How Likely Is A Gaza Cease-Fire And A Saudi Mega Deal?

Bill Whalen: It's Thursday, August 15th, 2024, and welcome back to Matters of Policy and Politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the world. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm the Hoover Institution's Virginia Hobbes Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism. I'm not the only Hoover fellow who's podcasting these days.

If your intellectual curiosity gets the best of you, you should go to the Hoover Institution's website, which is hoover.org, click on the tab at the top of the homepage that says Commentary, then head over to where it says Multimedia. And up will come the full menu of podcast, over a dozen in all, including this one.

Now, today's podcast, we're going to go across the globe. We're gonna examine the Middle East ast, and helping us to make sense of that troubled region is my colleague, Cole Bunzel. Cole's a fellow here at the Hoover Institution, a historian and Arabist. He studies the history and contemporary affairs of the Islamic Middle East with a focus on violent islamism in the Arabian Peninsula.

Cole, welcome back to the podcast.

Cole Bunzel: Bill, thanks for having me.

Bill Whalen: So there was a phrase in World War II, Cole, and it was called the sitzkrieg. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but this refers to about an 8th month period from 1939 to 1940, when there just wasn't an all out fight in Western Europe.

There was naval action going on. But in terms of big land battle, the Nazis had not moved on Holland, or Belgium, or France yet. So the sitzkrieg, as opposed to a blitzkrieg, it seems to be cold that we've had something of a sitzkrieg, if you will, the past couple of weeks in this regard.

On July, the 30th, Israeli forces eliminated Hezbollah's top military commander in Beirut. A day later, Hamas' political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, I apologize if I got his name wrong, Cole, was killed in Tehran. All of this after Iranian made rockets fired by Hezbollah military group landed on a soccer pitch in a Druze town in the Golan Heights on the 27th of July, killing at least a dozen youngsters, Cole.

Iran said at the time that it will retaliate. Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the commander of Iranian armed forces, has both promised and reportedly reenited a response. Meanwhile, Cole, Israel said it'll respond in kind, even if the Iranian attack yields no casualties. So we've been sitting around for the better part of two weeks waiting for something very bad to happen.

The Middle East, Cole, but yet here we are two weeks into the sitzkrieg, if you will, and nothing's happened. Why not?

Cole Bunzel: Well, I think it's important to go back to April, which was the last time we had a major confrontation or an impending confrontation directly between Iran and Israel.

This was after Israel dropped a bomb. I think it was a bomb. It was an airstrike on a diplomatic compound in Damascus that was hosting a number of senior Iranian generals that were responsible for paramilitary operations targeting Israel, not incidentally in Lebanon and Syria. And so there was a major retaliation from the Iranians.

It actually took almost two weeks to come about. So we're kind of in the same sort of territory right now about it being a bit more than two weeks. But there is a precedent now for an Iranian direct strike. Of course, as you remember, there were some 300 missiles and drones fired directly from Iran at Israel, almost all of which were intercepted by Israeli air defense and the United States, as well as some of the Arab partners, some of which were much quieter about their participation.

And I'm referring to Saudi Arabia in particular. So we have a difficult situation unfolding, because Iran, together with Hezbollah, have threatened retaliation, but Israel has in turn threatened further retaliation. So none of these parties wants to engage in a full out war, certainly not Iran, which knows that it doesn't have the military strength of Israel.

And it's also limited in what kinds of retaliation it can engage in because it knows now that if it fires the kind of ordinance that it did, which is quite a big deal for Iran to unload, it's probably going to be intercepted. So if it wants to kind of retain its honor, it has to do something where it will be successful.

And the United States, for its part, is just desperate to stave off an escalatory spiral. So what they're doing right now is they basically urged Israel and Hamas to come to the negotiating table in Doha, which is sort of unfolding right now. You don't have Hamas participating, but you have the CIA director there, and you have israeli officials who are negotiating, trying to cement a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

And the White House is hopeful that this could kind of replace retaliation by Iran and Hezbollah so that Iran could say, well, out of our appreciation and love for our Palestinian brothers, we're not going to prevent this deal from going forward, something like that.

