Why has the United States failed to broker a ceasefire in the Middle East?

A year ago, Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to visit Israel during wartime after the Oct. 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza. I watched him stare into the television cameras and tell the nation: “You are not alone” after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv. But he also urged his leadership not to repeat the mistakes of an “angry” America after 9/11.

In September, President Biden hosted a roll call of global leaders at the United Nations in New York, urging Israel and Hezbollah to exercise restraint. Netanyahu responded. Israel’s long arm can reach anywhere in the region, he said.

Ninety minutes later, Israeli pilots fired U.S.-supplied “bunker buster” bombs at buildings in southern Beirut. The attack killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. This is one of the most important turning points in the year since Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7.

Biden’s diplomacy is buried among the rubble of Israeli airstrikes using U.S.-supplied bombs.

I spent the best part of a year observing U.S. diplomacy up close, working with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at press conferences back in the Middle East, where I worked for seven years until last December.

The Biden administration has stated that the biggest goal of diplomacy is to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to release hostages. The stakes couldn’t be higher. A year after Hamas broke through the militarized fence into southern Israel, where they killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, dozens of hostages, including seven U.S. citizens, are still being held, many of whom are believed to be of people have died. In Gaza, Israel’s massive retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas health ministry, and the territory has been reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and starvation.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The United Nations says a record number of aid workers have been killed in Israeli attacks, while humanitarian groups have repeatedly accused Israel of blocking shipments, something the Israeli government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to the occupied West Bank and Lebanon. Iran fired 180 missiles at Israel last week in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah, the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah. The conflict threatens to deepen and surround the region.

I see in State Department reports that the Biden administration is trying to simultaneously support and constrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But its goals of defusing the conflict and brokering a ceasefire failed each time.

Biden officials claimed that U.S. pressure had changed “the shape of their military operations,” possibly referring to a belief within the administration that Israel’s incursion into Rafah in southern Gaza would be more limited than it otherwise would have been, even with the city’s large Some areas are now paralyzed and in ruins.

Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a shipment of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs in an attempt to dissuade the Israelis from launching a full-scale offensive. But the president immediately faced strong opposition from Republicans in Washington and Netanyahu himself, who appeared to compare it to an “arms embargo.” Biden has since partially lifted the pause and never repeated it.

The U.S. State Department claimed that its pressure did lead to more aid flowing in, despite the United Nations reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year. “It is through U.S. intervention, engagement and hard work that we have been able to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and this is not to say that this … mission is accomplished. It is not. This is an ongoing process,” the department said. said spokesman Matthew Miller.

Much of Biden’s work in the region falls to his top diplomat, Antony Blinken. He has traveled to the Middle East ten times since October, conducting several dangerous rounds of diplomacy, working alongside covert CIA efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

But I have witnessed multiple attempts to complete the deal being met with fire. As we flew through the region on a U.S. C-17 military transport aircraft during Blinken’s ninth visit in August, Americans grew increasingly exasperated. The trip began with optimism that a deal could be reached and ended with us arriving in Doha, where Blinken was informed that the emir of Qatar – whose delegation plays a crucial role in communicating with Hamas – was ill. , unable to see him.

Neglected? We’ll never know for sure (officials said they spoke by phone later), but the trip came after Netanyahu claimed he had “convinced” Blinken of the need to keep Israeli troops on Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of a deal It feels like a breakdown. This is a deal-breaker for Hamas and the Egyptians. One U.S. official accused Netanyahu of actually trying to undermine the deal. Blinken took off from Doha and did not arrive at the airport. The deal went nowhere. We’re going back to Washington.

Blinken made his tenth trip to the region last month but did not visit Israel.

For critics, including some former officials, the United States, while calling for an end to the war, is providing Israel with at least $3.8 billion (£2.9 billion) in weapons a year, plus additional requests approved since October 7. This either amounts to a failure to apply leverage or is a complete contradiction. They argue that the expansion of the current war actually marks a manifestation, not a failure, of U.S. foreign policy.

