March 3: Will Israel Return to War?

Europeans try to save Zelenskyy; Tariffs start tomorrow; A Strategic Crypto Reserve?

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The Big Story

Phase one of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas expired on Saturday. According to the original agreement, the two sides were supposed to have already begun negotiations for phase two, which calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent cease-fire in exchange for Hamas’ release of the remaining living hostages. But those negotiations haven’t taken place. Instead, the Israelis are pushing for what they have described as the “Witkoff framework,” a proposal—which, in their telling, originated with Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (Arab officials have described it as an Israeli plan)—to extend phase one of the cease-fire through April 19 rather than proceed to phase two. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that it was suspending the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza due to Hamas’ rejection of the Witkoff framework. “We will support [the Israelis’] decision on next steps, given Hamas has indicated it is no longer interested in a negotiated cease-fire,” a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council told the press on Sunday, implying, without stating openly, that Washington would back a resumption of the war.

Indeed, the main question now is whether such a resumption is imminent. Officially, the Israeli position is that Hamas must agree to a seven-week extension of phase one that would see the release of half of the remaining living hostages and half the bodies of the remaining dead hostages. Late last week, however, Andrew Tobin of The Washington Free Beacon reported that the IDF was preparing for a “decisive” air-and-ground offensive designed to “conquer the entire strip” and fully eradicate Hamas. On Sunday, Tobin reported that the suspension of aid to Gaza marked the first step in Israel’s implementation of these plans. “The blockade of Gaza is one of a series of escalatory steps that Israel, backed by President Donald Trump, is prepared to take to bring home the hostages and end Hamas’s control of Gaza,” Tobin wrote, citing conversations with current and former Israeli officials. According to Tobin:

The sources said that Israeli decision-makers expect Hamas to resist disarmament or exile—Israel’s conditions for moving on to phase two of the deal, which would end the war—and instead to fight to the end while holding some of the hostages as human shields and bargaining chips.

He also cites a weekend report in the Israeli press suggesting that the IDF is drilling for a return to fighting:

Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Saturday that Southern Command is on high alert and preparing for a return to fighting on short notice. In recent days, Israeli troops have been training to retake the strategically important Netzarim Corridor and other areas of Gaza from which the military withdrew during the ceasefire and for the possible relocation of the civilian population from the north of the strip to humanitarian zones in the south, according to the report.

On Sunday, moreover, YNet News reported that incoming IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir had summoned “senior military officials to Southern Command” for a meeting Friday, which YNet connected to rumors that the IDF is preparing to return to fighting.

A separate Sunday report in YNet, however, was more skeptical that a renewed offensive was imminent. “I don’t think Hamas is interested in fighting right now, and I don’t think we are either—not in the immediate term,” one cabinet minister told YNet. The same report noted that the aid cutoff, interpreted in some quarters as the early stage of a siege, was “largely symbolic,” given that Israel is continuing to provide water to Gaza and that Israeli officials estimate that Hamas has stockpiled “enough provisions to last at least four months.”

Whatever the Israelis choose to do, the United States appears to be signaling that it will back its ally. On Saturday, amid the breakdown in negotiations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked “emergency authorities” to bypass congressional review in approving an additional $4 billion in arms sales to Israel, including about $2 billion worth of 2,000-pound bombs.

Read the Beacon report here: https://freebeacon.com/israel/israel-cuts-all-aid-to-gaza-in-step-toward-resumption-of-full-scale-war/

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith’s obituary of Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations

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The Rest

→After the blowup between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump at the White House last Friday, which ended without the signing of the much-touted “minerals deal,” European leaders met with Zelenskyy in London on Sunday in an effort to rescue the Ukrainian cause. The summit ended with plans for the United Kingdom, France, and Ukraine to jointly draw up a peace proposal that would include peacekeepers from what British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called a “coalition of the willing,” led by London and Paris, though details on the scheme are scarce. French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a one-month cease-fire “in the air, at sea, and on energy infrastructure,” the Financial Times reports, but the British government clarified that this was not “a U.K. plan,” and Zelenskyy was reportedly unhappy—again—with the idea of a cease-fire without Western security guarantees.

On the U.S. side, Trump is expected to meet with members of his cabinet on Monday afternoon to discuss Ukraine, including a potential suspension of U.S. military aid—a step floated by administration officials in the press following Friday’s blowup. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the Pentagon to pause offensive cyber operations against Russia. The move, which had been planned before the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting, is reportedly part of “a broader effort to draw President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into talks on Ukraine.”

→Trump confirmed in a Monday afternoon press conference that his 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, originally scheduled for Feb. 4 before being suspended for a month, will go into effect at midnight tonight. That’s barring another last-minute reprieve similar to the one last month—in an interview Sunday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that negotiations were “fluid” and that Canada and Mexico have both “done a lot” over the past month to meet the United States’ demands to curb illegal immigration and drug trafficking across the countries’ shared borders. Mexico has all but eliminated the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States—on Feb. 21, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended only 200 migrants at the southern border, the lowest total in 15 years—and Canada has also taken aggressive steps to combat the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In early February, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed a “Fentanyl Czar” to help coordinate Canadian and U.S. law enforcement efforts, and last week, the Canada Border Services Agency announced the launching of “Operation Blizzard,” a “targeted, cross-country initiative aimed at intercepting illegal contraband arriving and leaving Canada.”

The spat over the tariffs—and Trump’s oft-repeated jokes about annexing Canada—have had the unintended effect of reviving the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party. In January, Canada’s Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, surpassed the Liberal Party by 26 points in the polls. A new poll released last week, however, showed a 28-point swing in favor of the Liberals, who now lead the Conservatives by 38% to 36%. Canada’s next elections are scheduled for October.

