Opinion | Israel Has a Choice to Make: Rafah or Riyadh

U.S. diplomacy to end the Gaza war and forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia has been converging in recent weeks into a single giant choice for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: What do you want more — Rafah or Riyadh?

Do you want to mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah to try to finish off Hamas — if that is even possible — without offering any Israeli exit strategy from Gaza or any political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians? If you go this route, it will only compound Israel’s global isolation and force a real breach with the Biden administration.

Or do you want normalization with Saudi Arabia, an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza and a U.S.-led security alliance against Iran? This would come with a different price: a commitment from your government to work toward a Palestinian state with a reformed Palestinian Authority — but with the benefit of embedding Israel in the widest U.S.-Arab-Israeli defense coalition the Jewish state has ever enjoyed and the biggest bridge to the rest of the Muslim world Israel has ever been offered, while creating at least some hope that the conflict with the Palestinians will not be a “forever war.’’

This is one of the most fateful choices Israel has ever had to make. And what I find both disturbing and depressing is that there is no major Israeli leader today in the ruling coalition, the opposition or the military who is consistently helping Israelis understand that choice — a global pariah or a Middle East partner — or explaining why it should choose the second.

I appreciate how traumatized Israelis are by the vicious Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings of Oct. 7. It is not surprising to me that many people there just want revenge, and their hearts have hardened to a degree that they can’t see or care about all of the civilians, including thousands of children, who have been killed in Gaza as Israel has plowed through to try to eliminate Hamas. All of this has been further hardened by Hamas’s refusal so far to release the remaining hostages.

But revenge is not a strategy. It is pure insanity that Israel is now more than six months into this war and the Israeli military leadership — and virtually the entire political class — has allowed Netanyahu to continue to pursue a “total victory” there, including probably soon plunging deep into Rafah, without any exit plan or Arab partner lined up to step in once the war ends. If Israel ends up with an indefinite occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, it would be a toxic military, economic and moral overstretch that would delight Israel’s most dangerous foe, Iran, and repel all its allies in the West and the Arab world.

Early in the war, Israeli military and political leaders would tell you that moderate Arab leaders wanted Israel to wipe out Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that is detested by every Arab monarch. Sure, they would have liked Hamas gone — if it could have been done in a few weeks with few civilian casualties.

It’s now clear that it can’t be, and prolonging the war is not in the interest of the moderate Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia.

From the conversations I’ve been having here in Riyadh and in Washington, I’d describe Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s view of the Israeli invasion of Gaza today like this: Get out as soon as possible. All Israel is doing at this point is killing more and more civilians, turning Saudis who favored normalization with Israel against it, creating more recruits for Al Qaeda and ISIS, empowering Iran and its allies, fomenting instability and driving away much-needed foreign investment from this region. The idea of wiping out Hamas “once and for all” is a pipe dream, in the Saudi view. If Israel wants to continue to do special operations in Gaza to get the leadership, no problem. But no boots permanently on the ground. Please get to a full cease-fire and hostage release as soon as possible and focus instead on the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian security-normalization deal.

That is the other road that Israel could take right now — the one that no major Israeli opposition leader is arguing for as the top priority, but the one that the Biden administration and the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Bahrainis, Moroccans and Emiratis are rooting for. Its success is by no means a sure thing, but neither is the “total victory” that Netanyahu is promising.

This other road starts with Israel forgoing any total military invasion of Rafah, which is right up against the border with Egypt and is the main route through which humanitarian relief enters Gaza by trucks. The area is home to more than 200,000 permanent residents and now also more than one million refugees from northern Gaza. It is also where the last four most intact Hamas battalions are said to be dug in and, maybe, its leader Yahya Sinwar.

The Biden administration has been telling Netanyahu publicly that he must not engage in a full-scale invasion of Rafah without a credible plan to get those one million-plus civilians out of the way — and that Israel has yet to present such a plan. But privately they are being more blunt and telling Israel: No massive invasion of Rafah, period.

A senior U.S. official put it to me this way: “We are not saying to Israel just leave Hamas be. We are saying that we believe there is a more targeted way to go after the leadership, without leveling Rafah block by block.” The Biden team, he insisted, is not trying to spare the Hamas bosses — just spare Gaza another spasm of mass civilian losses.