Bill Whalen: Now, going back to the April strike, Cole, didn't Iran kind of telegraph the strikes, if you will, kind of begging the question about how effective they were hoping the strikes to be.

In this regard, you have kind of a game of chicken if you're the Iranians. You mentioned about saving face. You have to do something, I guess, for public consumption to show the people the regime actually will not tolerate this sort of strike as it occurred in Tehran. But it's playing chicken, Cole, because you don't know what the Israelis will do in response.

And I got to believe with the Iranians, Cole, you're kind of rattled because that strike inside Tehran, that was a safe place. They thought it was deep in the heart of Iran. And it begs the question, what all do the Israelis really know about life inside of Iran?

So I I know we can't get inside of the head of the iranian leaders, but I think this is a more calculated response than people think.

Cole Bunzel: Yeah, it is calculated and it's different, but it's also different in terms of the circumstances because the attack in April happened directly against senior Iranian military officials.

The strike that we're talking about, it wasn't a strike. The bomb that took out Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader, on July 31st, that was not against an Iranian target. It was against a Hamas official. And, of course, Israel, which did not publicly take credit for that assassination, has assassinated multiple figures inside of Iran over the years, and that has not invited the kind of retaliation that we saw last April.

So it's not entirely clear that Iran is going to engage in the kind of theatrics from a few months ago in terms of a response. And it is noteworthy that it is not telegraphing that response in the way that it did back in April, as you think you're suggesting.

The United States and Israel knew kind of how to defend against this attack, sort of orchestrated in a way that the Iranians, I think, they hoped they would get some of the ordinance through. They would hit some targets. They ended up hitting pretty much nothing. And so that, which they, of course, did not acknowledge.

Their media says they were actually quite successful, and the Israelis and the Americans were lying, which is typical of their media. But the kind of response, now that we're looking at, one thing that I've noticed from the White House spokesman, John Kirby, from something he was saying today or yesterday, was that we aren't getting the kind of telegraphing that we got back in April.

So we don't know exactly what kind of response Iran is preparing, but we do have some sense that they are preparing kind of a known, unknown sort of discourse that we're witnessing there. I maybe watch too many movies, Cole, but one movie that comes to mind as a godfather.

Bill Whalen: And the baptism scene where Michael Corleone says he wants to I think the phrase is settle all family business at once, which ends to the decapitation of the various Corleone rivals, if you will. Why doesn't Israel do the same given that it has problems with Hamas, it has problems with Hezbollah, problems with Iran, problems with the Houthis, why does it just settle all these things at once?

Or is that just too much for the Israelis to consume at one time?

Cole Bunzel: Well, that would be quite a concentration of military effort on all the different fronts. I think that Israel would prefer to take it one step at a time. In terms of escalation, I think the most likely thing that we could see isn't we hear the word regional war a lot, I think that's probably unlikely, particularly present moment.

It's hard to imagine the Gulf states, for instance, becoming directly involved in a war against Iran. Iran doesn't want it, the Gulf states don't want it.

Bill Whalen: By definition, regional war cold means multiple nations fighting all the same time, right?

Cole Bunzel: Yeah. I think much more likely is what we would see is a direct confrontation, escalation between Hezbollah and Israel.

So the Iranian proxy that controls southern Lebanon, that is stationed there against a contrary to UN security resolution from 2006 that ended that war, it is below the so called, this area that is called the Litany River, and it has been firing thousands of rockets since October 7 at Israeli population centres.

And so tens of thousands of Israelis have not been able to return to their homes since the fall. And that has put a lot of pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to do something about this and, there's a lot of noise from the Israeli security establishment that they want to go after Hezbollah.

And what I keep reading is that the best way for Israel to kind of go after Hezbollah is to do it in a preemptive strike, because if you allow Hezbollah to set off, say, 6000 rockets, which apparently that's the most it can do in one day, it's going to kill a lot of Israelis, including a lot of civilians.

I mean, these are just rockets they don't have targeting devices on them, but they're going to land in a lot of places and that's going to make things very difficult for Israel. But, if you preempt by going directly on the offensive, it's much more likely that you can take out a lot of Hezbollah's rocket capability.

