Netanyahu Sabotages Ceasefire Talks AGAIN!

Right, so what a surprise to hear that in the latest round of ceasefire talks, Benjamin Netanyahu is sabotaging them yet again! They’ve barely got underway and he’s playing his favourite trick of changing his demands, this time from previously agreed positions that have been in place since late May. He is denying it of course, but unluckily for him there’s been a leak and the leak shows no fewer than five attempts since May, well before the most recently renewed attempts at talks, well before the latest atrocities meted out against Gaza and with other nations Israel has now put itself on a war footing with to scupper the ceasefire talks. Israel have repeatedly been the ones doing this, Israel have constantly undermined and wrecked attempts at peace, yet you’ll be lucky to find a media outlet prepared to say it in the headline, but this time round, this news has come from an outlet that has bent over backwards to exonerate Israel repeatedly, yet this time, even they haven’t the stomach for it.
Right, so Netanyahu is wrecking ceasefire talks again and I say again, I detailed exactly how often and in what ways Netanyahu has consistently done this all year long, one of Israel’s own newspapers having got so sick and tired of his dishonest partaking in peace talks, never having any intention of reaching agreement, finding an excuse to abandon it each time, but to listen to the politicians bleat time after time at Hamas to engage meaningfully in peace talks, when they have – even to the point of intentionally catching Netanyahu out at one point for the dishonest peace broker he’s been – we really shouldn’t be surprised he’s doing it again, he doesn’t want peace, he can’t afford peace, he will lose his grip on power if he does so, and with Israeli elections not due again until 2026, he’s really not interested in ending things now.
What is a bit different is that it is a prominent US paper that has exposed Netanyahu’s refusal to engage in peace talks with any intention of arriving at a deal.
The New York Times have come in with a scathing piece on Netanyahu dishonest peace-brokering is what I’d like to say they published, but although they are the ones carrying the story, the headline they attached to it is timid to say the least, the piece titled ‘Israel Was Less Flexible in Recent Gaza Ceasefire Talks, Documents Show.’ Less flexible? Netanyahu isn’t an exotic dancer here, he’s a despotic warmongering genocidalist! AL Jazeera put out a piece putting the Times in it’s place for it’s quisling language ridiculing this description with their piece entitled ‘Less Flexible? Just say it NYT, Israel is sabotaging a ceasefire deal.’
Well exactly so. At least someone can say it like it is without the customary handwringing!
So what has Netanyahu done then Damo? Well the document seen by the New York Times outlining what Netanyahu has done remains unpublished for us all to look at and whilst 5 stipulations are quoted by the NYT, they unhelpfully don’t highlight what all of them are, concentrating on a few which have been put to the negotiators in attendance from Egypt, Qatar and the United States, the biggest issue of them all to my mind being Israel maintaining control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the border area between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Given that Egypt are a negotiator here, this ought to be an untenable position for Egypt to tolerate since it is in violation of the Camp David Accords, the peace settlement reached between Egypt and Israel in 1979 which ended war between the two countries and has been under strain ever since.
Several months ago now, in violation of the peace accords, Israel seized control of the Gaza side of the Rafah Border Crossing and closed it Nand shortly thereafter, they moved on to seize control of the entire Gaza Egyptian border, the so-called Philadelphi Corridor. Why did they done that and why do they want to maintain control over it? Well with the entire Gaza Egyptian border now under Israeli control, barely any aid has entered at all, certainly not now the Israeli military are in control it’s not opening.
If seizing the Rafah Border Crossing was violating the Camp David Accords, then seizing the entire length of the Gaza-Egypt Border does so on steroids.
This is meant to act as a buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, 14km long, but Israel have seized it, claiming it is an oxygen line for Hamas, another direct insult and act of aggression against Egypt as that ostensibly would be. It would be an ongoing direct occupation of gaza along a strip of land at it’s southern border that potentially puts it in conflict with Egypt and serves no purpose at all, except to screw up negotiations.
Not only this, but the other main feature the New York Times draw attention to is that Israel want to restrict who is allowed to return to northern Gaza and who isn’t, having a veto, a vetting process over which Gazans may return to their homes and who must remain displaced. The displacement of any Gazan citizens is a breach of international law, is a war crime, to argue Israel have a right to keep some people displaced on a whim is ridiculous, is something nobody can possibly agree to and can’t possibly be found acceptable to anybody, but you just feel it in your water that the US would try and sell this as a good deal still, if anyone would, they would these days.
