Washington has made a series of key blunders since the conflict erupted, taking the region to the brink of a broader war
So did Hananya Naftali, who worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s digital team, posting on X: “BREAKING: Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” He quickly deleted the post.
Later in the day, a spokesperson for the Israeli army said that an “enemy rocket”
en route to Israel misfired and hit the hospital. Such rockets lack the
explosive power to kill 500 people. The army initially appended footage
showing an Islamic Jihad rocket, but after it was discovered that this
video was recorded 40 minutes after the bombing took place, the army removed the footage.
Someone appears to be working overtime at their laptop to kick over
the traces of the hospital attack. There is even audio that purports to
reveal Hamas operatives discussing the failed missile launch - except according to Channel 4, it’s fake, using the wrong tone, syntax and accent.
Bright green light
By the time Biden landed in Israel on Wednesday, much of the regional
tour he had planned had been cancelled. Such was the rage in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, that no Arab leader could agree to see him - for their own safety.
With hundreds
of people gathering outside the US and Israeli embassies in Jordan,
demanding the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the revocation of
the peace treaty with Israel, the visit to Amman was off.
But shortly after arriving in Israel, Biden only dug himself further into the deep hole he was already in, telling Netanyahu of the hospital attack: “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
Behind the scenes, the wheels really do appear to be coming off the cart that carries US Middle East policy.
To be clear, the actions that the US took behind the scenes in the
immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack paved the way for the crisis the
region is now in.
The US not only gave the brightest of green lights to a bombing campaign aimed at pushing more than one million
people in the northern half of the Gaza Strip down towards the Egyptian
border. It not only gave Israel JDAM bombs and several thousand 155mm artillery rounds, according to defence officials.
It also, according to multiple credible reports, tried initially to
persuade Egypt to take one million refugees from Gaza. Al Akhbar first reported
that the US tried to coordinate with the UN and “international
organisations receiving EU funding” to persuade Cairo to open Rafah. A
bribe was of course involved.
Sources spoke of the US willingness to provide significant funding to
Egypt, exceeding $20bn, if it agreed to the operation. They pointed to a
request from Cairo to “facilitate the transfer of large teams of
organisations working in the relief field to the border with Rafah
without entering Gaza”.
The Egyptian website Mada Masr also reported that Egyptian officials
had been in talks about the displacement of a significant part of Gaza’s
population. Such was the sensitivity of this claim that Egyptian
authorities came down on the website like a tonne of bricks: The editors
were summoned and an investigation was started by the Supreme Council for Media Regulation over publishing “false news”.
Undoubtedly, these talks took place before Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi realised how explosive they would be to him in a
re-election year.
Israel's 9/11
The US made three key blunders in its response to the Hamas attack.
It encouraged Israel to attack Gaza without restraint; it initially
entertained the scenario of a mass exodus of Palestinians to Egypt; and
it brought the Middle East to the brink of a regional war.
Right from the start, the narrative used by both Israel and the US was that the Hamas attack was Israel’s 9/11 moment; that Hamas was no different than the Islamic State; and that Israel had the moral duty not only to reply to Hamas’s attack, but to eradicate the whole movement.
This allowed Israel to think it could use air strikes on Gaza not
only to wipe out Hamas, but also to make structural changes to the
balance of power in the Middle East, which would mean dealing with
Hezbollah and eventually Iran.
People search through the rubble of a building after an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis, Gaza, on 17 October 2023 (AFP)
Netanyahu and opposition leader Benny Gantz have both alluded to a plan
that would, in Gantz’s words, “change the security and strategic
reality in the region”. It is not clear to me if the US would have
allowed Israel to go ahead with a plan wider than Hamas and Gaza, but
the plan was clearly there.
Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, wrote:
“This war is much more than a conflict between Israel and Hamas. In the
West, an understanding is developing that the Iron Swords War is a
defining moment and a one-time opportunity to reshape the Middle Eastern
architecture - which is expected to also affect the relations of power
in the entire world.”
For a few days, it looked as if the forced expulsion of half of Gaza,
under the guise of setting up humanitarian corridors, would work. The
northern border with Lebanon remained quiet. Hezbollah did not initially
react. The western media accepted the plan to conquer Hamas and
reoccupy Gaza.
The turning point came when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken apparently realised that another Nakba on the scale of what happened in 1948 was a red line.
Jordan’s deputy prime minister, Ayman Safadi, said all Arab countries pledged collective action against any attempt to expel Palestinians from their homeland after a meeting of foreign ministers. The same message was conveyed by King Abdullah II of Jordan on his recent European tour.
Such was the outcry from Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia that Blinken had to concede it was a “non-starter”. Biden has also said that the re-occupation of Gaza would be a “big mistake”. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that everyone should avoid escalation.
