America and Biden in a bind over war in Gaza

Joe biden

It was quite uncharacteristic of America President Joe Biden to rush to Tel Aviv on October 11, four days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, partly to express support to Israel, which is important with an election year looming ahead in 2024 and the power and influence enjoyed by the American Jewish lobby, and also to gather America’s Arab friends to sort out the bloody mess.

Biden succeeded in the first, at least partially, and failed in the second because the summit he had planned with the Arab leaders was cancelled by the Arabs after the supposedly misfired missile hit the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza and killed an estimated 500 helpless Palestinians. Biden immediately ruled that the Israelis were not involved and that it was the “other team”.

Biden’s Faltering Tightrope Walk

It was this unqualified partisan support that angered Arab leaders and the people. But Biden had a problem. He could not be seen playing even-handed in Israel and for the Jewish lobby at home. The American president sure hopes to soothe the frayed tempers of Arab leaders soon.

He has been working doubly hard with Israel and Egypt for humanitarian aid to pass through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt into Gaza. A majority of trapped Palestinians will indeed be grateful for the aid that is trickling into Gaza, however delayed and inadequate.

The Arab leaders,  especially Egypt and Jordan, have expressed their displeasure and anger at the Cairo Peace Summit that Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi hosted this weekend, where El-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah berated the Western world for its refusal to condemn Israel’s attack on civilians in Gaza while condemning as “barbaric” the Hamas attack on civilians in West Bank. The two leaders called out the double-standards of the West. While Americans stayed silent, the European leaders at the summit harped on Hamas’s barbarism.

Israel Readies For Protracted Warfare

Two weeks after the Hamas attack, the confrontation between Israel and Hamas continues, with Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza in a bid to get back at Hamas. The Hamas leaders have been playing the cat-and-mouse game as it were, releasing a mother and a daughter from among the hostages that they had taken on October 7, remaining almost incommunicado as the Israeli attack continues.

It had seemed on Sunday, the day after the Hamas attack on Saturday, October 7, that Israel would get back at Hamas quickly and ruthlessly, even if it meant Palestinian civilian deaths. But Israel is taking its time, unable to avert civilian deaths in Gaza and unable to get at the Hamas rank-and-file or the top brass.

Apparently, the Americans are holding back the besieged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government from going into Gaza with full force, and occupying it temporarily to root out Hamas. The Americans, according to the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with his privileged sources in the government, are invoking the strategic folly of Americans going into Afghanistan in 2001 and into Iraq in 2003, and restraining the angry Israelis from committing the same blunders.

So, this could be a protracted confrontation. Israel is in a way used to it because it has faced the Intifada in 1987-1993 and in 2000-2005. The Americans are also asking Israel to delay the invasion of Gaza to negotiate through Qatar the release of the hostages, who include many Americans as well.

The US In A Quagmire

The Americans are struck in the latest round of Israel-Palestine conflict just as they are struck with the protracted Russian war in Ukraine. President Biden has been seeking $100 billion aid for Ukraine and Israeli war even as the US Congress is paralysed with Republicans fighting an insiders’ war over who should be the House Speaker.

It might seem that America, despite the hiccups it is facing at the moment, can still support war efforts abroad because it remains the biggest global economy with around $24 trillion annual GDP. But Biden knows the weakening American position in the world, and he has been trying desperately to build new networks across continents.

One of them was his bid to integrate Israel with the Arab states, and extend the network to India through the India-Middle East-Europe-Corridor (IMEEC). The Hamas attack has very nearly blown up the Biden plan. But the president is clinging to it, and in some ways sees it as a way out of the West Asian impasse. He underscored the importance of IMEEC as paving the way for “more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war when connected.”

This seems a desperate hope with Israel seething with anger and the Palestinian plight making the Arab states restless. Biden is not yet willing to moot the political dialogue between Israel and Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas, which would be a more effective way of edging out Hamas than defeating it militarily. Perhaps, the American president is aware that he cannot push either Israel or Arabs beyond a point because America is not the superpower that it was.

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr is a New Delhi-based journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.