 6 last year [2023]. They’re still divided, and they’re still, in my view, leaderless,” Khalidi noted.

“There is a powerful trend or faction that advocates an unrestricted form of violence,” Khalidi continued. “In my view, this trend does not have a strategic vision. It has achieved tactical victories and some catastrophic strategic defeats, and it has caused enormous suffering to Palestinians and also to Israelis. But there is no unified leadership or collective strategic vision…

“There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future,” Khalidi pointed out. “Nor is there a sense of how they intend to get there. Those are strategic questions that are not being asked or answered by the people who currently claim to lead the Palestinian national movement, whether in Hamas or in what is laughably called the Palestinian Authority — an institution with no sovereignty, no authority, and no legitimacy among its own people.”

Looking ahead, Khalidi said, “I see the future as being very grim for the Palestinians into the foreseeable future, until they develop a consensus around a strategy and a leadership. Hopefully that will come soon, but there’s no way of telling when it will come.”

These observations hold up in today’s situation and deserve close attention and discussion.

For those of us in the United States and other countries who support the Palestinian quest for self-determination, the task remains to press for an end to the complicity of Washington and other imperialist governments in enabling Israel’s decades-long oppression, occupation, and attempts at genocide of the Palestinian people. We should demand an end to all military and economic aid to Israel — aid indispensable to Israeli aggression in the region — and that the U.S. get out of the Middle East!

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