So, I think that's the most likely form of escalation that we could see, particularly if there isn't a ceasefire agreement reached in Doha this week, which I'm not particularly optimistic about, but we shall see.

Bill Whalen: Well, it shifted, let's talk about that, so as you mentioned, there was a meeting today in Doha and Qatar, Qatari Egyptian US officials were present.

I believe an Israeli delegation attended, but as you mentioned, Hamas did not participate directly. Back in May, President Biden laid out a three phase program for the Middle east. Phase one, he said, would last six weeks, a call for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas of Gaza, the release of a number of hostages, including women, the elderly, the wounded, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and the implementation of a temporary truce.

Phase two, under the Biden plan, allowed for a quote, exchange for the release of all remaining living hostages, including male soldiers, and a permanent end of fighting. Then the third phase, coal reconstruction plan for Gaza would commence any final remains of hostages who have been killed would be returned to families.

And there you are. So what's going to happen with this program, can any of this see the light of day, or is this thing, is this not going to happen?

Cole Bunzel: Well, it's interesting just to begin with, that President Biden even outlined this plan back in May. He kind of outlined it as if it were his proposal.

It was actually an Israeli proposal or a counter proposal that was part of an ongoing back and forth between Hamas and Israel, and it was seized on by President Biden as this here is finally an opportunity to end this war. But what he did was, I think he represented stage two of this deal in a way that Israel didn't like.

So he basically said that according to the plan, as it had been laid out, as long as negotiations continued between Hamas and Israel, the ceasefire would remain in place. Israel, Netanyahu in particular, he responded by saying, that's not really what the deal says. It says we reserve the right to continue to engage in this war whenever we want after the six week period.

So Hamas, for its part, has been saying, we don't want to engage in any kind of temporary ceasefire, we want a permanent ceasefire, and that's the only ceasefire that we're going to entertain. Israel has said that they want to follow this plan. Netanyahu has said that he is not altering any part of the plan that was set out back in May.

But there are certain clarifications that this is the term that I see in the Israeli media that have been sought. So Israel, for instance, does not want to relinquish control over what is known as the Philadelphia corridor, which is the area that is the border region between Gaza and Egypt and the Sinai peninsula.

It's very important for Israel because this is an area where there have been lots of tunnels, this is where all the smuggling of weapons and military personnel is taking place. And Israel has just been astounded to find even more tunnels, massive tunnels where you could drive trucks through, even more than it expected and anticipated.

So it's not interested in giving that up and there's no mention of that in the text of the deal. It does say that Israel has to withdraw essentially from all of Gaza, all populated areas. Israel also is part of one of his clarifications, doesn't want to relinquish control of something that's called the Net serim corridor, or axis, which is an area that bisects Gaza, kind of in the middle of Gaza.

It's the area that separates the south from the north. And part of their rationale for this is that according to the deal, Israeli civilians are, excuse me, Palestinian civilians in Gaza are supposed to be able to return to their homes in northern Gaza, but Israel wants to basically check them for weapons to make sure that this area remains demilitarized.

That's what they, even though the deal doesn't quite say demilitarized, but it does say that people should be screened for weapons. And so these are just kinds of sticking points between the two parties. And you combine that with the disagreement over what really phase two consists of, and you get to, I think, this stalemate that we're still in.

And combine that even further with the fact that Ismail Hania, who had been the political head of Hamas, has now been replaced by the man who's kind of the man on the spot, Yahya Senwar, the very recalcitrant leader in Gaza, the military leader of Gaza. And I think you're in a situation where, the likelihood of a deal being struck and there being balloons and parades over how great the ceasefire is, it just doesn't seem very likely in my eyes, unfortunately.

Bill Whalen: We'll get to more Mr Sydmore in a moment, Cole, let's continue here with these negotiations. Two questions, one, why is Hamas not attending? And B, why bother to have this if Hamas is not attending?

Cole Bunzel: Yeah, well, I think John Kirby said, well, this isn't the first time that Hamas hasn't attended.

So they say they're not attending, but the Qataris are attending sort of in their stead, and I think it just slows down negotiations. One of the reasons that was given by Hamas is that they don't see any reason to participate in any further negotiations with Israel if Israel isn't putting forward a serious position.

