Opinion: Why President Biden hasn't been able to end Israel's year-old war in Gaza
Raphael S. Cohen
Fri, October 4, 2024 at 4:00 AM MDT·4 min read
The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a crowded tent camp for Palestinians displaced by the war in Muwasi, in the Gaza Strip. (Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press)
As the world prepares to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and the ensuing war is set to drag into a second year with intense fighting on another front, many Americans are wondering why President Biden has been unable to end the conflict.
Contrary to plenty of commentary, it certainly has not been for lack of trying.
Since the war broke out, Biden has visited Israel and had a host of conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made at least 10 trips to Israel. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has also made multiple visits to the country since Oct. 7 and had seemingly countless talks with his counterpart, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This is all on top of lower-ranking U.S. officials’ continuous efforts to engage with Israel.
And yet for all the time and effort the Biden administration has expended, it has failed to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Meanwhile, the threat of a wider war loomed again this week as Iran launched a missile attack on Israel in retaliation for the escalation of its conflict with the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Read more: Opinion: Israel's growing war with Hezbollah is traumatizing Lebanon. There's only one path to peace
The Biden administration is hardly alone in its struggle to find diplomatic common ground in the Middle East. Ever since the Oslo accords some three decades ago, a series of American administrations have tried and failed to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
At the same time, although Americans may want wars to be short and relatively restrained, they rarely are. The unfortunate battlefield reality is that any war against a group such as Hamas — with its estimated 30,000 fighters and hundreds of miles of tunnels embedded in one of the most densely populated places on Earth — was going to be a long, bloody slog. There is very little that anyone — even an American president — can do to change that.
Biden’s critics counter that the administration could put more pressure on Netanyahu to force a cease-fire. They note that Israel receives billions of dollars' worth of American military aid and depends on American diplomatic cover. They say that provides sufficient leverage to force Netanyahu’s hand. But does it?
Read more: Opinion: This is Biden's chance to end the war in Gaza. Just threaten to cut off weapons for Israel
In practice, the United States often has less influence over its allies than one might think. Historically, economic sanctions have a poor track record of forcing major concessions, particularly when existential security matters are at stake — which, in Israel’s case, they are. Indeed, threats to sanction the hard-right elements of Netanyahu’s coalition have yet to produce any sort of moderation. At the same time, the International Criminal Court’s announcement that it would seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant produced what few other policies could: It united Israel’s fractured political spectrum around the current government.
Even if U.S. pressure were effective enough to motivate the Netanyahu government to try to end the war, it still might not succeed. Ending the war, after all, would require the cooperation of both Israel and Hamas — and more specifically Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who shows no signs of budging.
Sinwar could unilaterally declare a cease-fire, release all the remaining Israeli hostages and deny Israel one of its core justifications for the war. But Hamas seems intent on executing hostages and otherwise doubling down on the hostilities. Presumably, despite all the devastation and suffering in Gaza, Sinwar on some level still believes that he is winning.
Even if America had successfully secured a bilateral cease-fire, it would be unlikely to produce a lasting peace. Indeed, all the structural and political reasons that have prevented peace for decades remain.
Because Israel would have to free hundreds of militants serving life sentences for murder in exchange for the release of remaining hostages, Hamas’ ranks would swell during a cease-fire. Eventually the battered organization would rebuild and strike again. Moreover, regional spoilers — most notably Iran — view a continuing proxy conflict with Israel as being in their strategic interest.
A year in, the Biden administration’s diplomatic offensive has yielded some modest results. The rate of casualties — even as reported by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry — has slowed. Aid to Gaza’s civilians, albeit insufficient, is flowing. More than three-fifths of the hostages taken on Oct. 7 have either been freed or recovered, although 97 have not. And, most important, a full-blown, regional Middle East war — widely feared at several junctures over the last year — has been averted, at least for the moment.
All that is admittedly cold comfort to the Palestinians caught in the crossfire, the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza and the growing displaced populations of southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
In the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Americans have become far more aware of the bounds of what military power can achieve. But other tools of national power, including diplomacy, have their limits too. Outside mediators can’t end this war, particularly if the combatants themselves don’t want to stop fighting.
