How to negotiate ceasefire deals like Israel

The art of pretending to make a deal.

Send your ceasefire proposal through the mediators to the counterparty and wait for the counterparty to respond. Let the counterparty study the terms of your deal and in the meantime tell your fervent allies who back your every move — no matter how depraved — to tell the counterparty and the world that your “extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous” deal is being held up by the counterparty who you have for decades maligned as the ones who “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

While the counterparty study your proposal, which very blatantly doesn’t address any of their pressing concerns, the most important of which is to actually cease fire — because, you know, it is literally a ceasefire deal — intensify the bombing of their enclave, the killing their civilians, the slaughtering of their journalists, the destruction of their hospitals, and the starvation of their people, among sundry such barbarities as pressure tactic to accept your lopsided proposal.

When despite all this, the counterparty still won’t accept your proposal, go ahead and bomb that one part of the enclave that you intended to bomb and spoke about bombing for months — and which you were using as leverage for the ceasefire deal — anyway.

While you do this, tell the world — and tell your fervent allies to also tell the world — that you were left no choice but to do what you always wanted to do. Give journalists — who either believe in your ideology with the same zeal as you do or are on your payroll, or most likely, both — to parrot lines about how your counterparty have rejected the deal that they actually accepted. In other words, gaslight the world.

The proposal, which was accepted by the counterparty, is now thrown in the dustbin.

Restart. Go through the whole process again. But this time keep changing the terms of the deal to keep your counterparty confused about your intentions. Pussyfoot around the deal so much that the counterparty — who know that you have no intention to make a deal, but have a responsibility to protect their besieged population and will go to any lengths to alleviate their suffering — begin to wonder why they should even sit on the same table as you and participate in this grotesque charade of yours.

Let them wonder. You do what you must.

Confuse your own delegation and make them doubt whether spending long hours negotiating in random locations around the world has any purpose whatsoever when even they know that you have no intention to make a deal. Frustrate them so much that even they come to the conclusion that “traveling is pointless” for a ceasefire deal that you won’t allow to materialise.

The status quo — where you can bomb the counterparty mercilessly with an explicitly stated goal of ethnic cleansing — is exactly what you want. What’s more, you are even invited to the Congress of your biggest benefactor to demand that they give you “the tools faster” so that you can “finish the job” of ethnic cleansing “faster.” Their response? Jump to their feet dozens of times and clap like seals at your depravity, with which they fully align.

And don’t forget the most important part: kill negotiators from the counterparty.

Kill the negotiator — who played a central role in releasing over 100 of your hostages — in a foreign country, no less, despite the apparent risk of a major regional escalation.

You are immune to rules that bind every other country in the world. You are not like any other country in the world. You are special. Laws don’t apply to you. You intensify bombings on the days the world court tells you to cease bombings. You are that special. So bomb and kill the negotiators — and other leaders — from the counterparty whenever and wherever you want.

Of course, your bombings aren’t limited to the leadership. Slaughtering the ordinary civilians is your bread and butter. It’s the thing that gives meaning to your existence. Keep at it. 40,000. 200,000. Fair game.

It is also important to kill the family members of the chief negotiator. You can start with killing his granddaughter in a refugee camp in the very early days of the negotiations. If that still doesn’t make him see reason, slaughter three of his sons and as many grandchildren in one go. Wait, he still fails to buckle and continues with his meeting right after hearing the news of the slaughter of his children and grandchildren? What an intrepid man!

These guys are certainly not made of the same stuff as you, which is one reason why dealing with them is so hard. You aren’t used to dealing with men of integrity, men on whom your boy Epstein had no kompromat, men who won’t compromise for the sake of cushy jobs for their sons in Ukraine despite zero qualifications.

But you persist. You sure know how to drive a hard bargain.

Try again. Now kill the chief negotiator’s sister with several members of his family. Gah! That lunatic still won’t buckle under all the pressure you are putting on him. You have by now killed over 60 members of his family in just 10 months, but he still refuses to give in.

By now you have tried everything and the counterparty have refused to budge from their principled stance of ensuring a permanent ceasefire, prisoner exchange, rebuilding of their enclave, and the return of their people to their homes, as part of the ceasefire deal.

For some reason, it won’t settle for your demands of continuing the butchery after getting all your hostages back. The audacity of those loons!

Now you have to make the move that will seal the ceasefire negotiation once and for all, and finally release all your hostages.

You deliver the coup de grâce: you kill the chief negotiator.

---

You can support my writing by buying me a coffee or two here: https://ko-fi.com/palestinewillbefree. You can also buy a monthly subscription at the same link. It will help me to continue this newsletter.

Additionally, you can show your support with a monthly/yearly/founder pledge. Thank you.

---