Biden Seeks Peace, But Netanyahu Promotes War, Leading to Iran War

 

Biden Seeks Peace, But Netanyahu Promotes War, Leading to Iran War

 

This is a full-text New York Times column criticizing President Biden’s rhetorical peace policy for a year, which has become a weapons supplier to Israel’s relentless escalation of war.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof has consistently contributed to the New York Times about Israel and Gaza.

The column can be summarized as follows: “Instead of achieving the groundbreaking Middle East peace he had hoped for, Biden has become the president who supplies weapons to ‘level the Gaza Strip,’ a war that has killed more women and children than any other war in the past 20 years.” The following is a partial supplement by the author to supplement the date and media of the quoted comments.

 

A few days ago, when Israel ignored America’s request for restraint by invading Lebanon, a reporter asked President Biden if he was comfortable with the situation that had unfolded.

 

“I’d be comfortable with them stopping,” Biden replied grumblingly. “There needs to be a ceasefire, now.” He has become a president who has walked away from the podium, whined, frustrated, helpless and self-deprecating.

It was the latest sign that Biden is continuing to be outpaced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Political scientist Ian Bremmer said Biden’s comments on the invasion of Ukraine had “zero (0) impact.”

Instead of achieving the groundbreaking Middle East peace he had hoped for, Biden has become a supplier of weapons to the Gaza Strip, a war that has killed more women and children than any other war in the past two decades, according to Oxfam.

Biden has been urging restraint for a year, but he has alienated himself by continuing to provide weapons that can defy his appeals. He has appealed to the better angels of Netanyahu’s nature, but it is not clear whether they exist.

Biden has limited and conditioned US arms transfers to Ukraine, but he has worried that doing the same for Israel could tempt Hezbollah to attack Israel. So Biden kept the arms supply flowing (at least one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs aside) and imposed no serious restrictions on their use.

This impunity has emboldened Netanyahu to ignore Biden, and the result is that Biden appears to be promoting a local war rather than regional peace, and the United States is at risk of being sucked into it.

“We are clearly seeing a failure of policy in the Middle East,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, a Biden foreign policy admirer, told me. “And I think it is ultimately rooted in the Biden administration’s unwillingness to effectively use American influence to achieve the president’s stated objectives.”

“The problem we have here is a pattern,” Hollen continued. “The pattern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu ignores the United States and is rewarded for it.” “It is painful to witness Prime Minister Netanyahu’s continued insults to the U.S. president and government,” former Swedish foreign minister and senior UN official Jan Eliasson wrote in X on Monday. “The prospect of a broader and far more terrifying war never frightens him. His strong belief in a military solution is a very dangerous gamble.”

 

As someone who knows and respects Biden, as someone who has seen his empathy, as someone who greatly admires his foreign policy team, and as someone who considers his diplomacy in East Asia to be exceptional, I cannot help but write this column.

A year after the terrorist attacks on October 7, Biden’s Middle East policy appears to be a practical and moral failure. It could also be a political failure, one that could potentially hurt Vice President Kamala Harris in Michigan, and one that could hurt everywhere if a war with Iran sends gasoline prices soaring.

So what went wrong? How could a leader who is so committed to peace preside over an escalation of war?

It is a matter of vision or It wasn’t a failure of effort. Biden laid out grand plans for a multilateral deal that would include a ceasefire in Gaza, normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations, a path toward a Palestinian state, and strengthening Saudi-American ties that would push China out of the region.

But Biden was reluctant to use his influence to forcefully achieve those goals, so Netanyahu hovered around the president.

In the process, Netanyahu made a miraculous comeback into Israeli politics, and new polls suggest he will be re-elected.

“We are winning,” Netanyahu said in a speech to the United Nations last month. He now has Iran in his sights, declaring a few days later that “when Iran is finally free, and that moment will come much sooner than people think, everything will be different.” (Netanyahu made the English-language video address on September 30, calling the regime that rules Iran “a fanatic” ("theocratics").