→Quote of the Day:

Cartel members said the only reason the government hadn’t really fought them until recently was because they’d bought off enough officials. One cartel cell leader said he doubted that this new effort would seriously damage the cartel because the group could ensure its survival by bribing key officials.

“There are always weak points,” he said, “there are always loose ends we can get to.”

That’s from a story in The New York Times on the Mexican government’s recent crackdown, under U.S. pressure, on the Sinaloa Cartel. Since Trump’s inauguration, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has deployed 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and hundreds more to the cartel’s stronghold in the state of Sinaloa. Mexican authorities have stepped up raids, arrests, and drug seizures, and last Thursday, the Mexican government turned over 29 cartel operatives to the United States. Despite the endemic corruption in Mexico, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman reported for The Daily Wire in February that Sheinbaum has installed “hardliners” who welcome a “good hard fight with the cartels” in key positions in the Mexican security apparatus.

→Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will invest $100 billion in U.S.-based chip-manufacturing plants over the next four years in a deal expected to be announced Monday, The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal will build on Biden-era efforts to promote semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, including via subsidies and tax credits included in the 2022 Chips Act, though it appears that TSMC’s latest investment was at least partly motivated by Trump’s threat of a 25% tariff on all semiconductor imports. And Politico Playbook on Monday flagged a related story first reported in Reuters: The Japanese carmaker Honda, which had planned to produce its next-generation Civic hybrid in Guanajuato, Mexico, was apparently told by Trump that Guanajuato won’t do. Instead, beginning in May 2028, Honda will start an annual production of about 210,000 Civics in Indiana. Volkswagen is also reportedly weighing whether to shift some production of its Audi and Porsche brands to the United States to avoid tariffs, per a report in the New York Post.

→Our brave new world of AI-enabled citizen journalism:

That’s Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, on “Israeli settlers” performing “Talmudic rituals,” which “sparked various reactions.” Much to think about.

→Trump announced on Sunday that the U.S. government would be buying Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other cryptocurrency tokens for a U.S. “Crypto Strategic Reserve.” All of the tokens named as part of the potential strategic reserve rose in value on Sunday, with one, ADA (Cardano), soaring 71%, according to the Financial Times—despite crypto having previously been in the midst of a sell-off as investors have rotated out of risk assets. Crypto boosters argue that crypto is a “hedge” against “centralized” fiat currency, so it wouldn’t seem to make a ton of sense for the United States to hedge against the U.S. dollar. On the other hand, the reserve likely will significantly boost the dollar value of crypto assets, which should help out the owners of those assets, like White House crypto czar David Sacks. While Sacks sold all of his personal crypto holdings prior to taking a position in the administration, he is still the primary investor in a company called Bitwise, which operates crypto index funds. Bitwise’s top five crypto holdings are in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP (Ripple), and ADA—all of which are now set to be purchased by the U.S. government.

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Dore Gold, 1953-2025

by Lee Smith

​​Former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold died yesterday at the age of 71. He was close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tapped him to lead the foreign ministry from 2015 to 2017. He was a scholar as well as an accomplished diplomat and published several books, perhaps most significantly Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.

Published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the book was one of the first to detail Riyadh’s destructive gambit and came to inform the views of U.S. as well as Israeli policymakers. It showed that one of the United States’ key Middle East partners was helping destabilize the region—as well as itself. After a series of domestic terror attacks targeting crucial Saudi infrastructure that killed foreigners and Saudis indiscriminately, Riyadh joined the fight against the terror it had previously sponsored.

In time, a reform-minded Saudi leadership came to see the value of normalizing relations with Israel, and it’s understood that Saudi Arabia’s Gulf Cooperation Council allies, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, would not have signed on to the Abraham Accords had Riyadh not given them the green light. Though the deals were brokered by Donald Trump’s first administration, Dore played an enormous role in preparing the ground for those historic agreements. For years, he was effectively Israel’s point man on Gulf affairs, quietly traveling from emirate to emirate to build trust and hammer out details. A 2021 picture of him signing a memorandum of understanding with a Bahraini official at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem is evidence, only scratching the surface, of his work to build regional peace.

I first met Dore in the summer of 2006 in the middle of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. I’d made my way from Beirut, where I’d been living for two years, to Jerusalem and Dore’s office at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (now the Center for Security and Foreign Affairs), which he directed for two decades. He asked me to help with a small research project, and it was a great honor to get to know him and some of the country’s top policy experts he’d brought on board.

I spoke with Noah Pollak, another American that Dore, originally from the Hartford, Connecticut, area, took under his wing. Noah believes that Dore’s most enduring contribution to Israeli strategy was his conviction, argued consistently for 30 years, that peace is impossible unless Israel has defensible borders.

“Dore said that Israel could never go back to the 1967 lines,” Noah told me in a phone call. “Israel cannot give up Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or the Jordan Valley and at a minimum must retain a major security presence in Judea and Samaria.”

It’s useful to remember that Dore made this case during the heyday of the peace process, when the Israeli and U.S. political classes believed that a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace between Israel and the Palestinians was within reach and could only happen if Israel ceded territory.

“Dore understood that the Palestinians will never make peace,” says Noah. “And as the peace process ebbed and flowed, he was intellectually consistent and politically courageous, even when few wanted to hear it. There are few industries that reward bad ideas as richly as the Middle East peace process racket, but Dore stayed consistent.”

Since Oct. 7, virtually all Israelis, as well as the current U.S. administration, have come to see the situation as Dore did. Therefore, any policy designed to secure peace and enhance prosperity in the region, for Israelis and Arabs as well as Americans, will have to draw on not only Dore’s work but also his example, a man of courage, vision, warmth, and kindness.