Aaron David Miller, Natan Sachs, and Khalil Shikaki
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On Thursday, Israel and Hamas announced that they had agreed to a ceasefire—the first phase of a twenty-point peace plan that includes the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
On this week’s episode of Carnegie Connects, Aaron David Miller spoke with Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, and Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, about the stakes of the peace deal and obstacles to implementation . Excerpts from their conversation, which have been edited for clarity, are below. Watch the full discussion here.
Aaron David Miller: To what degree has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal travails and obsession with remaining in power shaped his decisionmaking in Gaza?
Natan Sachs: That’s a great question, and it’s difficult to answer for two reasons.
One, it very much depends on your worldview. So if you’re not a fan of Netanyahu—and I plead guilty to that—then you tend to see him more as motivated by bad reasons. If you are a fan of him, you dismiss it offhand. Two, we’re trying to go into the head of one person, and it’s harder than many of us—myself included—sometimes pretend.
I do have a slightly contrarian view here. I think that Netanyahu suffers from a very severe malady that has warped his decisionmaking—the malady of someone who’s been in power for a very, very long time and is genuinely sure that he has no replacement. Netanyahu truly believes he has no suitable replacement. And as we know, the graveyard is full of people who have no suitable replacements. This has led to the political crisis that we’ve seen for years on end. In the context of this war, I think even more so.
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