All Quiet on All Fronts? (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- February 3, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. Until recently, you spoke of no fewer than seven active war-fronts. Now all are quiet?

A. The ceasefire and the hostage/prisoner exchange with Gaza-based Hamas have indeed, at least temporarily, silenced almost all fronts. The Hezbollah/Iran front was already quiescent. Now the Yemeni Houthis and Iraqi pro-Iran militias have also ceased firing missiles at Israel in deference to the ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. 

Q. You said “almost” all fronts?

A. The IDF has switched its focus of attention to the West Bank, and particularly the northern West Bank towns of Jenin and Tulkarm. There in recent months militant groups, in part inspired by Hamas and in part in response to settler-extremist territorial provocations, have been targeting Israel and Israelis. IDF and Shin Bet intelligence assess that the cumulative release, under ceasefire provisions, of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails, many of them to homes in the West Bank, will further augment anti-Israel incitement there. Hence the IDF West Bank offensive is understood to be punitive, preventive and deterrent.

Q. Sounds familiar. Déjà vu?

A. That’s understatement. Way back in the 1930s, during what was known as the Arab Revolt, British mandatory forces fought a radical Palestinian uprising that centered on the northern West Bank ‘triangle’ of Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin. Then (by the RAF), as now (by the IAF), militant strongholds were bombed from the air, meaning resorting to bombing territory ostensibly under one’s own strategic control in view of the tenacity of the enemy. The northern triangle Arab towns also led the Palestinian cause in the course of two intifadas in the 1990s and early 2000s.

One key difference today is that the IDF is working in tandem with Palestinian Authority forces that are as concerned as Israel about Hamas-inspired militancy in the West Bank.

Q. Quiet is guaranteed on the Lebanon front?

A. No. Political stability is not yet assured in Lebanon--negotiations over a new governing coalition continue apace--and the Lebanese Army has not yet deployed throughout the south in accordance with ceasefire stipulations. The US and the Lebanese have agreed to extend the redeployment deadline until February 18. Until and unless everything is in place, fighting could again break out between Israel and Hezbollah/Iran, thereby potentially triggering renewal of missile attacks from Yemen and Iraq.

Q. So the ceasefire is delicate. This week, Israel enters negotiations with Hamas, hosted by Qatar, Egypt and the US, regarding phase II of the Gaza hostage/prisoner release and ceasefire deal. In parallel, PM Netanyahu meets President Trump in Washington. What is at stake?

A. Phase II is supposed to free the remaining hostages, alive and dead, render the ceasefire permanent, and provide for a number of Israeli, Palestinian and international moves that include further IDF withdrawal and opening of Gaza Strip borders. The PA and Egypt are already taking up roles alongside the European Union at the Rafah crossing between the Strip and Egypt. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, with whom Netanyahu also meets in Washington, has been playing a hands-on dynamic role.

Note, in this context, that Israel for its part has no known proposals for the ‘day after’ in Gaza. Hamas last week helpfully and accurately summed up Israel’s recent history of abortive proposals: “Here is the list of evil Israeli projects that [Hamas] succeeded in thwarting: the ‘generals’ plan [to empty out northern Gaza], rule by clans, a floating harbor, humanitarian ‘bubbles’, military rule, renewed settlement, Palestinian migration to Sinai, and fragmenting the Strip by means of the Netzarim [central Gaza] and Philadelphi [Rafah, southern Gaza] strips.”

Sounds familiar? Netanyahu, it now emerges, has failed to defeat Hamas in Gaza, yet he either does not know or will not acknowledge that fact. Netanyahu and Trump will presumably discuss this Israeli lack of a strategy against a backdrop of a host of key controversial issues that could affect political stability in Israel as well as strategic stability in the Middle East.

Q. Start with political stability in Israel . . . 

A. If the Gaza ceasefire becomes permanent, the Kahanist-messianists in Netanyahu’s coalition, let by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are threatening to leave, thereby potentially bringing down the government and precipitating elections. Smotrich, along with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who has already resigned, want to settle the Gaza Strip, not withdraw from it. 

Then too, the unresolved crisis with the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi parties in the coalition over compulsory national service for Haredi young men--a crisis sparked by losses and manpower shortfalls in the war--also threatens coalition stability.

Q. And regional strategic stability . . . 

A. Trump is likely to press Netanyahu to commit to phase II in the Strip, potentially at the cost of coalition stability in Jerusalem. Here Trump’s primary concern is avoidance of war in the Middle East on his watch. Besides, he apparently genuinely believes he can persuade Arab countries, led by Jordan and Egypt, to absorb hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from the Gaza Strip--a territory whose Mediterranean coastline is in his eyes essentially prime real estate: “You know, we just clean out that whole thing and say, ‘You know, it’s over.’ . . . I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location . . . .“

Trump’s real estate and mass migration ideas for Gaza and the Gazans are non-starters. They may deceive right-wing Israelis who covet Gazan land and misunderstand Trump’s support. But they are at the very least serious irritants for the Arab world. Above all, Gazans under ongoing Hamas rule or even PA rule will never agree to leave Palestinian territory. 

As Palestine-expert Michael Milstein wrote in Yediot Aharonot, “Like many of Trump’s proposals [Greenland, Panama, Canada], the [Gaza] ‘deal’ has material logic while ignoring ideological and cultural dimensions, historical memory, and tensions between Israel, the Arab world and the Palestinians that are stronger than any other consideration in the Middle East post-October 7.” Trump and his Israeli supporters completely misunderstand the Palestinian issue, not to mention the tenets of Hamas-style militant Islam that is almost certain to continue to rule Gaza. And not to mention international legal prohibitions of ‘transfer’.

Beyond the discomfort of Trump’s abortive Gaza real estate and demographic ideas, Netanyahu will conceivably acquiesce more easily in an ongoing Gaza ceasefire if he receives reassurances, however tentative, about both normalization with Saudi Arabia and joint US-Israel planning for military measures/pressure against Iran over its nuclear program. 

Q. Will Trump accommodate Netanyahu on these issues?

A. True, both steps could prove politically popular with Netanyahu’s constituency. But the Saudis need real promises regarding a Palestinian state, however distant in the future. And Trump does not relish the idea of war anywhere in the Middle East, whether Gaza or Iran.

Q. Bottom line: your best guess for Israel and the region in the months ahead?

A. Elections in Israel in 2025, which leave the nationalist and messianic right wing in power. A stalemate between Trump and the friendly Arab world over the disposition of the Gaza Strip, leaving hundreds of thousands of Gazans in homeless poverty. Trump-sponsored ‘normalization’ between Saudi Arabia and Israel postponed by these events and developments. A Trump administration attempt to negotiate with Iran over nuclear issues, possibly using an Israeli military threat as a ‘stick’.

All this, at barely over 50 percent probability. After all, this is the Middle East. 

And all this while Israel, which has criminally neglected the ‘day after’ in Gaza, is left to contemplate the meaning of October 7 for the Zionist reality; while Hamas remains in power in Gaza because Netanyahu will not back a Palestinian alternative; and while Palestinians and other Arabs contemplate the 50,000 dead, buried and unburied, in Gaza.

Meanwhile, US-Israel relations face dangerous complications regarding Gaza: over the fate of the ceasefire; over population transfer schemes of Trump and the Israeli messianist right-wing; and over the role being played by American mercenaries (“private military companies”), with their doubtful reputation from Iraq and elsewhere, in policing the ceasefire and its population-movement provisions.

As for Netanyahu, he has backed down by doing a deal with Hamas inside the Strip. He has backed down by allowing the PA to return to the Rafah crossing. What next?