That is a position that Hamas is willing to entertain. And also, I think this does relate back to Yahya Sinwar being in charge of Hamas. He has said, according to something that was in the New York Times yesterday, that he thinks that the only way that negotiations would be helpful in the first place would be if there's already a ceasefire in place.

So ceasefire negotiations for him seem to have to begin with a ceasefire, which doesn't make a lot of sense. So Hamas doesn't wanna participate. But I think, unfortunately, what that demonstrates is that it's the international community, it's the United States, it's the Arab partners of Egypt and Qatar.

They're all really pressing for this deal. Israel is, they're engaged in the conversation, but Hamas is the one that is going to be difficult to even get in the room and even more difficult to get to an actual agreement.

Bill Whalen: From Hamas standpoint, Cole, is there symbolic value in not participating in the negotiations?

In other words, being able to say to your brothers in the Middle east that we're not being forced in negotiations? The United States doesn't dictate terms to us. We will decide what is best to us on our own timetable, our own schedule.

Cole Bunzel: Yeah, I think that's part of it.

I think they're also trying to just demonstrate a certain resilience or defiance, and that goes back to the fact that their leader, the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Hania, was just assassinated, allegedly by Israel, in Tehran. So, I mean, you can imagine if you were Hamas, that that would tick you off and you would not want to be in the same room or building with the people responsible for murdering your colleague.

Yeah, so that theatrics are certainly part of it.

Bill Whalen: All right, let's talk a little bit about Yahya Sinwar. He was appointed the political head of Hamas after the Haniyeh assassination. I think his title technically is political chief at large. He was born in a refugee camp in southern Gaza.

He is one of the founders of Hamas military wing. He has spent a very large chunk of his life in israeli prisons. He is a rare Hamas leader who is fluent in Hebrew. He is a militant figure and enforcer inside Hamas. Question for you, Cole. Al Jazeera, I was reading a piece about him in Al Jazeera, of all places, and Al Jazeera called this a defiant choice.

Would you agree with that characterization? Is this a defiant choice?

Cole Bunzel: Yeah, I think it is a defiant choice. Now, Hamas had been sort of like Iran in the way that it has in the different kinds of leaders for different settings. So Iran has had Javad Zarif in the past as the, I think the foreign minister, who is kind of.

He puts on a smiling face. He can communicate with the west. And then inside Iran, you have Khamenei, who is more of a defiant voice. So you had this kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde thing going on. Hamas had a similar thing. Ismail Haniyeh is a more palatable figure.

You could talk to western officials, including the head of the CIA. And inside Gaza, you had a more ruthless individual like Yahya Sinwar, who is known, really, you could say a tough bad guy, somebody who is known to have strangled people to death as part of his earlier career as head of Gaza.

Internal, not Gaza, Hamas internal security, and was serving four life sentences. So not a good individual. I'm forgetting what the question was, actually. I think I moved on to a little far.

Bill Whalen: Well, about it being a defiant choice. But here's what he is a political leader, a political chief at large, as they call it.

Can he think strategically? Because a political leader needs to think strategically. Needs to be thinking, as in chess, a couple steps ahead. Is he that kind of thinker?

Cole Bunzel: Well, I think that he is somebody who's very much wedded to kind of an originalist Hamas ideology, which is a view that Israel doesn't have any right to exist in any form, that the land on which Israel exists is occupied Palestinian land, every single inch of it.

There can therefore be no talk of two state solution. There can only be resistance. We can have truces, perhaps, but everything will ultimately lead to the elimination of Israel, driving the Jews off of the land, that sort of thing. He's very much committed to that worldview. And I think that October 7, which he is known to have been basically the mastermind of, was the demonstration of that worldview.

And he wasn't satisfied being the leader of Hamas and Gaza just with sort of building an economy and a society with Gulf money. This is kind of Netanyahu's idea, okay? And to some extent, our Gulf allies were gonna give them funding. They're gonna create an economy, and ultimately they'll become more pacified.

