THE PATTERN OF BIBI’S DESPERATE PROPOSALS

What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a wreath-laying ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on May 6. / Photo by Amir Cohen/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.

The conversion of my friend Ellsberg, who died last June of cancer, from avid supporter of and adviser on the Vietnam War to perhaps its most important critic is well known. One of Dan’s major obsessions was with American leadership, specifically with the perversity of President Lyndon Johnson continuing to fight a war that many of his closest advisers knew could not be won. 

I thought of Dan after learning here in Washington that Israel’s—make that Benjamin Netanyahu’s—latest incursion into Rafah would be an all-out ‘go’ unless the Hamas negotiating team, now in Cairo, provides proof of the well-being of the thirty-three Israeli hostages said to be in its control. Without such proof, I was told by a senior American official, it will be “end game on.”