Episode Notes:

Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the Israeli Policy Forum, once again joined the WarCast to discuss the latest from the Israeli-Hamas war. The conversation touched on the latest in Gaza, the ceasefire, and the future of the conflict.

[:29] Intro

[:44] The prisoner/hostage swap

[3:59] When will the conflict resume?

[6:10] U.S. policy

[10:22] Netanyahu's political future

[14:12] Security in Israel's south

Episode Transcript

Aaron Stein: My name is Aaron Stein, and I am the chief content officer at War on the Rocks. You are listening to the Warcast, the members-only podcast for what you need to know now. Hello and welcome to the Warcast, where we are joined again by Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum. Michael, it's good to have you back on the show.

Michael Koplow: Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Stein: I know you're on the road and been running around, so we're going to do a update as succinctly as possible. As we are recording this, the ceasefire, or I guess the pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas is extended for, what is this, the fifth day now?

Michael Koplow: This is day number six that's about to end.

Aaron Stein: So day number six is about to end, and there's been a series of, I guess, prisoner swaps, hostages on the Hamas side, and then prisoners on the Israeli side. For listeners who have been following this, but perhaps not in much granular detail, what is the status of these prisoner swaps? And how is it being viewed in Israel, given the domestic political situation, which is deep unhappiness with Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, the lead up to the war, and then the hostage issue itself?

Michael Koplow: We've had two different swaps. The first was a four-day ceasefire that was worked out ahead of time, where, over the course of the four days, 50 Israeli hostages were released back into Israel in return for 150 prisoners, security prisoners being held in Israeli prisons. And so, you had this formula of the three-to-one swap. And the Palestinian security prisoners who were released did not have any blood on their hands in the sense of none of them were in prison for having successfully murdered Israelis. A number who were released were in prison for attempted murder or for bombings or stabbings, but none of them had successfully killed any Israelis. And so, those were the ones who were released.

And the 50 hostages that Israel got back were women and children. And the contours of that agreement were also supposed to be that children would not be separated from their mothers. So you weren't going to have children hostages released while their mothers were kept. That was the first four-day agreement.

And then it was extended for another two days. And during those two days, 10 Israeli hostages were released in return, again, for 30 Hamas prisoners. And that was another two-day deal, so that deal is set to expire at 7:00 AM local time tomorrow, which is midnight here in the United States.

And Hamas has said that it is willing to keep on doing this, this formula of 10 for 30, up to another four days, which would make this a ten-day arrangement. The significance behind 10 days is that the Israeli cabinet initially approved up to 10 days of this. So if it goes beyond 10 days, you'd have to have the cabinet reconvene and approve something else.

That's what's being talked about. Israel has said that it's not willing to negotiate a new agreement until all the women and children are out. And it estimates that there are somewhere between 20 and 30 women and children still being held by Hamas.

And then after that, that is an open question. There's all sorts of things being bandied about, mostly by Qatar and Egypt, to have this become a permanent ceasefire where all the hostages get released in return for thousands of security prisoners being released from Israeli prisons, and in return for an Israeli commitment not to assassinate any tap Hamas leadership.

That's an agreement that Israel is simply not going to acquiesce to. It doesn't matter who we're talking about, whether it's Bibi Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader. So I think that that's largely fantasy, but that's where things stand at the moment.

Aaron Stein: You preempted my next question. Let's talk about the end of the fantasy. I think everybody, in the abstract, likes to see the halting or at least the pausing of violence. But again, we're recording this on Wednesday, November 29th at 3:07 PM East Coast time. And a couple hours ago East Coast time, so I guess in the early evening Israel time, is that both Netanyahu and Gantz have come out and said basically that the conflict will resume. What's your take and read on, let's say beyond the 10 days of potential tit-for-tat hostage prisoner swap and releases?

Michael Koplow: The conflict absolutely will resume. Israel set two goals at the beginning of this. One was the secure of all the hostages back to Israel and the other was destroying Hamas. Now, I don't know whether either of these is actually doable in their full completeness. But on the military end of it, Israel is, even if they end up scaling back what they mean by military victory, whether it means removing Hamas from power in Gaza or killing top Hamas leadership, whatever it is, they haven't accomplished it.

