FAI TO THE CHIEF ON GAZA
Questions mount on if anti-Israel wing has hijacked policy from addled Biden
DURING his State of the Union address in March, President Biden announced an ambitious American initiative to get more aid into the Gaza Strip — a $230 million floating pier off the coast of the war-torn territory.
Biden explained that the Joint Logistics Over The Shore pier “would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza.” It didn’t.
Barely a week into the operation, four US Army boats broke free from their moorings and floated off. One washed up on an Israeli beach.
To make matters worse, the ship sent to extract the stuck vessel also found itself beached as bemused beachgoers looked on.
Three days later, the Pentagon announced that the causeway had broken off in heavy seas, and the whole pier would have to be floated to Ashdod in Israel for repairs. It took until June 7 to reopen the pier, but 10 days later, it was again floated to Ashdod because of sea conditions. The pier was returned to Gaza, but was again removed on June 29.
The whole project could be shut down this month, well ahead of schedule.
Even when it has been functional — which has been the exception, not the rule — much of the aid delivered from the pier is piling up on the shore anyway, after Palestinians stopped picking it up over accusations that the IDF used the pier area to extract four hostages and the commandos who rescued them.
The project — announced during the president’s premier address and involving 1,000 troops — was a public failure for the US. It did not address the problem for which it was designed, was possibly counterproductive and was entirely inappropriate for local, predictable conditions.
Was that an isolated fiasco, the product of bum luck and an admirable willingness to take risks to urgently get more aid to civilians? Or does the episode serve as an apt metaphor for the Biden administration’s policies throughout the Israeli war on Hamas — overly ambitious, ineffective and out of touch with the realities on the ground?
Missed goals
Since the Hamas invasion and slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7, US goals have not entirely aligned with those of Israel.
“There’s an interest in the security of Israel,” said Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank and professor at Georgetown University. “But the US has defined that differently than the Israeli government.”
Americans have focused more on Israel’s international standing and what Gaza looks like years down the road.
“In the absence of a plan for the day after, there won’t be a day after,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in May, warning that Israeli refusal to advance a viable plan for the post-war management of Gaza would lead to a never-ending war in the enclave.
He has also argued repeatedly that “genuine security” for Israel depends on a pathway toward a Palestinian state.
The White House has pressing regional concerns, which would all be served by a rapid conclusion of the war in Gaza. It wants to protect shipping in the Red Sea, which has been badly disrupted by Houthi attacks from Yemen.
Washington is eager to find a way to end the escalating IsraelHezbollah cross-border conflict, one that has the potential to spiral into a regional conflict with Iran that the US is determined to prevent.
Ending the fight in Gaza would also allow the Biden administration to make a push to realize its grand vision for the Middle East — a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and a USSaudi defense pact.
And, of course, there is the issue of Biden’s own political survival. Even before his disastrous debate performance last week, the president was trailing challenger Donald Trump consistently in swing states. Biden needs every vote he can muster, and he has been trying to dull the anger of progressives and Arab-Americans over his support for Israel.
‘Don’t’ — but they did
Some, like Byman, see Biden’s handling of those competing interests as reasonable.
“Iran is trying to keep its role and that of its allies real but limited,” he said. “I think part of that is due to the US, the threats of US retaliation.”
Byman continued: “The perception of most US security figures is that Israel has tipped the balance — from hitting Hamas hard, to making marginal gains without much to show for it — in ways that are hurting Israel in their international opinion, and in particular, making it hard to have any longer-term solution.”
Yet even if there have been some US policy successes around the war, there are pressing questions about the effectiveness and even the coherence of US policy since Oct. 7.
Three days after the attack, Biden warned Iran and its proxies that if they were considering “taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.” They did.
Hezbollah has been firing at Israel since Oct. 8, and more than 60,000 Israelis have been internally displaced as a result. Iran launched a massive drone and missile attack on Israel in April. The Houthis in Yemen and Iranbacked Shiite militias in Iraq have also launched strikes at Israel.