That was the opposite of what Yahya Sinwar wanted. He was determined by the attack on October 7 last year, I think, to end that sort of experiment in Hamas governance and Gaza and return to defiance, return to militancy. And so to the extent that he's thinking strategically, that's his strategy.

And unfortunately, it's not a strategy, it's not a face that the west, that the United States can really work with if we're trying to come to any kind of resolution to this war.

Bill Whalen: Cole there is a interesting historical parallel back here in the United States, and that would be the camp David summit of 2000, I think July that year, final year of Bill Clinton's presidency, Yasser Arafat was part of the negotiations.

The Clinton administration spun this as trying to avoid bloodshed in the region because Arafat had said that he would declare statehood in September, and they thought all hell would break loose if he did that. But with six months to go in his presidency, Bill Clinton was looking at a couple of things.

He was looking at, first of all, legacy presidents always smell a Nobel Peace prize, and I think he fell prey to that as well. And also, some people tell you that he was looking for some sort of personal atonement for the Monica Lewinsky scandal as well. He wanted to go out on a high note, if you will.

I mentioned this, Cole, because there was a story that went around a few months after Clinton left office, and it goes something like this. About three days after Clinton stepped out of office, he got a phone call from Yasser Arafat, just Arafat, thanking him for his presidency. And the story goes like this, Cole, Arafat told Clinton, quote, you are a great man.

To which Clinton responded, the hell I am, and failure, and you made me one. The problem was that Clinton desperately wanted to get some sort of a Agreement out of that July summit at Camp David, and he ran into a brick wall in the form of Yasser Arafat.

Clinton suggested the problem, Cole, was that Arafat was simply too old. He was 71 years old at the time and too set in his ways to do a complicated peace deal and that's why I bring up Sid War and his age. I think he's born in 1962, so he's not a youngster necessarily, he's not a kid, either.

But again the question is, can someone like Sid War, can people, is there any evidence within the Hamas world that Hamas can actually do a peace deal? Or is this just, I'm sorry all for public consumption?

Cole Bunzel: So you did have after October 7th, serious analysts of the Arab Israeli conflict, writing from their sources, reports about there being internal conflicts within Hamas.

There were certain voices, including Ismail Haniyeh, who maybe were nothing so adamant about this new posture of defiance that was represented by October 7th. Publicly, Hamas officials were all supporting and cheering the massacre of October 7th. But inside, there was concern, that this was actually going to lead to the undoing of Hamas's permanent state of war, Israel retaliating and killing, demolishing Gaza.

And which is kind of what we're seeing, but what seems to have happened is that a lot of those voices have just been muffled and they've lost any sort of influence in part. Because, while you had these negotiations going on in Qatar with Hamas representatives who live in these villas in Qatar and they're very wealthy and they're living a nice life inside Gaza, they had absolutely no influence over Yahya Sinwar.

He called all the shots, he was effectively the only voice that mattered. And so, by appointing him as the political head of Hamas, they're sort of just making reality official, I think that's one way of looking at it. So, unfortunately, if there were more moderate voices inside Hamas and moderate is of course, very relative in that setting.

They have basically lost their influence, so I think what we're seeing, compared to Yasser Arafat, I mean, Yasir Arafat is like Gandhi compared to Yahya Sinwar. Yahya Sinwar has absolutely no interest whatsoever in negotiating a two-state solution. I mean, the only possible outcome that would satisfy Yahya Sinwar would be, the Jews leaving and Hamas taking over all of, as they see it, historic Muslim Palestine.

Bill Whalen: Is it a good thing, Cole, to be pressing for negotiations and peace when your administration has five months and one week to go? Today is August 15th and five months and one week from now, Joe Biden is no longer president of the United States. I ask because if you are one of the negotiating parties, if you're Hamas, if you're Israel, the Saudis who we'll get to in a minute.

We also have the bigger deal between Israel and Saudi Arabians, you have to be thinking in the back of your mind, what changes in America six months from now? There may be a new administration, they be more friendly to us, they may be more hostile. In other words, when America is in the middle of an election, is that a good time to be trying to broker peace in the Middle East?