Here's an excerpt from Al-Jazeera’s much more plain speaking piece telling it exactly like it is:
‘The New York Times confirms in its roundabout way that, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has relentlessly denied trying to block a deal in Gaza and instead blamed Hamas for the deadlock, unpublished documents seen by the newspaper “make clear that the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by the Netanyahu government has been extensive – and suggest that agreement may be elusive at a new round of negotiations set to begin on Thursday”.
In July, Israel “relayed a list of new stipulations” to US, Egyptian, and Qatari ceasefire mediators that “added less flexible conditions” to the “set of principles” it had previously provided.
Among these new stipulations is that, rather than withdraw its military forces from the Gaza Strip in the event of a ceasefire, Israel would instead remain in control of Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. But what could the Palestinians possibly find objectionable in the casual maintenance of a brutal military occupation?
Israel has also revived its insistence on erecting checkpoints where Israeli soldiers will conduct weapons screenings on displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in northern Gaza – a stipulation that is pretty soundly grotesque coming from the party that is currently perpetrating genocide with all manner of weaponry.
In short, it’s a simple strategy of moving the goalposts. Whenever it seems that a ceasefire deal might be dangerously within reach, all Netanyahu has to do is throw in a bunch more demands that even members of his own security establishment deem over the top.’
It is a complete insult to anyone’s intelligence that Israel will meaningfully engage in negotiations and of course Hamas have seen this as well as anyone else can, having notified negotiators that after Netanyahu’s latest stunt to wreck a peace settlement, there’s no point in them engaging in these talks either and actually in no small way is that Israel’s doing too. Hamas’ chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran the other week, reputationally, he was seen as a moderate voice in these discussions, but now he has been removed and the influence is coming now from Yahya Sinwar, who is much less diplomatic and who’s rhetoric will likely suit Netanyahu far more as somebody who the finger of blame can be pointed at to take the heat off himself for ruining the prospect of peace.
But as much as Sinwar might be seen as a less moderate voice, Netanyahu’s actions don’t make Hamas’ view of engaging in peace talks with such a dishonest broker seemingly any less futile so it’s little wonder they see no point in going, but naturally many more mainstream media outlets are all over that, whilst ignoring what the NYT are saying, giving the impression, of course, that this is Hamas’ fault and not Netanyahu’s doing. Sky News as a for instance put out an article headlined as ‘Hamas says it will not join ceasefire talks this week’, it’s only when you dig down into the article it actually mentions why they’ve decided to do that, an excerpt reading:
‘Talks are due to take place on Thursday to discuss a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
However, a Hamas representative in Lebanon told Sky News that delegates from the militant group would no longer be taking part.
In a statement, Ahmad Abdul Hadi said Hamas was not against ceasefire talks "in principle".
However, he said it would not participate this week because Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "is not interested in reaching an agreement that ends the aggression completely".
"Rather he is deceiving and evading and wants to prolong the war, and even expand it at the regional level, and thus he uses negotiations as a cover to continue his aggression against our people and commit more massacres against them," he said.’
Stymying the process essentially freezes everything where it is, with the exception of the ongoing warfare, the death and destruction continuing. Israel remains in control of the stuff it wants to be in control of. Netanyahu is avoiding all the charges he faces on corruption and human rights abuses. He avoids his hard right government collapsing, but above all else, the reality of a Palestinian state is frozen too, something which is more important than all else to some in Israel and not least Netanyahu’s government itself. Allowing Netanyahu to keep moving the goalposts time after time is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Engaging with Israel meaningfully is impossible when they aren’t an honest broker for peace, and that will continue for as long as Israel’s right to disrupt proceedings continues to be protected more by vested interests than the lives of Gazan people are, who continue to be failed for the national interests of others.
Of course whilst politicians provide ample cover, self interest of their own nations being the only reason for it, Israeli spokespeople regularly come unstuck defending the indefensible as the shameless shill for the genocidal state David Mencer found out not once, but twice on British mainstream media and on both occasions it was entirely self inflicted! Get the details of that double bill of karma in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.