None seem too concerned about any potential US retaliation.
The Biden administration has attacked the Houthis directly at the head of an international naval coalition. But Operation Prosperity Guardian has been ineffective. Houthi attacks have become more destructive and lethal as months go by, and ships continue to avoid the Red Sea, driving up costs and disrupting global supply chains.
Biden has also thrown significant diplomatic and intelligence muscle behind efforts to reach a cease-fire-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas.
While trying to shepherd through an agreement, he issued a more forceful “Don’t” to Israel — trying to prevent it from carrying out a major ground operation in Rafah,
the last Hamas stronghold and presumed hiding place of Hamas’ senior leaders and many hostages.
Biden told MSNBC in March that the planned offensive would be a “red line.” In May, he said publicly that his administration would not support Israel or provide it with offensive weapons if it launched the operation.
Biden’s attempts to head off the invasion exacted a price.
American threats against Israel undermined the one lever Israel had left to push Hamas toward a hostage deal — an aggressive operation in Rafah.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has argued that time is on his side. He can hold out, and international pressure on Israel will continue to grow.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar told other Hamas leaders recently, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Until last week, Hamas has rejected any deal that does not guarantee a permanent end to the war and its own survival.
“The message coming out of Washington was that Israel was killing too many Palestinians, ‘dehumanizing the Palestinians,’ basically causing starvation,” said former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren. “That was the message, over and over, and that convinced [Hamas] that the United States was going to hold Israel back. That helped convince Sinwar that time was working on his side.”
With his pressure on Israel, Biden has made it harder to end the war, and thus far less likely to achieve the other US goals in the region — avoid regional conflict, protect shipping routes and midwife Israel-Saudi peace.
“The United States has helped create precisely the situation that it wanted to avoid,” charged Oren.
The situation was different in the early weeks of the war. The administration, led by Biden, was firmly behind Israel, but over time, its positions have shifted.
“What we see fundamentally is that the trend is ever more consistently anti-Israel,” argued Danielle Pletka, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Pressure from the left
A common explanation for the trend is Biden’s desire to retain left-wing support ahead of the November elections against the despised Trump.
But after the debate, in which Biden was at times incoherent, and visibly sluggish throughout, a more worrying question must be asked: Who has been running US policy on Israel since October?
From the outset, many of Biden’s staffers have tried to pressure their boss to move away from his support for Israel.
Barely a month after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, over 400 administration staffers signed an open letter calling on the president to demand a cease-fire. Around the same time, some 1,000 officials in the US Agency for International Development signed a separate open letter urging Biden to call for an immediate cease-fire. And in January, 17 re-election campaign staffers signed a letter accusing Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
That pressure, combined with the stances of more senior aides who simply want to win in November, would be a lot for even the most energetic commander in chief to withstand. But Biden clearly isn’t that person anymore.
Pletka is direct: “Biden doesn’t run his own government and the anti-Israel people are in charge.”
That the president flubbed even his rehearsed answers after a week of intense preparation doesn’t indicate he has the capacity to consistently impose his desires on a restive staff around a fraught issue like the war in Gaza.
With Biden’s political future in serious doubt, US policy could go in a number of directions:
If Biden does decide to drop out of the race and remain in office, he could well revert to his core affinity for Israel to leave a legacy as one of the Jewish state’s great defenders — staffers be damned.
On the other hand, if his aides handle him more closely, the elements in the White House that want to punish Netanyahu and shut down the war in Gaza will have a freer rein.
And if Biden drops out entirely, stepping down as president, as more and more Democrats want, it is entirely unclear who the presidential nominee would be, and what direction they would take the party on Israel.
One thing is clear: For the coming months, Biden will be perceived in the region as weak, and his White House as far more concerned with domestic political challenges than Middle East conflicts.
Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and company could see this as a halfyear opportunity that won’t be available if the pugnacious and unpredictable Trump returns to Pennsylvania Avenue.