I have found, from my visits to Iran over the past 20 years, that the Iranian regime is brutally repressive, widely unpopular at home, and a vicious force in the region. But I am concerned that Netanyahu is trying to lead Israel into a war with Iran and is trying to drag the United States into that fight.

"For a very long time, I think, Prime Minister Netanyahu has wanted to drag the United States into a conflict with Iran," Senator Hollen said.

I have previously argued that Gaza has become an albatross around Biden's neck, a stain on his legacy, but the situation continues to deteriorate. There is a dreamlike talk among American hawks of building a new Lebanon and reshaping the Middle East. It is possible that the devastation of Hezbollah will buy Israel security for a time.

But all that grandiosity reminds me of the lofty talk of a year ago about how Israel would destroy Hamas in a matter of months. It also brings to mind the absurd predictions of a new era of democracy and peace that came 21 years ago when the Iraq invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein would be followed by a new era of democracy and peace.

“If you overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, I guarantee you that it will have a tremendous positive impact on the region,” Netanyahu testified to Congress in 2002. “I think the young people sitting right next to me in Iran and many others will say, ‘The era of such regimes, such dictators, is over.’”

Going back even further, my first reporting trip (as a law student and freelance journalist) was hitchhiking through Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982, under the name of Operation Peace in Galilee, with the goal of establishing a buffer zone in southern Lebanon and a friendly government in Beirut.

That invasion led to the quagmire sometimes called Israel’s Vietnam, and gave birth to Hezbollah.

Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Moussawi in 1992. There was a brief sense of triumph, but Al Musawi was replaced by Hassan Nasrallah, who proved a far more effective enemy of Israel.

To be blunt, I think the hawks have learned to roll their eyes when they promise that a small war will bring peace.

As Biden clearly understands, there are more productive ways to reshape the Middle East. A ceasefire in Gaza would 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 Iran’s nuclear program by the time Donald Trump withdrew. And ultimately, the path to making Israel safe is to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state.

Biden has acknowledged that the results have sometimes been “over the top” and “indiscriminate bombing,” and has continued arms transfers to Israel despite his administration’s judgment that Israel’s use of US weapons was most likely to violate international humanitarian law.

The Biden administration may have broken US law requiring that arms exports to countries that block US humanitarian aid be halted. ProPublica and Devex obtained a memo from the U.S. Agency for International Development concluding that Israel was blocking aid, and reported it on September 24, but Biden dismissed those concerns. (The headline at the time was, “Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two agencies conclude.”) Biden had no intention of staying where he is. On his first visit to a shattered Israel after the horrors of the October 7 attacks, he expressed the right sympathy for all that had happened, but also warned Israelis not to repeat the same mistakes the belligerent U.S. made after 9/11. He seemed to expect Israel to show more restraint in Gaza, not starve Gazans, and for the war to end by the end of the year. He figured the best way to get Netanyahu to listen was to give him a bear hug. He repeatedly suggested that Israel and Hamas were close to negotiating a ceasefire.

A metaphor that comes up a lot in diplomatic conversations is that Joe Biden is like Charlie Brown every time he tries to kick the soccer ball, and Netanyahu steals it, and sometimes Hamas steals the soccer ball too.

“How many times has the soccer ball been stolen before the game?” asked Josh Paul, a former State Department diplomat who resigned in protest of Biden’s Middle East policy.

Before Biden, other U.S. presidents were more willing to use arms transfers to Israel as leverage. Almost every president since Lyndon Johnson has threatened to withdraw weapons from Israel or give them up to gain leverage, Andrew P. Miller, a former senior State Department official, noted in Foreign Affairs. It hasn’t worked perfectly, but it has often forced Israel to begrudgingly move in ways that benefit the United States.

To be fair, Biden has been swayed by domestic politics. At times, half of Americans seem to complain that he hasn’t done enough to deter Israel, while the other half complain that he hasn’t been supportive enough.

And Biden has had legitimate concerns that a public spat between the United States and Israel could embolden Hezbollah and Iran.

Did Israel, reeling from the shock of the past year, respond to such pressure? Or was it rebellious to Netanyahu’s presentation of himself as Israel’s defender from American bullying?

