‘Less flexible?’ Just say it NYT, Israel is sabotaging a ceasefire deal

Once in a while, The New York Times has to tell inconvenient truths regarding Israel, the preferred partner in crime of the United States and the recipient of billions upon billions of dollars in American aid and weaponry.

However, just because the US newspaper of record has to tell the truth doesn’t mean it has to do so in a straightforward way.

There was that time in 2014, for example, that The Times reported on the Israeli missile strike that killed four young boys playing football on the beach in the Gaza Strip. While the text of the article did unflinchingly convey the fact that Israel had slaughtered four children, the headline was rendered preposterously vague: “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife”.

Now that the Gaza Strip has become not only the “centre of Mideast Strife” but the site of a straight-up genocide, The Times has once again found itself creatively diluting the news, as in Tuesday’s headline: “Israel Was Less Flexible in Recent Gaza Cease-Fire Talks, Documents Show”.

Translation: Israel is sabotaging ceasefire efforts in a war that way back in January had already killed one percent of the population of Gaza.

Officially, some 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, although according to a Lancet study the true death toll could exceed 186,000. For its part, the Joe Biden administration has just approved $20bn in additional arms transfers to Israel even as the US claims to be working towards a ceasefire.

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Benjamin Netanyahu has relentlessly denied trying to block a deal in Gaza and instead blamed Hamas for the deadlock, unpublished documents seen by the newspaper “make clear that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Netanyahu government has been extensive – and suggest that agreement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.

In addition to pandering to an Israeli far right for whom the prospect of any pause in mass killing is anathema, Netanyahu has other reasons for wanting to derail negotiations. If the war stops, he’ll have to deal with corruption charges and domestic opposition – not to mention that annoying institution known as the International Criminal Court, where the chief prosecutor has applied for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

At the end of the day, though, Israel has never been in the business of peace; rather, the entire Israeli enterprise is predicated on the perpetuation of war and killing. One need look no further than Israel’s extensive history of sabotaging not only ceasefire deals but the so-called “peace process” in general – all the while naturally blaming the Palestinians for any and all failures to reach a solution.

The year prior to the official Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which supposedly ended Israel’s occupation of the territory, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass gave the Haaretz newspaper the rundown on the deal. “The significance of the disengagement plan” from Gaza, Weisglass told Haaretz, was nothing less than “the freezing of the peace process”.

He continued: “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem”. And voila: “Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda… All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Of course, you can also remove the whole Palestinian state package from the agenda by just killing everyone. And as genocide proceeds apace with the next round of ceasefire negotiations set to kick off on Thursday, The New York Times’s suggestion that an “agreement may be elusive” is an understatement, indeed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.