Why has America failed to broker a Middle East ceasefire?
6 hours ago
Tom Bateman
State Department correspondent
A year ago, after the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s offensive
in Gaza, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit Israel at a time of
war. I watched him fix his gaze at the TV cameras after meeting Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv, and
tell the country: “You are not alone”. But he also urged its leadership not
to repeat the mistakes an “enraged” America made after 9/11.
In September this year at the United Nations in New York, President Biden
led a global roll call of leaders urging restraint between Israel and
Hezbollah. Netanyahu gave his response. The long arm of Israel, he said,
could reach anywhere in the region.
Ninety minutes later, Israeli pilots fired American-supplied “bunker
buster” bombs at buildings in southern Beirut. The strike killed Hezbollah
leader Hassan Nasrallah. It marked one of the most significant turning
points in the year since Hamas unleashed its attack on Israel on 7
October.
Biden’s diplomacy was being buried in the ruins of an Israeli airstrike
using American-supplied bombs.
I’ve spent the best part of a year watching US diplomacy close up,
travelling in the press pool with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on
trips back to the Middle East, where I worked for seven years up until last
December.
The single greatest goal for diplomacy as stated by the Biden
administration has been to get a ceasefire for hostage release deal in
Gaza. The stakes could barely be higher. A year on from Hamas smashing
its way through the militarised perimeter fence into southern Israel where
they killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, scores of
hostages - including seven US citizens - remain in captivity, with a
significant number believed to be dead. In Gaza, Israel’s massive
retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to
figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, while the territory has been
reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and hunger.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The UN says record numbers of
aid workers have been killed in Israeli strikes, while humanitarian groups
have repeatedly accused Israel of blocking shipments - something its
government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to
the occupied West Bank and to Lebanon. Iran last week fired 180 missiles
at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed
Hezbollah group. The conflict threatens to deepen and envelop the region.
Wins and losses
Covering the US State Department, I have watched the Biden
administration attempt to simultaneously support and restrain Israeli
Prime Minister Netanyahu. But its goal of defusing the conflict and
brokering a ceasefire has eluded the administration at every turn.
Biden officials claim US pressure changed the “shape of their military
operations“, a likely reference to a belief within the administration that
Israel’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza’s south was more limited than it
otherwise would have been, even with much of the city now lying in ruins.
Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a single consignment of
2,000lb and 500lb bombs as he tried to dissuade the Israelis from an all-
out assault. But the president immediately faced a backlash from
Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu himself who appeared to
compare it to an “arms embargo”. Biden has since partially lifted the
suspension and never repeated it.
The State Department asserts that its pressure did get more aid flowing,
despite the UN reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year.
“It’s through the intervention and the involvement and the hard work of
the United States that we’ve been able to get humanitarian assistance into
those in Gaza, which is not to say that this is… mission accomplished. It is
very much not. It is an ongoing process,” says department spokesman
Matthew Miller.
In the region, much of Biden’s work has been undertaken by his chief
diplomat, Anthony Blinken. He has made ten trips to the Middle East since
October in breakneck rounds of diplomacy, the visible side of an effort
alongside the secretive work of the CIA at trying to close a Gaza ceasefire
deal between Israel and Hamas.
But I have watched multiple attempts to close the deal being spiked. On
Blinken’s ninth visit, in August, as we flew in a C-17 US military
transporter on a trip across the region, the Americans became
increasingly exasperated. A visit that started with optimism that a deal
could be within reach, ended with us arriving in Doha where Blinken was
told that the Emir of Qatar - whose delegation is critical in communicating
with Hamas - was ill and couldn’t see him.
A snub? We never knew for sure (officials say they later spoke by phone),
but the trip felt like it was falling apart after Netanyahu claimed he had
“convinced” Blinken of the need to keep Israeli troops along Gaza’s border
with Egypt as part of the agreement. This was a deal breaker for Hamas
and the Egyptians. A US official accused Netanyahu of effectively trying
to sabotage the agreement. Blinken flew out of Doha without having got
any further than the airport. The deal was going nowhere. We were going
back to Washington.
