Bullied by Benjamin?: Biden speaking on the phone with Netanyahu from the Oval Office in the White House in Washington. However, no real solutions seem to be coming out of these talks. — White House handout/Reuters
WHEN Israel defied America’s appeals for restraint by invading Lebanon, a reporter asked US President Joe Biden if he was comfortable with what had unfolded.
“I’m comfortable with them stopping,” Biden replied plaintively. “We should have a ceasefire now.” He walked away from the podium, grouchy, frustrated and impotent, a self-diminishing president.
It was the latest sign of how Biden keeps getting rolled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. As political scientist Ian Bremmer said of Biden’s words on the invasion: “Impact: zero.”
Instead of midwifing the landmark Middle East peace that he hoped for, Biden became the arms supplier for the levelling of the Gaza Strip – a war that killed more women and children in a single year than any other war in the past two decades, according to Oxfam.
Biden has been calling for restraint for a year, but he marginalised himself by continuously providing the weapons that allowed his appeals to be ignored. He appealed to the better angels of Netanyahu’s nature, but it’s not clear that they exist.
Biden restricted and conditioned US arms transfers to Ukraine but worried that doing the same to Israel might tempt Hezbollah to attack it. So Biden kept the arms flowing and never imposed serious restrictions on their use. This impunity emboldened Netanyahu to ignore Biden, and the upshot is that Biden has nurtured not a regional peace but, it seems, a regional war – with America at risk of being sucked in.
“In the Middle East, we clearly see a failure of policy,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, who admires Biden’s foreign policy in other respects. “And I think it’s ultimately rooted in the Biden administration’s unwillingness to effectively use American influence to achieve the president’s stated goals.”
“The problem we have here is the pattern,” Van Hollen added. “The pattern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu ignores the United States and he gets rewarded for it.”
Jan Eliasson, a former Swedish foreign minister and senior UN official, lamented, “It is painful to witness the continuous humiliation of the US president and government by Netanyahu.”
Policy failure
A year after the Oct 7 attacks, Biden’s Middle East policy appears to be a practical and moral failure. It could be a political failure as well, potentially hurting Vice President Kamala Harris in Michigan – and everywhere if a war with Iran lifts gas prices at the pump.
So what went wrong? How could a leader so intent on peace have presided over expanding war?
It wasn’t a failure of vision or of hard work. Biden concocted a grand plan for a multipart deal that would deliver a ceasefire in Gaza, normalisation of Saudi-Israeli relations, a path to a Palestinian state and a stronger Saudi-American relationship that would freeze China out of the region. But Biden was unwilling to forcefully use his leverage to get there, so Netanyahu ran rings around the president.
In the process, Netanyahu miraculously rehabilitated himself in Israeli politics, with a new poll suggesting that he is on track to be re-elected.
“We are winning,” Netanyahu said in an address to the United Nations last month. He now has Iran in his sights, declaring a few days later, “When Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think, everything will be different.”
Many worry that Netanyahu is leading Israel toward a war with Iran and aiming to bring the United States to the fight as well.
“In my view, Prime Minister Netanyahu has wanted to drag the US into a conflict with Iran for a very long time,” Van Hollen said.
I’ve previously argued that Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck, staining his legacy, but it keeps getting worse.
Costly war: Starving Palestinians scrambling to get food aid from a charity kitchen in Gaza. — Reuters
Among American hawks, there is dreamy talk about building a new Lebanon and reshaping the Middle East. But all that grandiosity reminds me of lofty talk a year ago about how Israel was going to destroy Hamas in a few months.
It likewise reminds me of the ebullient predictions 21 years ago that invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein would usher in a new age of democracy and tranquility.
“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu testified to Congress in 2002. “I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”
As Biden surely understands, there are more productive ways to reshape the Middle East. A ceasefire in Gaza would probably have ended the rocket fire from Lebanon and allowed Israelis to return to their homes in the north. The nuclear deal with Iran dismantled much of that country’s programme until Donald Trump withdrew from it. And ultimately the way to make Israel secure is to negotiate the birth of a Palestinian state.
Biden kept up the arms transfers to Israel even as he acknowledged that the result was sometimes “over the top” and “indiscriminate bombing” and even as his administration found that Israel’s use of American arms most likely violated international humanitarian law.
The Biden administration may also have broken US law, which requires a halt to weapons shipments to countries that block American humanitarian aid. ProPublica and Devex obtained a memo written by the US Agency for International Development concluding that Israel was obstructing aid, but Biden brushed those concerns aside.
Biden did not intend to be where he is now. On his first visit to a shattered Israel after the horror of the Oct 7 attacks, he expressed all the right empathy but also warned Israelis not to repeat mistakes that a bellicose America made after 9/11. He seems to have expected that Israel would show more restraint in Gaza than it did, that it would not starve Gaza residents and that the war would end by about year-end. He thought a bear hug of Netanyahu was the best way to get him to listen. Repeatedly, he suggested Israel and Hamas were close to a ceasefire deal.
In fairness, Biden was boxed in by domestic politics. It sometimes seems that half of Americans complain that he hasn’t done enough to restrain Israel, and the other half protest that he hasn’t been supportive enough.
Global loss
Biden’s failure to apply enough leverage – or perhaps even uphold American law – has damaged other interests the White House cares about, including support for Ukraine. Hypocrisy alerts go off in foreign capitals when American diplomats hail the “rules-based international order” and simultaneously provide the bombs that destroy Gaza civilian infrastructure and induce starvation.
One of Biden’s tremendous successes has been to build alliances in Asia to fence in China, but this is undermined by his Middle East policy. People in South-East Asian countries said in a poll that the war in Gaza is their No 1 geopolitical concern, and that if forced to choose between the US and China, their countries should side with China.
“America’s stature has been greatly diminished among its friends and allies,” Nabil Fahmy, a former Egyptian foreign minister, said, noting that other countries have been struck that “Israel has consistently and blatantly disregarded US requests.
“This will have long-term consequences as allies and friends look elsewhere.”
“We feel that the US’ blind support for Netanyahu is encouraging Israeli extremists and feeding their appetite to annex the West Bank to Israel,” said Issa Amro, an activist who has been described as a Palestinian Gandhi. “Palestinians in the West Bank are losing hope in the prospects for peace and losing faith in the two-state solution.”
In Gaza, more than 10,000 children have been killed and about 2,000 have had limbs amputated, according to a forthcoming report by Theirworld, a British charity that works on children’s issues. It adds that 40% of Gaza families are now taking care of a child who is not their own, and that 85% of Gaza children have gone a full day without food.
“Every day is a struggle living in tents surrounded by blood, muck, mud and rubble,” said Dr Sam Attar, an American physician who has volunteered on four surgical missions to Gaza hospitals during the war. “Every day is a breaking point for food and water.”
Mohammed Alshannat, a linguistics scholar in Gaza who admires democracies and believes that Muslims and Jews can live in harmony, has spent the past year struggling to keep his family alive. “There is no place safe and no food, clean water or medicines,” he emailed. “It is like sheep in a slaughterhouse.”
Meanwhile, Biden has ensured American weapons continue to shatter lives without clearly advancing American, Israeli or Arab interests. Ettie Higgins of Unicef in Lebanon told me about a 7-year-old Lebanese girl who lost 15 members of her family in an Israeli strike a few days ago. The girl lost her parents and all her siblings and suffered cuts and bruises herself.
I imagine her meeting Biden and asking: “Why did you provide bombs that kill families like mine?”
And I wonder how Biden, a good man who never wanted this war to happen and yet enabled it, would respond. —©2024 The New York Times Company
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about human rights, health and global affairs.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