Cole Bunzel: I think it's particularly difficult right now for Joe Biden, I think he's perceived as a lame-duck president. It's very interesting that Netanyahu visited Washington and I think within a week, Netanyahu goes back and he assassinates the second leader of Hezbollah, and the political leader of Hamas in about a ten-hour stretch, which probably wasn't a part of the discussion between Netanyahu and Joe Biden, if I had to imagine.

So, Netanyahu doesn't feel constrained it seems, by Biden, he's probably hopeful that Trump will be re-elected. Now, if you're Hamas, you could imagine that maybe you'd feel the opposite, that if Trump is re-elected, then you're gonna have a more difficult position. Because Trump might say, to hell with Gaza, finish the job, I'm not gonna worry about humanitarian concerns.

And so, it is difficult, I don't vote the administration for trying of course, I think that it's the right thing to be doing. I'm not sure they're going about it the right way, I don't think publicly putting pressure on our ally Israel, which I think was part of the whole theatrics of the May 31st Biden speech.

If we go back in time, that was necessarily helpful. But we are where we are, and this is what we're doing.

Bill Whalen: Let's talk about the so-called megadeal between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the question whether or not it's still on the table, Cole. The megadeal is, understand it, Cole correct me if I'm wrong, a package of agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia, which leads to the question which I want you to address about how to get around this, if it's not a treaty.

And I think the answer is you're gonna point me to Bahrain. The second part is a normalization of relations and the third pathway to a Palestinian state. And according to a State Department spokesman, quote, all of them are linked together. So first of all, getting back to our questions, negotiations, is this in play right now?

Is this viable?

Cole Bunzel: Well, if we go back to October 6th, this idea of a Saudi normalization with Israel in return for certain benefits from Washington, for the Saudis, this was very much in play. It was something that the Saudis were very much interested in hosting lots of pro-Israel delegations, Jewish groups, congressmen.

And there was a lot of momentum behind it. And it was essentially taken off the table, at least temporarily by October 7th, Saudi Arabia reverted to its kind of natural position of criticizing Israel and settlements and occupation, et cetera, as kind of the root cause behind what Hamas did on October 7th.

So, there hasn't been a lot of momentum on this. And we've also heard that kind of the price now in terms of what the Saudis would like to see in terms of a kind of Palestinian state or something along those lines has been raised. So before October 7th, it was sort of leaked in the press that the Saudis, they didn't really care that much about what the Palestinians got.

They weren't going to condition this mega deal on Palestinian statehood, but they wanted there to be at least some kind of something in the agreement that would make them be able to save face and say, look, we got this, maybe to say we got Israel to take off annexing the West Bank as part of an agreement, something like that.

But now the Saudis very much adamant that there be an Israeli commitment to a pathway to a Palestinian state, which doesn't even sound like very much, right? You're just saying we commit as Israel to a pathway to a Palestinian state to exist side by side with an Israeli state.

But Netanyahu, given what's going on with Israeli politics and the status of his coalition, which includes two very far-right Israeli ministers, Betsy Las Motrich and Ben Guvir, he can't even utter the words Palestinian state. So, the Saudis somewhat surprise, they haven't taken the idea of the megadeal. Entirely off the table since October 7.

They have been saying that we are still interested in a possible deal of normalizing relations with Israel in return for the goodies that you mentioned from Washington, a security agreement, help with a simple nuclear program, things like that. Just yesterday there were these stories that MBS, the effective leader of Saudi Arabia, the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who's known as MBS in the press, that he's kind of fearful of his life.

He thinks that if he normalizes relations with Israel, he might end up like Anwar Sadat did after the Egyptian president who was ultimately assassinated after making peace with Israel in the early 1980s, which one can sympathize with him. But even though it's not technically off the table right now, I think for all intents and purposes, Saudi Arabia isn't going to kind of make this a priority, it doesn't make sense to the Saudis to do that.

And also, given the state of Israeli politics, it's difficult for there to be any kind of an agreement because Saudi Arabia needs the Israeli leader to say Palestinian state, and you just can't do it.

Bill Whalen: Now, a bilateral US-Saudi treaty call would require 67 votes. The Senate, and I think Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, said it's not gonna happen.