These were accompanied by other clear warnings. Iranian Foreign
Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned that the axis of resistance
would open “multiple fronts”
against Israel if the attacks on Gaza continued, telling Iranian state
television: “Time is running out very fast. If the war crimes against
the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will
open and this is inevitable.”
If the US still did not get the message, all it had to do was look
out the window at the record mass demonstrations across the region.
Regional war
As Biden arrived in Israel on Wednesday, the region was boiling.
Quite apart from moral issues, the US military is clearly unprepared for
such a venture, having spent the last several years drawing down its
military assets.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it withdrew more than eight Patriot missile batteries last year from Iraq, Kuwait,
Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as a Terminal High Altitude Area
Defense (Thaad) system from Saudi Arabia. It emptied its stockpiles of
155mm rounds in Israel to give to Ukraine. It moved its naval assets to
the Asia Pacific.
It has had to reverse most of this in short order. One carrier group is in the Mediterranean, and another is on the way. The last time the US had two carrier groups
in the Middle East was in 2020. Along with ships, it has had to move
A-10 attack aircraft and F-15 and F-16 fighters back to the Gulf.
There is an argument circulating in Washington that the nature, speed
and extent of the Hamas attack changed the US-based Middle East system
All this is supposed to deter Iran. It won’t. I don’t often refer to
the analysis of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on Israel, but
on this occasion, I will break the habit of a lifetime.
Friedman wrote:
“If Israel goes into Gaza now, it will blow up the Abraham Accords,
further destabilize two of America’s most important allies (Egypt and
Jordan) and make normalization with Saudi Arabia impossible - huge
strategic setbacks. It will also enable Hamas to really fire up the West
Bank and get a shepherd’s war going there between Jewish settlers and
Palestinians. Altogether, it will play directly into Iran’s strategy of
sucking Israel into imperial overstretch and in that way weakening the
Jewish democracy from within.”
Hamas does not need to fire up the occupied West Bank, as there are
huge demonstrations in all of its major cities calling for President
Mahmoud Abbas to go, after Palestinian Authority (PA) forces used live fire on demonstrators. But on the strategic point, I agree with Friedman, although it pains me to say so.
He is also right to say that a ground invasion of 360,000 aggrieved Israeli soldiers is a recipe for even worse, and more wide-scale, massacres than we have seen up until now.
Losing support
There is an argument circulating in Washington that the nature, speed
and extent of the Hamas attack changed the US-based Middle East system.
James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador in the region, told Middle East Eye: “Hamas’
ability to overcome an entire Israeli military defence line puts this
war at the level of Yom Kippur (the 1973 Middle East war). No recent war
has threatened the US-based Middle East system so much as this, and
that is how the administration views it.”
But this analysis starts the clock at the attack itself, not at all
the warnings that went before it - the collapse of the PA, the Israeli
encroachments on Al-Aqsa Mosque, the impossibility of negotiations, the attempts to make a deal with Saudi Arabia
over the heads of the Palestinians, and the impossibility of all
Palestinians being able to break out of their collective cages.
Could it also be that the “US-based Middle East system” , the
foundation of which is blind support for Israel , is broken? The
resignation letter of Josh Paul, a senior official at the US State
Department , who quit over his administration’s stance on the Gaza War
makes for interesting reading.
Paul called the Hamas attack the “monstrosity of monstrosities” but
continued : “This Administration’s response - and much of Congress’ as
well - is an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political
convenience, intellectual bankruptcy and bureaucratic inertia. Decades
of the same approach have shown that security for peace leads to neither
security nor peace, The fact is that blind support for one side is
destructive in the long term to the interests of the people on both
sides.”
Biden might finally have gotten the message. But having released the
brakes on Israel’s collective rage 12 days ago, he is going to have a
tough job trying to apply them now.
I said earlier that the wheels have come off the cart - and it really
is a rickety, horse-drawn cart. What these past 12 days have
demonstrated more than anything else, is the inability of the US to be a
world leader. It lacks the requisite analytical skills, regional
knowledge and brainpower. It shoots from the hip and thinks about the
consequences later. It is led into wars for which it is patently
unprepared.
Blinded by dogma, ever keen to divide the world into Manichean
opposites - democracy versus autocracy, the Judeo-Christian world versus
Islam - America has lost touch with the values it claims to uphold. Is
lying on Israel's behalf about the war crimes it is perpetrating,
helping to defend it ?
Washington is losing the support of its allies. No one looking at US
actions can have much confidence that they have been thought through.
The consequences of these 12 days, and the days to follow, will send
tremors far and wide.
Biden has every interest in shutting this episode down now, by
stopping the ground assault and forcing the opening of Gaza to basic
humanitarian aid.
Only then could negotiations with Hamas take place over a prisoner
exchange. If he does not achieve these basic goals, he too will find out
how much damage an unfettered Israel can inflict on itself, the region,
the US, and indeed the world.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.