On his tenth trip to the region last month, Blinken did not visit Israel.
Superficial diplomacy?
For critics, including some former officials, the US call for an end to the
war while supplying Israel with at least $3.8bn (£2.9bn) of arms per year,
plus granting supplemental requests since 7 October, has amounted
either to a failure to apply leverage or an outright contradiction. They
argue the current expansion of the war in fact marks a demonstration,
rather than a failure, of US diplomatic policy.
“To say [the administration] conducted diplomacy is true in the most
superficial sense in that they conducted a lot of meetings. But they never
made any reasonable effort to change behaviour of one of the main actors
- Israel,” says former intelligence officer Harrison J. Mann, a career US
Army Major who worked in the Middle East and Africa section of the
Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the October 7th attacks. Mr
Mann resigned earlier this year in protest at US support for Israel’s assault
in Gaza and the number of civilians being killed using American weapons.
Allies of Biden flat-out reject the criticism. They point, for example, to the
fact that diplomacy with Egypt and Qatar mediating with Hamas resulted
in last November’s truce which saw more than 100 hostages released in
Gaza in exchange for around 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. US
officials also say the administration dissuaded the Israeli leadership from
invading Lebanon much earlier in the Gaza conflict, despite cross border
rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israel.
Senator Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist who sits on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee and who travelled to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia
late last year, says it’s critical to weigh Biden’s diplomacy against the
context of the last year.
“I think there's responsibility on both sides for a refusal to close the
distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that Hamas launched these
attacks,” he says.
“He has been successful in preventing an escalation - despite repeated
and aggressive provocation by the Houthis, by Hezbollah, by the Shia
militias in Iraq - and has brought in a number of our regional partners,” he
says.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says Biden’s diplomacy has
amounted to an unprecedented level of support, pointing to the huge US
military deployment, including aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear
power submarine, he ordered in the wake of October 7.
But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome the resistance of
Netanyahu.
“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not
to comply, so the main reason for the failure of this diplomacy was the
consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.
Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s
reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up
his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response
in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to
withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire
deal.
“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages
means a major threat to Netanyahu and he's not prepared to accept it, so
he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.
The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the
deal, insisting he was in favour of the American-backed plans and sought
only “clarifications”, while Hamas continually changed its demands.
A question of leverage
But whatever the shuttle diplomacy, much has turned on the relationship
between the US president and Netanyahu. The men have known each
other for decades, the dynamics have been often bitter, dysfunctional
even, but Biden’s positions predate even his relationship with the Israeli
prime minister.
Passionately pro-Israel, he often speaks of visiting the country as a young
Senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s
unerring support for the Jewish state - some citing it as a liability, others
as an asset.
Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest failure to use leverage
over Israel has been over the scale of bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year
of his only term, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, have
taken to American streets and university campuses denouncing his
policies, holding “Genocide Joe” banners.
Biden’s mindset, which underpins the administration’s position, was
shaped at a time when the nascent Israeli state was seen as being in
immediate existential peril, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said
Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New
York.
“American diplomacy has basically been, ‘whatever Israel's war demands
and requires we will give them to fight it’,” says Prof Khalidi.
“That means, given that this [Israeli] government wants an apparently
unending war, because they've set war aims that are unattainable -
[including] destroying Hamas - the United States is a cart attached to an
Israeli horse,” he says.
He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an
outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and
neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.
“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just
cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the slaughter in Gaza,
except through an Israeli lens,” he says.
Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed
scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different
outlook. “They know what the people putting stuff on Instagram and
TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.
Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next
month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come
with the same generational baggage.
However, neither Harris nor Trump has set out any specific plans beyond
what is already in process for how they would reach a deal. The election
may yet prove the next turning point in this sharply escalating crisis, but
quite how is not yet apparent.
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