And Senator Graham is pretty good at counting votes, so I think we could agree that there would not be an actual treaty, but there's a way around this. And here I turn your attention, Cole, to what is called a comprehensive security and prosperity agreement. And this was the phrase used when the United States and Bahrain entered to an agreement, I believe, in September or shortly before October 7.

Can you tell us a little bit about what we did with regard to Bahrain, which is important, I guess, because it hosts the US Fifth Fleet and it's also headquarters of US Naval Forces Central Command.

Cole Bunzel: Well, I don't know the nitty-gritty of that arrangement, but most of what I've read about what the Saudis are interested in is they want an actual treat agreement like what we have with Japan and South Korea.

Something that binds the United States to the security of Saudi Arabia in a way that gets out of electoral politics.

Bill Whalen: It's called article 5, I believe that's after NATO. In other words, is that what they're looking for, an article 5?

Cole Bunzel: Well, I think it could be possibly something short of that.

When you look at those treaties with South Korea and Japan, the language isn't quite on the level of article 5 with NATO. But they want the Senate to ratify something with them, that is part of the whole arrangement that as far from my discussions with officials there, that's what they're interested in.

And one of the ways that they were hoping to obtain this was to have the treaty that the Senate would ratify. I suspect I'm with you and Lindsey Graham and being a little skeptical about the possibility of getting to 67 votes. But the idea would be that the treaty would also include Israel, so that you would have the vote being on security, bilateral relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia in one go, and possibly in that way you could get to votes.

But given the popularity or lack thereof, of Saudi Arabia in the Senate, particularly among Democrats, it's pretty hard to imagine us getting to that.

Bill Whalen: I would say at least two headwinds cole one is the question of human rights, which was an issue with Bahrain, which the US had to dance around and do in that agreement.

But the other one that doesn't get a lot of attention is Saudi uranium enrichment.

Cole Bunzel: Yeah, I mean, the Saudis are interested in a nuclear program. And if you were Saudi Arabia, you probably would be, too, because you're right across the Persian Gulf from Iran, which has a sprawling nuclear program.

They are, for all intents and purposes right now, a threshold nuclear power. And every month, every year, they're becoming even more of a threshold nuclear power and with the capability to sprint to a bomb in multiple locations, so that scares the Saudis. They've told our Western counterparts that if they get a bomb, we're gonna get a bomb, and we'd rather be in partnership with you in terms of nuclear enrichment and having an approved program that you can oversee and help us with.

And ideally, that wouldn't include any kind of military component because Iran won't get the bomb, but they want nuclear enrichment and it's hard to blame them for that.

Bill Whalen: Okay, let's end on a couple of questions, first question calls. I mentioned, what, four months and a week or five months in a week until the administration is over.

Does Joe Biden get a ceasefire in the Middle East and does he get a lasting ceasefire?

Cole Bunzel: If I had to bet on it, I would say no.

Bill Whalen: No and no?

Cole Bunzel: No and no. I mean, predictions in the Middle East are a game that you don't really wanna get into if you want a successful career in the think tank world or in policy.

I think it was just a couple weeks before October 7 that national security advisor Jake Sullivan was praising his administration for having the calmest situation in the Middle East that there had been in decades. We saw how that turned out. So you never know, Yahya Senwar, he may very well say, you know what?

I'm losing right now and we need calm, I'm going to agree to Israel's conditions and we're gonna have this stupid ceasefire and I'll break it, I'll break the conditions when I feel like it. I mean, that's perfectly possible. But I think from Hamas' perspective, what they're very concerned about is they have these hostages, they have over 100 hostages now.

They probably only have 50 to 75 who are still alive, but a lot of them are women and children and the elderly, and Israel wants those back. And so in the first phase of the proposed deal, Israel gets back the women, the children, the elderly. Those are, of course, from Hamas perspective, the most valuable hostages.

And so they don't wanna relinquish that card, it makes a lot of sense for them to say no and to wait until they get a better deal, possibly with, say, a Kamala Harris administration that is, a lot more, let's say, intolerant of Israeli military operations in Gaza. So that could be his calculation, it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Bill Whalen: Second question, Cole, is an Israeli conflict with Hezbollah inevitable or votable?