Raphael S. Cohen is the director of the strategy and doctrine program at Rand Project Air Force and of the national security program at the Pardee Rand Graduate School.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Raphael S. Cohen
Fri, October 4, 2024 at 4:00 AM MDT·4 min read
The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a crowded tent camp for Palestinians displaced by the war in Muwasi, in the Gaza Strip. (Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press)
As the world prepares to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack and the ensuing war is set to drag into a second year with intense fighting on another front, many Americans are wondering why President Biden has been unable to end the conflict.
Contrary to plenty of commentary, it certainly has not been for lack of trying.
Since the war broke out, Biden has visited Israel and had a host of conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made at least 10 trips to Israel. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has also made multiple visits to the country since Oct. 7 and had seemingly countless talks with his counterpart, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This is all on top of lower-ranking U.S. officials’ continuous efforts to engage with Israel.
And yet for all the time and effort the Biden administration has expended, it has failed to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Meanwhile, the threat of a wider war loomed again this week as Iran launched a missile attack on Israel in retaliation for the escalation of its conflict with the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Read more: Opinion: Israel's growing war with Hezbollah is traumatizing Lebanon. There's only one path to peace
The Biden administration is hardly alone in its struggle to find diplomatic common ground in the Middle East. Ever since the Oslo accords some three decades ago, a series of American administrations have tried and failed to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
At the same time, although Americans may want wars to be short and relatively restrained, they rarely are. The unfortunate battlefield reality is that any war against a group such as Hamas — with its estimated 30,000 fighters and hundreds of miles of tunnels embedded in one of the most densely populated places on Earth — was going to be a long, bloody slog. There is very little that anyone — even an American president — can do to change that.
Biden’s critics counter that the administration could put more pressure on Netanyahu to force a cease-fire. They note that Israel receives billions of dollars' worth of American military aid and depends on American diplomatic cover. They say that provides sufficient leverage to force Netanyahu’s hand. But does it?
Read more: Opinion: This is Biden's chance to end the war in Gaza. Just threaten to cut off weapons for Israel
In practice, the United States often has less influence over its allies than one might think. Historically, economic sanctions have a poor track record of forcing major concessions, particularly when existential security matters are at stake — which, in Israel’s case, they are. Indeed, threats to sanction the hard-right elements of Netanyahu’s coalition have yet to produce any sort of moderation. At the same time, the International Criminal Court’s announcement that it would seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant produced what few other policies could: It united Israel’s fractured political spectrum around the current government.
Even if U.S. pressure were effective enough to motivate the Netanyahu government to try to end the war, it still might not succeed. Ending the war, after all, would require the cooperation of both Israel and Hamas — and more specifically Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who shows no signs of budging.
Sinwar could unilaterally declare a cease-fire, release all the remaining Israeli hostages and deny Israel one of its core justifications for the war. But Hamas seems intent on executing hostages and otherwise doubling down on the hostilities. Presumably, despite all the devastation and suffering in Gaza, Sinwar on some level still believes that he is winning.
Even if America had successfully secured a bilateral cease-fire, it would be unlikely to produce a lasting peace. Indeed, all the structural and political reasons that have prevented peace for decades remain.
Because Israel would have to free hundreds of militants serving life sentences for murder in exchange for the release of remaining hostages, Hamas’ ranks would swell during a cease-fire. Eventually the battered organization would rebuild and strike again. Moreover, regional spoilers — most notably Iran — view a continuing proxy conflict with Israel as being in their strategic interest.
A year in, the Biden administration’s diplomatic offensive has yielded some modest results. The rate of casualties — even as reported by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry — has slowed. Aid to Gaza’s civilians, albeit insufficient, is flowing. More than three-fifths of the hostages taken on Oct. 7 have either been freed or recovered, although 97 have not. And, most important, a full-blown, regional Middle East war — widely feared at several junctures over the last year — has been averted, at least for the moment.
All that is admittedly cold comfort to the Palestinians caught in the crossfire, the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza and the growing displaced populations of southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
In the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Americans have become far more aware of the bounds of what military power can achieve. But other tools of national power, including diplomacy, have their limits too. Outside mediators can’t end this war, particularly if the combatants themselves don’t want to stop fighting.
Raphael S. Cohen is the director of the strategy and doctrine program at Rand Project Air Force and of the national security program at the Pardee Rand Graduate School.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Tracy Wilkinson
Fri, October 4, 2024
Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, a suburb of Beirut, on Oct. 3, 2024. (Hassan Ammar / Associated Press)
The relationship between Israel and its closest and most reliable ally, the United States, has started to feel like a case of unrequited love.
