With pile-on of ceasefire proposals for Israel, free speech by Trump is the best source of a reset

Excellent coverage from Anne Bayefsky and Benjamin Weinthal indicated on Monday 18 November that elected members of the UN Security Council (i.e., the rotating elected members, not any of the Permanent 5) are working on a UN Security Council Resolution to be voted on as early as Tuesday 19 November that seeks to impose an immediate ceasefire on Israel, and box in the incoming Trump administration regarding its options for future policy.

I’ll let readers peruse the respective reports, rather than regurgitating them here.  There’s no publicly available text of a draft resolution, and the U.S. is being cagey about the nature of our behind-the-scenes negotiations and how our UN ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, will be voting.  (Her options are to abstain, exercise a Perm-5 veto, or vote for the resolution.  There’s no point in merely voting against it; if we really don’t want it, we can just veto it.)

But the aggregate reporting does say the resolution is said to call for a prompt, unconditional ceasefire, and for the UN to monitor the delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza.  Bayefsky suggests the aid monitoring would probably be a pretext for the UN to require scheduled reporting on Israel’s “progress” in that regard, with the threat of leverage and sanctions from foreign governments and world judicial bodies hanging over Israel’s head.  (This would be part of boxing in the Trump administration, with a UN-run program to dog Israel with reporting requirements and latent threats.)

Apparently the proposed ceasefire is not contingent on a release of the hostages.  In my view, Israel has no incentive to cooperate with this.  There may be the usual call to release the hostages in the resolution, but unless any ceasefire is only to take effect on such release, the call for hostage release is toothless.

The U.S. administration has no legitimate incentive to support the resolution either.  Nothing indicates it would actually get the seven remaining American hostages released.

Anne Bayefsky sees the “aid” gambit as a one-way street, with the headlights always coming at Israel threatening a collision.  She points out that the “Biden team has been playing [a] Palestinian no-win game since October 8, 2023. … In preparation for Biden’s lame-duck term, Secretaries Blinken and Austin gave Israel a post-election deadline of November 14th to deliver on a range of arbitrary, capricious and inappropriate ‘humanitarian’ demands that parroted UN sources – or else. It’s a setup for justifying UN-favored punishments on Israel and a UN-US December/January surprise.”

In other words, the UNSCR will serve to set up worse measures aimed at Israel, and Team Biden could well have in mind trying to pile on impediments and punishments for Israel on the way out the door.  (Bayefsky reminds us the Obama administration did exactly that with UNSCR 2334 in January 2017.)

It’s not clear what the resolution has to say about UNRWA, though there is information circulating about the back-room negotiations, indicating the UN sponsors of the resolution intend to emphasize getting UNRWA back in the middle of aid distribution.

That matters, and other developments suggest it’s significant.  The U.S. suspended funding to UNRWA back in March 2024, a prohibition that runs through March 2025.  And Israel cut ties with UNRWA and banned its operations in Gaza at the end of October 2024.  The cut-offs are due to evidence that UNRWA officials are linked to Hamas, and some of them simply are Hamas.

But in September 2024, Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced a bill to resume U.S. funding of UNRWA.  And just a few days ago, the State Department’s USAID announced that it would be providing $230 million in aid to “the Palestinian people,” though without clarifying how the aid is to reach the “Palestinian people.”

It appears that the $230 million is part of a humanitarian aid package of about $2 billion approved by Congress as a defense supplemental in early 2024 (a multifarious package of aid and other spending was approved in the bill, with recipients including Taiwan and Ukraine).  The U.S. suspension of aid deliveries to UNRWA in March 2024 affected distribution of that aid.  And now, with the Biden administration involved in both the UNSCR negotiations and the additional aid to “the Palestinians,” with its Democratic allies in Congress pressing to restore UNRWA as a conduit for aid to Gaza, it seems likely that a UNSCR focused on monitoring aid to Gaza could include language about UNRWA.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) may well think so.  Benjamin Weinthal’s report for Fox News quotes Cruz’s trenchant comments on the overall subject:  “I will work with my Republican colleagues and with President Trump to take whatever steps are necessary to undo these measures, including fundamentally reevaluating our relationship with the U.N. and the Palestinians, broadly cutting aid, imposing sanctions on specific officials responsible for those measures, and countering governments and NGOs pushing or implementing them.”

