The Israeli right undermines Biden's Middle East agenda

The Israeli right undermines Biden’s Middle East agenda

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor
Columnist
January 10, 2024 at 12:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/10/israel-right-biden-middle-east-blinken/

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The Biden administration is trying to thread the trickiest of needles in the Middle East. While remaining steadfast in its support for Israel as it pursues its war against militant group Hamas, the United States is also trying to lessen the harm inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and minimize the scope of the conflict, which is threatening to widen across the region. Critics — including a chorus of pro-cease-fire protesters who interrupted President Biden at a Monday event in Charleston, S.C. — argue that those efforts at mitigation are broadly failing, and that the White House is either deliberately or witlessly presiding over a vast slaughter of Palestinians (at least 23,210 people, at last count) and the de facto ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

On a tour of Middle Eastern capitals this week that included a stop in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed ahead. He delivered messages from Arab counterparts to Israeli officials, urging the wartime government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back the intensity of its military operations and expand humanitarian assistance for a population wracked by hunger and disease. Blinken also reiterated the U.S. backing of Israel’s campaign and shrugged off a South African-led initiative at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide as “meritless.”

Looming over Blinken’s trips this week are the Biden administration’s concern that the war may spiral regionally. Israel may be withdrawing some forces from Gaza — though the toll on Palestinian lives has only worsened — but tensions are mounting on its northern border with Lebanon, where Israeli forces have been engaged in daily exchanges with influential militant group Hezbollah. “The risk that Israel might launch an ambitious attack on Hezbollah has never gone away,” my colleagues reported, citing White House and State Department officials, “but there has been broader concern about an escalation in recent weeks, particularly as Israel announced the temporary withdrawal of several thousand troops from Gaza on Jan. 1 — a decision that could open up resources for a military operation in the north.”

Then there’s the question of what comes next in Gaza. U.S. officials are pushing for a post-war scenario that would see substantive engagement and investment from Israel’s Arab neighbors, the return of non-Hamas Palestinian administrative rule to Gaza and the revival of a political track for the two-state solution — the now-moribund vision of separate Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side.


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