Despite being sidelined repeatedly by Israel over the last year, the Biden administration keeps up its nearly unquestioning support — even as Israel all but ignores American efforts to contain the violence and rein in its behavior.
This week, the U.S. government is publicly backing Israel’s march into southern Lebanon, the first such incursion in nearly two decades. The U.S. also supports Israel’s anticipated retaliation against Iran after Tehran’s bombardment of its archrival this week. Both actions could easily push the region into all-out war, a conflict Washington says it doesn’t want.
U.S. officials insist they are working to avert a wider war. But they have little to show for the effort so far. It wasn’t always so hard.
The United States gives Israel around $3 billion a year in aid and much of it in weapons: 2,000-pound bombs, sophisticated air-defense systems, even ammunition. The two countries have long shared intelligence, political goals and foreign policy agendas, and successive U.S. administrations have had considerable sway over Israel and its decisions that had global effects.
An Israeli Apache helicopter releases flares near the border with Lebanon, as seen from northern Israel on Oct. 2, 2024. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
That ability appears to have waned in the last year, for a variety of reasons, some less obvious than others.
The unprecedented scale — and horror — of the Oct. 7 attack is one.
A year ago, Hamas-led militants based in the Gaza Strip swept into southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, maiming many more and kidnapping around 250.
Before that, the Biden administration had kept its distance from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because of its radically racist anti-Arab, anti-democratic members. Netanyahu had also been exploiting U.S. partisan politics in recent years, openly courting GOP favor and eschewing the usual Israeli policy of staying neutral in American politics.
After Oct. 7, there was a outpouring of support from the United States. President Biden hopped on Air Force One to pledge American backing. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, evoking his own Jewish faith, traveled to Israel 10 times in as many months, trying to address concerns and contain the potential violence.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrives in Amman, Jordan, in January, one of his many visits to the Middle East during the Israel-Hamas war. (Evelyn Hockstein / Associated Press)
Netanyahu appears to have read that early administration response as a near-blanket endorsement for an open-ended invasion of Gaza. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in that assault, Gaza officials estimate. The authorities do not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.
“The Israelis saw this as essentially a green light,” said Steven Cook, a senior fellow specializing in the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.
At the same time, Israelis, and particularly Netanyahu, have increasingly resisted pressure and advice from the Biden administration when it comes to dealing with Palestinians and other perceived security threats, exerting greater independence.
“Over a period of time, the Israelis have come to believe that the administration has not given them good advice [and] they are determined ... to change the rules of the game,” Cook said.
Increasingly emboldened, Netanyahu repeatedly outplayed and misled U.S. officials, according to people with knowledge of talks aimed at halting hostilities and freeing Israeli hostages.
After having laid waste to much of northern and central Gaza, Israel promised U.S. officials it would not do the same in the southern city of Rafah, where a million Palestinians were sheltering.
Yet as each day passed in the spring, Israeli airstrikes gradually chopped away at Rafah. In recent months, U.S. officials say Netanyahu backed out of cease-fire agreements for Gaza even as some of his spokespeople, such as Ron Dermer, who has the ear of U.S. officials, said Israel was on board.
Just last week, Biden administration officials frantically sought a 21-day cease-fire in Lebanon, backed by France and others. They thought they had secured Israel’s agreement.
Then Netanyahu landed in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly and made clear he would press ahead unfettered in his offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 27, 2024. (Richard Drew / Associated Press)
In turning a deaf ear to U.S. entreaties, Netanyahu seems to be taking advantage of Biden’s emotional affinity for Israel and of the political timing that ties the lame-duck president’s hands.
Biden is among the last of the old-school U.S. congressional lawmakers who were reared in the post-Holocaust period where an emerging Israel struggled for its survival against greater Arab powers and won. It seemed a noble cause, and Biden frequently has expressed his undying love for the “Jewish state.”
Fast forward to this season just weeks away from a monumental U.S. presidential election, and Netanyahu probably calculates that Biden will not move forcefully to make demands on Israel when it could cost the Democratic ticket votes in a razor-edge close vote.
“American leverage, and Biden’s leverage in particular, is very small at this point,” said Rosemary Kelanic, a political scientist specializing in the Middle East, now at Defense Priorities, an antiwar Washington advocacy group.
“Politically, it’s really difficult to do anything that seems like it’s changing American foreign policy right before an election,” she said.