“To say [the administration] The diplomacy that took place was real in the most superficial sense, in that they held a lot of meetings. But they never made any reasonable effort to change the behavior of one of the major players, Israel,” said Harrison J. Mann, a former intelligence official. He was a career U.S. Army major who served in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Middle East and Africa Division. Mann resigned earlier this year in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s attack on Gaza and the massive civilian deaths caused by U.S. weapons.

Biden allies flatly reject the criticism. For example, they pointed out that through diplomatic mediation with Egypt and Qatar, Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement last November that released more than 100 hostages in Gaza in exchange for about 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. U.S. officials also said the U.S. government early in the conflict in Gaza dissuaded Israeli leadership from invading Lebanon, despite cross-border rocket attacks between Hezbollah and Israel.

Sen. Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who visited Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia late last year, said that judging by the context of last year Biden’s diplomacy is critical.

“I think both sides have a responsibility to refuse to close the distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that Hamas launched these attacks,” he said.

“Despite repeated aggressive provocations by the Houthis, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias, he has succeeded in preventing escalation and engaging some of our regional partners,” he said.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Biden’s diplomatic support has reached an unprecedented level, noting that the United States ordered a large-scale military deployment on October 7, including an aircraft carrier strike group and nuclear-powered submarines.

But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome Netanyahu’s resistance.

“Every time he comes close to this goal, Netanyahu finds reasons not to comply, so the main reason for this diplomatic failure is Netanyahu’s consistent opposition,” Olmert said.

Olmert said a stumbling block to a ceasefire was Netanyahu’s reliance on “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who support his government. They are agitating for a stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. This summer, two far-right ministers threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire.

“Ending the war as part of the hostage release agreement represented a major threat to Netanyahu, and he was not prepared to accept it, so he violated the agreement and he kept screwing up,” he said.

Israel’s prime minister has repeatedly denied suggestions he is blocking the deal, insisting he supports the U.S.-backed plan and is only seeking “clarification” while Hamas keeps changing its demands.

But regardless of shuttle diplomacy, much has changed in the relationship between the U.S. president and Netanyahu. The men have known each other for decades and the relationship is often painful and even dysfunctional, but Biden’s stance predates even his relationship with the Israeli prime minister.

He passionately supported Israel and often spoke of his visit to the country as a young senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s staunch support for the Jewish state — some seeing it as a liability, others seeing it as an asset.

Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest failure in exerting influence over Israel is the scale of the bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year of his only term in office, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, took to the streets and college campuses across the United States, carrying “Genocide Joe” banners and denouncing his policies.

Edward Said Rashid Khalidi, professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University in New York, said Biden’s mentality was developed at a time when the emerging state of Israel was seen as facing immediate existential danger; support the government’s position.

“U.S. diplomacy is basically, ‘Whatever Israel’s war requires, we will give them what they want,'” Professor Khalidi said.

“This means that given the [Israeli] The government wanted an apparently never-ending war because they set unattainable war goals – [including] Destroy Hamas – America is a cart hooked to an Israeli horse,” he said.

He believes Biden’s approach to the current conflict is shaped by outdated notions of the balance of power in the region and ignores the experience of stateless Palestinians.

“I think Biden is caught in a longer-term time warp. He just can’t see things like … 57 years of occupation, the massacre in Gaza, except through an Israeli lens,” he said.

Professor Khalidi said that now a generation of young Americans are witnessing the scenes in Gaza on social media, and many have very different views. “They know what people in Gaza are showing them by posting on Instagram and TikTok,” he said.

Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor, will face Donald Trump, 78, as the Democratic nominee in next month’s presidential election, but she There’s not the same generational baggage.

However, neither Harris nor Trump has laid out any concrete plans beyond the deal they already have in place. The election could be the next turning point in a rapidly escalating crisis, but exactly how it will turn is unclear.

Main image source: Getty

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