Cole Bunzel: That's tough, it's hard to entertain this reality that we're in right now kind of lasting forever. It's a real stain on Netanyahu's legacy right now that tens of thousands of Israelis can't return to their homes in the north.

And that situation has to be reversed. Now, it could effectively be reversed with ceasefire in Gaza cuz Hezbollah says we will stop firing rockets if there's a ceasefire, so that possibility is certainly there. However, if months and months continue to pass and we don't get ceasefire and we still have this exchange of military confrontations between Israel and Hezbollah, you can also imagine Israel saying, to hell with it.

We need to go on the offensive, we need to eliminate the threat and allow our people to return to their homes. And that's what the Israelis security establishment seems to be set on. So looking over the horizon the next year or two, I would expect there to be a larger war there that would be my prediction.

Bill Whalen: Question three, the eventual outcome of the megadeal, so what is the megadeal again, it's the US and Saudi Arabia in a bilateral treaty. It is normalization relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and a pathway to a Palestinian state. Are all three doable, Cole, or would you just pick one or two out of that and if so, which ones would you pick?

Cole Bunzel: I'm not sanguine about this deal at all, unfortunately, I think that the conditions are just not right for it. So long as there's this ongoing confrontation in Gaza, any kind of normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel makes MBS look bad. He's concerned about his popularity, he's concerned about his life.

And just given the state of Israeli politics, as I said before, it's hard for as long as this current government exists in Israel, I don't think that there can be a megadeal unless the far right ministers that I referred to before somehow say, okay, let's agree to a pathway to a Palestinian state.

Wink-wink, fingers crossed, we don't really care there's that possibility.

Bill Whalen: Okay, final question, Cole, it has to do with you. You're an Arabist, so you read things that I don't read, that I can't read. Just walk us through what you read every day from the Middle East and perhaps you could give us a couple reading selections places you go in English, not Arabic.

Cole Bunzel: Well, I read a lot of things that bring the FBI to my house occasionally, So I spent a lot of time and that's not a joke, actually, which I can talk about if you want. Yeah, so I for the last decade or more, I have been a close follower of militant Islamist Mediaeval on the app known as Telegram, which is kind of a jihadi haven.

So I have a fake account and I follow all sorts of ISIS and Al-Qaeda channels and groups as well as Hamas channels and groups and so I look at what people are writing on those every day includes Al-Qaeda media, ISIS media, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood. So, just before coming on here, I was looking at what Hamas political officials were writing on Telegram to see how they were reacting to the first day of the Doha negotiations, which surprisingly, they didn't reject entirely.

So that's the kind of thing I read, not necessarily first thing in the morning, but there you have that. And then I look at a lot of Saudi media, like these are sort of the leading Saudi newspapers. The media world in Arabic is if you think of there's a rivalry in English between the New York Times editorial page and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that that sort of cleavage is mirrored between Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

Al Jazeera is a Qatari, pro resistance news outlets very popular. Al Arabiya is its counterpart, it's proof the United States status quo, Saudi Arabia, UAE, that type of arrangement. So in the media world is an interesting world in Arabic, certainly, as it is in English, of course, as well.

Bill Whalen: And where in English language media would you turn people to read? Do you have preferred columnists to follow or certain publications that do a better job than others in terms of covering the region?

Cole Bunzel: Just covering the region, you really have to look at all the major newspapers, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg does a lot of good work.

Sometimes Arab News, which is a Saudi English newspaper, Times of Israel is a very good, that's probably in my opinion, the best Israeli newspaper to follow. I go to that every day, certainly but, yeah, there's a lot out there.

Bill Whalen: Good, well, Cole, I think that kinda covers the waterfront or the Middle East, I should say the landscape there, it just never gets better, does it?

Cole Bunzel: Hopefully brighter days ahead.

Bill Whalen: Okay, Cole well, again, I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for joining us today, and hopefully not too many more phone calls or raids from the FBI in your future.

Cole Bunzel: Thank you, appreciate it.

Bill Whalen: You've been listening to matters in policy and politics, the Hoover Institution podcast, devoted governance and balance of power here in America and around the globe.

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