Even the most minimal challenges to Israel — such as sanctions on Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank who kill and harass Palestinians, or the brief suspension of 1-ton bombs being lobbed on Gazan population centers — have generated backlash from the Republican right wing.
“We call on the Biden-Harris administration to end its counterproductive calls for a cease-fire and its ongoing diplomatic pressure campaign against Israel,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
By moving aggressively in Lebanon now, Israel may be betting it can operate more freely in the political vacuum created by the U.S. election.
A view from northern Israel of the aftermath of an Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon on Oct. 3, 2024. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
“I see the Israelis pushing to change the facts on the ground as much as they can” before the U.S. election, said Mike DiMino, a longtime CIA analyst based in the Middle East.
In addition to potentially occupying southern Lebanon while the U.S. is preoccupied with an election, Israel could also force the next U.S. president to confront a regional conflict that also involves Iran, experts say.
Netanyahu “has long wished for a big military escalation with Iran that would force the Americans to join, and perhaps to attack Iran directly,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “The circumstances are ripening in a way they never have before.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Christian villages were neutral in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. That didn't save them
Nabih Bulos
Thu, October 3, 2024
Smoke rises after an Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon on Thursday. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
For much of the last year, as Hezbollah and Israel traded blows in an escalating tit-for-tat, the predominantly Christian village of Ain Ebel remained mostly out of the crossfire: Hezbollah cadres didn’t use the village as staging ground for attacks, and Israeli warplanes and artillery avoided striking it.
And while Hezbollah-aligned parts of southern Lebanon emptied of residents as the violence increased, many Christians in Ain Ebel and other mixed-religion towns and villages in the region stayed put.
That changed this week when Israel began its ground invasion. About 11 a.m. Tuesday, according to Ain Ebel Mayor Imad Lallous, calls started coming in to residents from the Israeli military, telling them they should evacuate immediately and not return until further notice.
An Israeli tank maneuvers in northern Israel near the Israel-Lebanon border on Monday. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
“They told me, as the mayor, I should inform everyone to leave. But we have nothing to do with the fighting, we don’t have any political parties here, no Hezbollah, nothing,” Lallous said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Hours later, an evacuation order came on social media for more than 20 towns and villages, including Ain Ebel.
Much of Lebanon’s south falls under the de facto rule of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite paramilitary faction and political party that the U.S. and Israel deem a terrorist organization. The Shiite majority in the area champion Hezbollah, crediting it for ending Israel’s 18-year occupation in 2000.
Read more: Iran launches missiles at Israel amid ground invasion of Lebanon
But scattered across this region’s tree-covered mountains, tobacco fields and orchards of apples and figs are predominantly Sunni, Christian and Druze towns and villages — most of which are at best ambivalent toward Hezbollah.
Many insisted on neutrality when the Iran-backed group began launching rockets across the border into Israel last year on Oct. 8, a day after allied, Gaza-based Hamas militants attacked southern Israel.
That neutrality has not spared those communities in recent weeks, as Israel has ramped up its assault on Hezbollah with thousands of airstrikes on wide swaths of the country and now a ground incursion.
Smoke rises following Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel on Wednesday. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
Read more: Even before the Israeli ground invasion, Hezbollah was struggling to regroup
Israel says it’s attacking Hezbollah positions, arms caches and infrastructure scattered all over Lebanon’s south. It also accuses Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields, an allegation the group denies.
On Monday, an Israeli strike hit Ibl al-Saqi, another Christian village on the border, wounding the priest there along with several others. The day before that, two missiles knocked down a pair of residential towers in the mixed Muslim-Christian village of Ein al Delb near Sidon, killing 45 people and wounding 58 others, authorities said.
A tally of casualties issued by the Lebanese Health Ministry since Israel began its escalated assault on Hezbollah in September puts the death toll at more than 1,300; it's unclear how many of the dead are Hezbollah fighters, but the toll includes hundreds of women and children, the ministry said.
A wounded girl lies in a hospital bed in the southern village of Saksakieh, Lebanon, on Sept. 24. (Mohammed Zaatari / Associated Press)
Read more: Israel and Iran exchange threats as combat surges in southern Lebanon
That’s why Lallous didn’t consider ignoring the Israeli order. “I couldn’t take the risk,” he said.