Let’s remember, the official added, that Israel thought Hamas’s leaders were in Khan Yunis and it destroyed much of that town looking for them and not finding them. And they did the same with Gaza City in the north. What happened? Sure, a lot of Hamas fighters there were killed, but many others just dissolved into the ruins and have now popped up anew — so much so that a Hamas unit on April 18 was able to fire a rocket from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza toward the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

U.S. officials are convinced that if Israel now smashes up all of Rafah, after having done the same to big parts of Khan Yunis and Gaza City, and has no credible Palestinian partner to relieve it of the security burden of governing a broken Gaza, it will be making the kind of mistake the United States made in Iraq and end up dealing with a permanent insurgency on top of a permanent humanitarian crisis. But there would be one critical difference: The United States is a superpower that could fail in Iraq and bounce back. For Israel, a permanent Gaza insurgency would be crippling, especially with no friends left.

And that is why U.S. officials tell me that if Israel does mount a major military operation in Rafah, over the administration’s objections, President Biden would consider restricting certain arms sales to Israel.

This is not only because the Biden administration wants to avoid more civilian casualties in Gaza out of humanitarian concerns, or because they would further inflame global public opinion against Israel and make it even more difficult for the Biden team to defend Israel. It’s because the administration believes that a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah will both undermine prospects for a new hostage exchange, for which officials say there are now some fresh glimmers of hope, and destroy three vital projects it has been working on to enhance Israel’s long-term security.

The first is an Arab peacekeeping force that could replace Israeli troops in Gaza, so that Israel can get out and not be stuck occupying both Gaza and the West Bank forever. Several Arab states have been discussing sending peacekeeping troops to Gaza to replace Israeli troops, who would have to leave — provided there is a permanent cease-fire — and the presence of the troops would be formally blessed by a joint decision of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella body bringing together most Palestinian factions, and the Palestinian Authority. The Arabs states would also most likely insist on some U.S. military logistical assistance. Nothing has been decided yet, but the idea is under active consideration.

The second is the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic-security deal that the administration is close to finalizing the terms of with the Saudi crown prince. It has several components, but the three key U.S.-Saudi ones are: 1) A mutual defense pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia that would take any ambiguity out of what America would do if Iran attacked Saudi Arabia. The United States would come to Riyadh’s defense, and vice versa. 2) Streamlining Saudi access to the most advanced U.S. weapons. 3) A tightly controlled civilian nuclear deal that would allow Saudi Arabia to reprocess its own uranium deposits for use in its own civilian nuclear reactor.

In return, the Saudis would curb Chinese investment inside Saudi Arabia as well as any military ties and build its next-generation defense systems entirely with U.S. weaponry, which would be a boon for American defense manufacturers and make the two armies entirely interoperable. The Saudis, with their abundant cheap energy and physical space, would look to host the massive data centers required by U.S. tech companies to exploit artificial intelligence, at a time when domestic U.S. energy costs and physical space are becoming so scarce that new data centers are becoming harder and harder to build at home. Saudi Arabia would also normalize relations with Israel, provided that Netanyahu committed to work toward a two-state solution with an overhauled Palestinian Authority.

And last, the United States would bring together Israel, Saudi Arabia, other moderate Arab states and key European allies into a single, integrated security architecture to counter Iranian missile threats the way they did on an ad hoc basis when Iran attacked Israel on April 13 in retaliation for an Israeli strike on some senior Iranian military leaders suspected of running operations against Israel, who were meeting at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria. This coalition will not come together on any continued basis without Israel getting out of Gaza and committing to work toward Palestinian statehood. There is no way Arab states can be seen to be permanently protecting Israel from Iran if Israel is permanently occupying Gaza and the West Bank. U.S. and Saudi officials also know that without Israel in the deal, the U.S.-Saudi security components are not likely to ever get through Congress.

The Biden team wants to complete the U.S.-Saudi part of the deal so that it can act like the opposition party that Israel does not have right now and be able to say to Netanyahu: You can be remembered as the leader who presided over Israel’s worst military catastrophe on Oct. 7 or the leader who led Israel out of Gaza and opened the road to normalization between Israel and the most important Muslim state. Your choice. And it wants to offer this choice publicly so that every Israeli can see it.

So let me end where I began: Israel’s long-term interests are in Riyadh, not Rafah. Of course, neither is a sure thing and both come with risks. And I know that it’s not so easy for Israelis to weigh them when so many global protesters these days are hammering Israel for its bad behavior in Gaza and giving Hamas a free pass. But that’s what leaders are for: to make the case that the road to Riyadh has a much bigger payoff at the end than the road to Rafah, which will be a dead end in every sense of the term.

I totally respect that Israelis are the ones who will have to live with the choice. I just want to make sure they know they have one.

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