It’s hard to know for sure, but experts say the Israel Defense Forces would be sensitive to delays in the transfer of weapons or spare parts, and would pressure Israeli politicians to heal their rift with the United States. Biden also has a unique latitude to wield this influence because he is widely respected as a true friend in Israel. In a poll last spring, two-thirds of Israeli Jews said they were confident Biden would do the right thing in world affairs.

Biden’s failure to exert enough influence, or even to uphold American law, has undermined other interests the White House has had, including aid to Ukraine. When American diplomats praise the “rules-based international order” while simultaneously delivering bombs that destroy civilian infrastructure and cause starvation in Gaza, foreign capital is sounding the alarm about hypocrisy.

One of Biden’s great successes has been building alliances in Asia to contain China, but this is being undermined by his Middle East policy. People in Southeast Asian countries say in opinion polls that the Gaza war is their number one geopolitical concern and that if forced to choose between the US and China, their country should side with China.

“America’s standing among friends and allies has fallen significantly,” said Nabil Fahmi, a former Egyptian foreign minister, adding that other countries have been shocked by Israel’s “consistent and blatant disregard for American requests.”

“This will have long-term consequences as allies and friends look elsewhere,” Fahmi added.

We must recognize that events in the Middle East or elsewhere will take us nowhere. Many doves were wrong to question the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and many hawks were wrong to embrace the 2003 Iraq War. From my perspective, I was right to oppose the Iraq War, but I was wrong to oppose the Iraq War four years later. But a year after the October 7 attacks, we know a few things. Israeli and American hostages are being held in Gaza. Hamas has been significantly weakened in Gaza, but not destroyed. Hamas may have found support in the increasingly explosive West Bank. “We feel that America’s blind support for Netanyahu is fueling Israeli extremists and their desire to annex the West Bank,” said Issa Amro, an activist described as a Palestinian Gandhi. “Palestinians in the West Bank are losing hope for peace and faith in a two-state solution.” More than 10,000 children have been killed and about 2,000 have had limbs amputated in Gaza, according to a forthcoming report by the British charity Theirworld, which focuses on children’s issues. It also found that 40 percent of Gaza families are caring for children other than their own, and 85 percent of Gaza children go without food all day long.

“We live in tents surrounded by blood, mud and rubble, and every day is a struggle,” said Dr. Sam Attar, an American doctor who volunteered to perform four surgical operations at a Gaza hospital during the war. “Every day is a limit to food and water.”

Mohammed Alshannat, a Gaza linguist who advocates democracy and believes Muslims and Jews can live in harmony, has struggled to keep his family afloat for the past year. “There is no safety, no food, no clean water, no medicine,” he wrote in an email. “It’s like sheep in the slaughterhouse.”

And what is the purpose? I see Israel winning real tactical victories in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, but it’s not clear where this leads except to a political victory for Netanyahu.

“Tactical success, but what is the strategy?” asks Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute. “What is the strategy the day after?” That’s the question Netanyahu still has not answered.

Israelis are clearly no safer than they were a year ago, Lebanese and Palestinians are clearly less safe. US troops are vulnerable in their Middle Eastern bases, and ships are at risk off the coast of Yemen. There is no peace in sight, and there are no access roads to Gaza, Lebanon or the West Bank. It’s as if Biden and Netanyahu are trapped on the set of Sartre’s existentialist play “No Exit.”

“We have no plan, no criteria but death,” laments Israeli scholar Ori Goldberg.

Meanwhile, Biden has ensured that US weapons continue to destroy lives without clearly advancing US, Israeli or Arab interests. Ettie Higgins of UNICEF in Lebanon spoke a few days ago about a 7-year-old Lebanese girl who lost 15 of her family members in an Israeli attack. She lost her parents, siblings, and was left with bruises and cuts herself. I imagine her meeting Biden and asking, “Why did you provide the bombs that killed my family?” And I wonder how Biden, a good man who never wanted this war to happen but made it possible, will respond.