One year since Oct. 7, US resigned to limits of its influence over Netanyahu
Despite superpower status, US finds itself being led by Israel on Lebanon policy, retreating from its own ceasefire initiative and chafing at proposals to threaten security aid
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
The Biden administration’s policy regarding Israel-Hezbollah tensions appeared to shift dramatically within hours last week.
US President Joe Biden began the day on September 30 by calling for a “ceasefire now” along the Blue Line dividing Israeli and Lebanese territory, and telling reporters who shouted questions at him that he was aware of Israeli plans to soon launch a limited ground incursion into Lebanon and that he was “comfortable with them stopping.”
But hours later, the IDF announced that it had begun a series of raids aimed at dismantling Hezbollah posts on the Lebanese side of the border.
While Biden’s public comments left little room for interpretation, the White House quickly dropped its call for an immediate ceasefire once it became clear that Israel wasn’t prepared to agree to one.
A senior administration official told The Times of Israel that the US was concerned about “mission creep,” but understood and accepted the rationale behind the Israeli raids, given that evacuated Israeli civilians would not be willing to return to their homes near the northern border so long as Hezbollah remained perched on the other side of it with the capabilities to perpetrate an October 7-like attack.
Evidently, the US no longer felt that a diplomatic deal alone would be enough to address this threat. “We recognize that, at times, military pressure can enable diplomacy,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
The IDF raids — which have continued for a week alongside expanding airstrikes in Lebanon — were subsequently described to The Times of Israel by a White House National Security Council spokesperson as “in line with Israel’s right to defend its citizens and safely return civilians to their homes.”
It was hard to believe that just five days earlier, the White House had announced an initiative for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, with US officials saying that Netanyahu’s office had given its blessing before the idea was publicized.
Hours later, though, Netanyahu spoke of intensifying Israel’s fighting against the Lebanese terror group, and the next day the IDF launched an airstrike that killed Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
The US hasn’t rescinded its 21-day ceasefire initiative, but now seems to frame it as a less immediate goal — one to be realized whenever Israel decides to finish its attacks against Hezbollah.
A year since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught sparked the war in Gaza, the Biden administration again finds itself being led by Israel, despite being the world superpower responsible for providing the IDF with much of the weapons it needs to wage that war.
It continues to maintain that one of its primary goals is to prevent the Gaza war from widening into a regional conflict but is arguably moving the goalposts to avoid acknowledging that a second Iranian missile attack against Israel, an IDF ground incursion into Lebanon, intensifying salvos from Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria may well already amount to that much-feared, full-fledged Mideast war.
Frustrated Biden officials have pushed back on the notion that the US can simply “wave a magic wand” to coax Israel into conducting the war as Washington sees fit.
“We talk with [Israel] at a number of different levels about what we believe is in their interest, what we believe is in the interest of the region. We’ll continue to do that but ultimately, it’s up for them – as it is for any sovereign country – to make their own decisions,” Miller said last week.
Biden was more blunt after receiving a leading question from yet another reporter suggesting that the US “allows” Israel to take certain actions. “We don’t ‘allow’ Israel. We advise Israel,” the president shot back on October 3.
The US frequently points to Israel’s decision during the first month of the war to permit the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza after initially pledging not to as an example of when the administration has succeeded in influencing Jerusalem.
Biden and his top aides privately leaned on Israel to agree to the step before the president arrived in Israel on October 18.
But that was nearly a year ago.
The amount of aid entering Gaza has fluctuated since, dropping to dangerously low levels at times, only to pick back up after the US has banged its proverbial fists on the table, as it did following an IDF strike that killed several staffers of the World Central Kitchen humanitarian agency in April.
While concerns about potential famine have somewhat dissipated, aid groups say the situation remains dire and unstable.
Netanyahu in his speech to the UN General Assembly last month argued that Hamas remains in control of aid distribution. On Sunday, he reportedly agreed to the requests of far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir to hold a security cabinet discussion on having the IDF take over the allocation of humanitarian assistance.
The security establishment has pushed back on this idea, fearing soldiers involved would be exposed to attacks from Hamas fighters and also arguing that it would more likely lead to Israel permanently occupying the Gaza Strip. But with Netanyahu still rejecting a role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, a viable alternative to Hamas rule is unlikely to fill the vacuum.
The lack of a clear Israeli strategy for how to end the Gaza war has led critics to lobby for leveraging US security assistance to Israel.
The US has withheld one shipment of 2,000-lb bombs since May over concerns they would be used by the IDF in highly-populated areas in Gaza. All other shipments have continued to flow.
A US official speaking to The Times of Israel on Sunday noted that taking a harder line on Israel by more substantially withholding security assistance risks “emboldening” Iran to intensify its attacks on Israel.
Top Biden aides are in agreement that Netanyahu is motivated chiefly by his own political survival, creating obstacles in negotiations for a hostage deal that have allowed the war to extend indefinitely, the US official said.
However, they clarified that the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah are more to blame, as they both instigated the latest round of fighting against Israel, and that the terror group’s leader Yahya Sinwar hasn’t even engaged in hostage talks for weeks.
Accordingly, threatening to withhold more aid to Israel in this context wouldn’t produce results on the ground, while it would expose Vice President Kamala Harris to criticism for clashing with Washington’s key Mideast ally weeks before the presidential election, the US official suggested.
“We push when we can — and our policy has prevented the conflict from deteriorating at various points in the war — but there is a limit to what we can do,” the US official said.