A Bayefsky observes, the Biden administration gave the UN a 14 November deadline to answer questions about UNRWA’s connections with Hamas, adding to the likelihood that the events now swirling around humanitarian aid and a UNSCR ceasefire demand, to be voted on less than a week later, are all connected.

Into the midst of this drama, reporting enters that Hezbollah has agreed to a ceasefire in which its assets are to be withdrawn north of the Litani River, in compliance with UNSCR 1701 of 2006, while Israel is allowed to “clear” southern Lebanon of the Hezbollah detritus (i.e., as opposed to UNIFIL undertaking the task in its peacekeeping role).

The offer to let Israel do the clearing looks transparently like a pretext for keeping IDF troops under the threat of Hezbollah attacks, but theoretically not in “combat.”  This is an untenable position to be in at any time (cf. Mogadishu 1993), and Israel should of course not agree to it.

But on a larger landscape, the twin ceasefire proposals, both rehashes of previous proposals, look like an attempt by the Biden administration to pressure Israel into a disadvantaged position in which a broad scope of sanctions and hostile political moves can be turned on Israel full-blast before Biden leaves office in January.  As Bayefsky suggests, they could include peremptory UN declaration of a “Palestinian state” against Israel’s interests and rightful sovereignty.  Team Biden – like Obama and John Kerry before it – has threatened such a move in the months since 10/7.

I don’t know that there’s anything to be done about the Biden administration.  It’s disgraceful and disgusting to behave this way, but it’s not unlawful.

The focus of Trump’s team should be persuading the UN and the foreign parties involved that it’s not in their best interests to be involved in it.  Ted Cruz has made a good start in conveying that the Senate can muster GOP support for blowing up the UN’s status quo, if it goes forward with this.  Trump should convey the same message.  And he can do it succinctly, without running around in the background engaging in direct negotiation, with commitments and definitions of terms and all that goes with actual “negotiation,” during the transition when he is not yet the president.

There is no politician on the planet in a position as credible as Trump’s to convey that he means it when he says the U.S. cannot be constrained by what the Biden administration brings about between now and January.  The whole “problem” with Trump, for the denizens of the status quo, is that he won’t be constrained by their arrangements.  If he indicates he’s prepared to alter the UN’s reality if necessary, and the reality of all its commissions and courts, and the NGOs the UN works with, he actually means it.

And not only is it perfectly lawful for him to engage in public speech indicating such a posture – it’s the right thing to do.  He shouldn’t muddy the waters air-dropping into counter-negotiations.  But he absolutely should speak his mind publicly about what’s being done now.  That’s what electing a president to change America’s course is about.

The convention that presidents-elect don’t make clear to foreign governments and the public that they won’t continue the policies of their predecessors is just that:  a convention.  It’s not a law.  America spent several decades after World War II with a largely unchanging, singularly-focused strategic reality  — the Cold War with the Soviet Union — that encouraged a mindset of continuity and consensus, and those circumstances shaped the expectations we have as our legacy today.  But those circmstances were not eternal, and it’s better for the world, not worse, to keep its actors advised of the sentiments of an incoming president who was elected by Americans to change our direction, not maintain it.

And the way to communicate that point is openly, accountably, and straightforwardly – not furtively.  Everyone from Iran, Russia, and China to Israel, Iran’s proxies, the Arab nations of the Middle East, and the UNSC-10 putting their names on the resolution should know where Trump stands.  Stand-up foreign policy messaging is the only way to go here.

Note that Trump is already doing that on every other subject, from energy to border security to taxes, tariffs and trade, social issues, federal regulation, and Russia-Ukraine.  It would simply be in line with what he’s doing on all other topics, if he made clear that it’s folly to think he can be boxed in by some UN arrangement made hastily by his predecessor before he takes office.

It’s also folly to try and make the UN go, without the U.S. behind it.  The only thing that gives the UN teeth is U.S. support.  That has been the case since Day 1.

There are some member states of the UN, and some UN officials, who need a good dose of Trump’s opinion on this weighty international security matter now rather than later.  They should have all the information they need to make sound decisions with.  Nothing  prohibits Trump from making it available to them, and he should do so.

Feature image:  President-elect Trump shouts “Fight!” after an assassination attempt at his campaign rally event in Butler, PA 13 July 2024.  Trump campaign video, X/Twitter.