And everybody acknowledges that, that they need to do more, they need more time. Israeli estimates are that of the thirty-two or thirty-three thousand Hamas fighters that were in Gaza pre-October 7th, they've killed somewhere between five and six thousand of them. Obviously, Hamas is still very much in control in Southern Gaza. As far as we know, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Dief, the other leaders are still alive, so Israel's not going to be satisfied with what it has so far.

And it's not just a matter of how many Hamas fighters you can kill, Israel wants to restore security to the South. And as long as Hamas is still in control of Gaza, nobody in Israel is going to be satisfied that security in the South has been restored.

So I'm certain the military campaign is going to continue. The question is what that campaign is going to look like and what the scope is going to be. And that's largely a question, I think, of how much shorter President Biden's leash is at the moment versus what it was seven weeks ago.

Aaron Stein: Let's talk about President Biden's "leash." And we're talking about the rising, I think within the Democratic party, but also in the Republican party for different reasons, constraints are beginning to emerge on the amount of US assistance that can be given to Israel. What is your read on American domestic politics and where Biden can go once, as you expect, the ceasefire to go up in smoke?

Michael Koplow: I think there are two issues here, and they're not the same, although they are linked. One is this question of American assistance, and one is the question of just American support for the type of campaign that Israel is going to conduct. Leaving aside the question of weapons, weapons sales or weapons transfers.

On the question of the campaign itself, there's obviously growing discomfort in the Democratic party and in the White House over the civilian casualty rate in Gaza, over the level of destruction in Gaza in terms of infrastructure, in terms of the speed with which humanitarian assistance is or, in many cases, is not reaching Palestinians. And the first part of this campaign, in many ways, was easier because Israel said to people in Northern Gaza, "This is where we are planning on going, and so go south." And people went south and you now have, out of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, an estimated 1.7 or 1.8 million in the south, and there isn't anywhere else for them to go, especially because Israel is not going to let them back into the north until it's done with whatever it's doing in the north.

So that's going to require a very different type of campaign, if you are sensitive to destruction and casualties and humanitarian crises, which the United States is very sensitive to. So John Kirby yesterday said openly in press conference that the US is not going to support the same type of campaign in the south of Gaza as it did in the north, and that means that Israeli tactics are going to have to change.

The second part of this equation is about US security assistance. And there, we're seeing calls from some folks who have been advocating conditioning security assistance Israel for a while. Bernie Sanders had an op-ed in the New York Times last week, which I don't think was different from positions he stated previously. We saw Chris Murphy come out with an interview where he talked about the need for both Israel and Ukraine, if we're going to be sending assistance, to comport with human rights and international law.

We also saw President Biden himself, on Friday during his press conference, in response to a question about conditioning assistance to Israel, describe it as a worthwhile thought. And then he talked about why he didn't think it was a smart thing to do tactically in terms of the US-Israel relationship during the conduct of the war. So it seems that now even President Biden is signaling that if Israeli behavior continues as it is, that there may be new conditions coming on security assistance to Israel.

I think even that has to be broken down further because there's the question of Israel's military campaign in Gaza, and then there's the question of Israeli policy in the West Bank, which is what has traditionally driven calls to halt or condition or restrict security assistance to Israel. And there, the US is also concerned about the enormous increase in settler violence and the increase in arming of settler civilian, in quotes, security teams.

So I think that it's going to be difficult to separate all of these different threads. But if I and the Israeli government, there are a lot of warning signs flashing out there with regard to both Gaza and the West Bank, about the future of US security assistance to Israel beyond the question of just this $14 billion supplemental assistance, and beyond the question of just the scope of this operation in Gaza.

Aaron Stein: One of the things that I've seen floating around is that Netanyahu obviously can read polls and obviously understands that he's in deep trouble, right? I was going to use the S word, but this is a kid's friendly podcast. When it comes about his future politics. And the reason why, and this will probably be the final question, is when you talk about the settler violence and the West Bank, and you talk about the opportunities of the United States, not necessarily to pivot, but for the Biden administration to maybe, as a release valve on aid condition, is to really jumpstart peace negotiations with the Palestinians in the West Bank and whatever comes next in Gaza.