By nighttime Tuesday, the village of Ain Ebel was almost completely deserted, with only a handful of residents staying behind while the others fled to a monastery in the nearby Christian village of Rmeish.
“Why did they tell us to leave? I don’t know. I’m as confused as anyone about this,” Lallous said, a note of exasperation in his voice.
Read more: Even before the Israeli ground invasion, Hezbollah was struggling to regroup
As it stands, it was just in time, said Father George Al-Amil, a Maronite priest in Ain Ebel. At 4 a.m. Wednesday, a missile hit a house in the village.
“It was empty and its residents are anyway not in the country,” he said, speaking from Rmeish.
“No one understands why this is happening. We’ve never seen any movement from Hezbollah in these areas.”
An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires a shell from northern Israel toward Lebanon on Wednesday. (Baz Ratner / Associated Press)
The Israeli military did not respond to questions about the evacuations of Ain Ebel and the targeting of other communities.
Confusion has been the dominant emotion among those who left Ain Ebel, joining what authorities say are an estimated 1.2 million Lebanese displaced in the last week. Many are angry, saying that Israel’s actions ensure their homes will become part of the battlefield.
Read more: Airstrike in Lebanon kills pregnant woman, children near border with Israel
That’s what happened in 2006, when the village was the site of clashes between Hezbollah and Israel during a 34-day war, leaving homes destroyed, fields burned and residents besieged with no bread for 20 days. Others echo that point, and reject the Israeli military’s repeated assertion that Hezbollah is using villagers as human shields.
“No one is using us as human shields. If anything, people stay behind to shield the village,” said Jasmin Lilian Diab, who is from Ain Ebel and is director of the Institute of Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University.
She said trauma from earlier conflicts colors how villagers view this one. As a child during Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon, she remembered driving through an Israeli checkpoint to go home, and of hiding under her bed for days during the 2006 war.
“An important reason people don’t leave is also the fear of not being able to return,” she said.
“‘People ask, ‘What if I leave my home tonight, and then like in so many conflicts, we never get to come back? What if I leave my village tonight and it's no longer accessible to me in the morning?’ ”
Diab acknowledged that she, like others from Ain Ebel and areas uninvolved with Hezbollah, had a “complicated relationship” with the group and its entry into a war without the Lebanese people’s consent. But, she said, the anger is “more towards Israel as an occupier.”
Similar fears of history repeating itself are growing in Marjayoun, a Christian town about five miles from the Israeli border and once the headquarters of the now defunct South Lebanon Army, a militia Israel funded to help its troops police occupied parts of southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s.
Read more: What to know about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, which could bring unprecedented destruction
The Lebanese group, working in concert with Israeli soldiers, was accused of torturing and killing compatriots, forcibly conscripting males over the age of 15 and uprooting families who refused.
On Thursday, after the Israeli military expanded its evacuation list to encompass 20 additional towns and villages, including those stretching north of a United Nations-mandated buffer zone, people in Marjayoun — which thus far has not been included in any evacuation order — girded themselves for a war coming ever closer.
“We’ve heard so many bombs here, even a child can distinguish the sounds now,” said Hassan Al-Abla, a 78-year-old retiree still in Marjayoun. As he was speaking, a bass-drum thump sounded in the air. He raised a finger. “Hear that? That’s the firing sound. Now you’ll hear the impact,” he said. A beat later came a louder bang and a column of smoke rose over a nearby mountain. Al-Abla gave a wan smile.
“See what I mean?" he asked. "This is how it is all the time now."
In the morning hours before the evacuation order for towns and villages near Marjayoun, roads to the north were mostly deserted, except for a few cars barreling past at high speed. During a journey through towns and villages on the road back to the coast from Marjayoun, most places showed no signs of life: no vehicles, no people, only a single stray cat streaking across the road.
The sense of isolation is growing, said Archbishop Elias Kfoury, the Greek Orthodox archbishop for Sidon, Tyre, Marjayoun and other areas in the south. In a telephone interview Thursday, he excoriated the Israeli military for bombing roads linking Marjayoun to other areas in the south.
“People want to be able to go to hospitals or clinics, or their livelihoods," he said. "No one is passing weapons on those roads.”
Asked about what it would mean if Marjayoun too was told to evacuate, Kfoury grew angrier.
"We aren’t in this war. Why are we being targeted? People are living in their homes, and have no link to Hezbollah or any group at all," he said.
“The question should be directed to those who want us out."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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