Six months out from November’s election, US President Joe Biden continues to flounder on a key foreign policy issue.
“We've made clear our views about operations in Rafah that could potentially put more than a million innocent people at greater risk,” said White House spokesman John Kirby Monday. “[Biden] also made clear that we continue to believe that the hostage deal was the best way to avoid that sort of an outcome while securing the release of those hostages.”
Days later, the IDF’s operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah continues with no apparent progress on a deal to bring it to an end.
The incident is characteristic of the White House’s relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed analyst Hasan Unal, which leaves the US president with the impossible task of attempting to please both pro-Palestine elements in his party and Israel’s far-right leadership. The professor of political science and international relations at Bashkent University joined Sputnik’s Fault Lines program Wednesday to discuss these latest developments and their strategic and humanitarian implications.
“I think Israel would've wanted to see Hamas rejecting any deal on that,” said Unal after reports emerged the Palestinian group had accepted a proposal negotiated with the help of the US, Egypt and Qatar. “That would have cleared the way for Israel, particularly the Netanyahu government, to undertake that awful military operation in Rafah… It has certainly placed Israel in a very difficult corner in that sense. So Hamas has won the tactical game.”
“That doesn't mean that that is going to stop Israel,” he explained. “Don't forget, the United States is the only country perhaps in the world that has so much leverage over Israel. On the one hand, yes, there is the Israeli lobby, which is very powerful in the United States. But at the same time the United States has enormous influence and leverage over Israel.”
Unal recounted the United States’ efforts to rein in Israel in the past, such as during 1956’s Suez Crisis in which the US, the Soviet Union, and international authorities ordered Israel to end its occupation of Egyptian territory in the Sinai Desert. The US again forced Israel into a compromise during the 1978 signing of the Camp David Accords and once again when former President Ronald Reagan ordered the country to end its bombing of Beirut in 1982.
In 1991 US Secretary of State James Baker succeeded in delaying US loan guarantees to Israel until it agreed to pause illegal settlement building in Gaza and the West Bank. Baker and former President George H.W. Bush faced strident opposition for the move from AIPAC and other pro-Israel interests.
Bush lost reelection the following year, and US leaders have shown little willingness to challenge Israel ever since.
But host Jamarl Thomas claimed Biden’s efforts to assuage Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have apparently won him little favor as the US president is caught between a dissatisfied base and an Israeli leadership that seems to regard him with contempt.
“He's not getting credit from Israel for all the support he's given,” said Thomas. “I mean that deranged speech that he gave yesterday as they are killing all these – I was watching pictures of babies hanging out of buildings from that attack and Joe Biden, at the exact same time, goes out and gives a speech bringing up the Holocaust as if what happened 50, 60 years ago justifies a genocide that's happening now.”
“He is trying to have his cake and eat it, too, and he is losing both,” he claimed. “Many of those people – the way that Israel sees it, and the way that the Israel lobby sees it – [think] that Joe Biden is abandoning Israel. That's the way they view it… any pressure that he puts on them at all is taken as a rebuttal of Israel as an outright item, despite the fact that his own party is hitting him for basically giving this complete allegiance to Israel.
“He's trying to do two things at once and is accomplishing neither.”
“He's not a good juggler,” Unal agreed. “He looks terribly confused as to what to do from the very beginning… Israel doesn't take the Biden administration seriously.”
“I think there is also the dimension of multipolarity,” he added, claiming that other global powers are playing an unprecedented role throughout the controversy. “For instance, in the past we never had China taking so much of an interest in what is going on in the Middle East and particularly in the Israelis and Palestinians.”
Beijing brokered a meeting of officials from Hamas and Fatah recently, attempting to achieve reconciliation between the two major groups representing Palestinian interests. Moscow hosted a similar summit in February, insisting on a solution to the long-running Palestine-Israel conflict with support from within the Arab world.
When Israel and Iran traded strikes against each other in April, the United States reportedly called for China to use its influence to prevent Tehran from retaliating for the attack on its consulate in Damascus. Observers noted that the incident demonstrates the rising influence of Moscow and Beijing as the United States’ hapless leader struggles to project power globally.