But you see that Netanyahu, on the other hand, saying, "Well, I'm the only [inaudible 00:11:07] who's going to be able to stop this." Right? And so, "I'm the guy you still need to trust when this is all over to prevent the Palestinians from having a state." And it feeds into this settler craziness, for lack of a better term, that you're seeing popping up all over in the West Bank. Is that having any resonance in the Israeli domestic political discourse? Or is this guy dead man walking and he's headed for the electric chair politically in a couple of months?

Michael Koplow: Politically, he's a dead man walking. It's going to take some time to dislodge him because it's extremely tough to dislodge Israeli prime ministers under the current rules who don't want to resign. But he has no political future. Everybody understands that except for him, his wife, and one of his two children. And at some point, he'll realize it as well. But that point has not arrived yet.

But it's also the case that within Israel, almost nobody is talking about resumption of a peace process and negotiations with the Palestinians. The discourse, understandably, is entirely about security. And I think that the United States and other parties are going to want to see something from the Israelis, and it's going to be short of the resumption of a full-blown peace process.

Now, the sad reality is that Israel has been doing many things in the West Bank that are incredibly damaging. And if those things stop, it will give a huge boost to what the United States wants to see. It'll give a huge boost to the Palestinians. It'll give a huge boost to resetting the conditions where you can have some sort of political process down the road, but it doesn't mean a political process tomorrow.

And so, if you have a government a year from now that is not led by Bibi Netanyahu, is a much broader government that is led by someone like Benny Gantz or even someone like Naftali Bennett. And you have a real crackdown on settler violence, and you have a real crackdown on illegal outpost construction in the West Bank. And you have new settlement construction approvals taking place only inside the large blocks along the Green Line, where 80% of Israelis living over the Green Line reside anyway. All of that will be for the good, and all of that will also alleviate, I think, some of this pressure on the question of security assistance to Israel because it really is tied to the West Bank more than it is to Gaza.

And if that's twinned with a process in Gaza that is actually going decently, that has some sort of transitional government led by local Palestinians, where humanitarian assistance is flowing in reliably, that should be enough, I think, given this administration and given where Congress is, to maintain the relationship as things stand now and not have US assistance to Israel undergo some sort of revolution.

But not only is none of that assured, if this current government is in place, I'm confident in saying that almost none of that will happen if this government is in place. And then this question of the US's relationship is a very different [inaudible 00:14:13].

Aaron Stein: So it actually seems like the better question that people should be asking is, what does security for Israelis actually look like in the south? Because that seems to be the pressure point with which to release a lot of the stuff, and then I'll let you go.

Michael Koplow: I think that if you talk to residents in the south, as I have, what they'll tell you is they want a two to three-kilometer buffer zone inside of Gaza, which I think is almost certainly going to happen. And the reason they want that is because of mortars. The mortars that are shot at the border communities, there's no defense against them. There's no iron dome for mortars, and there's also no warning time. Whereas if you create a two to three-kilometer no man's land, then that eliminates the issue of mortars. And many of the folks don't even talk about that as a security zone that has to be constantly manned and patrolled by IDF, but, basically, a zone where if anybody enters it, they get shot on site.

So they're going to want some sort of buffer zone and the return of troops to the south, which have really not been there since Israel built the subterranean wall about 5, 6, 7 years ago. At that point, Israel thought that soldiers were not needed and withdrew most of them. So they want that, they want better conditions in the south in terms of schools and hospitals and the best of everything.

And frankly, what they also want is new political leadership because they do not trust the folks in power now. And so, if you have a different government and you have a buffer zone in Gaza, and most crucially, Hamas is no longer the governing entity there, I think that for most residents of the south, that will be enough to return, even if it does not provide complete full guaranteed security.

Aaron Stein: Well, there's a hundred more questions, but I know we'll probably have you back on next week, so thanks for always doing this for me, man.

Michael Koplow: My pleasure.