In the days after Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023, Joe Biden cautioned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to make the same mistakes the US made following 9/11.
Mr Biden, who was US president at the time, never publicly spelt out what he meant, but it was understood as a warning to Mr Netanyahu, in response to the shock generated by the attack, not to overreact or overreach, as George W Bush had done by invading and occupying Iraq and proposing a US-led democracy agenda that would transform the Middle East.
That war lasted more than a decade with tremendous cost in lives, treasure and US prestige. It also emboldened Iran and spawned extremist groups across the Levant and North Africa, such as ISIS.
If that is what Mr Biden meant, and administration officials made it clear that it was, then it was sound advice – maybe the soundest Mr Biden had to offer the Israelis during his tenure in office.
The problem was that Mr Netanyahu didn’t listen, and the US did nothing to apply restraint when the Israelis did exactly what they were urged not to do.
In fact, the Biden administration did exactly the opposite. It embraced Mr Netanyahu’s goals in Israel’s assault on Gaza. It gave Israel tens of billions in military arms and defended its actions at the UN.
As it became clear that the Israelis were committing war crimes and what some international agencies have termed genocide, Mr Biden and company threatened sanctions on the international jurists that were investigating these crimes.
About all the US administration did during all this time was timidly challenge Mr Netanyahu to think about “the day after” and offer a few ceasefire proposals. Although the Israelis never fully accepted the terms of the Biden proposals and made it clear what Mr Netanyahu’s government had in mind for the “day after”, the US did nothing to rebuke them.
The Biden crowd should have known that Mr Netanyahu didn’t want to end the war, nor did his governing coalition, with which he was aligned. They were driven by fantasies of Greater Israel that would evict Palestinians from Gaza, annex the West Bank, and expand its “security perimeter” by gaining control of parts of Lebanon and Syria.
As the war dragged on, it metastasised into a regional conflict. Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis entered the fray with disastrous consequences for all involved. Israel responded by assassinating Hezbollah’s leaders and cadre in a massive bombing campaign and a terrorist attack using explosive personal devices in Lebanon and extending the war into Syria and then to Iran, Hezbollah’s main military backer.
After entering the White House, Donald Trump followed the Biden playbook by giving the Israelis a free hand and political backing, while also, as can be his style, floating grandiose and often contradictory ideas.
He cautioned Mr Netanyahu against bombing Iran and then joined in the battle. He floated the now infamous “Gaza Riviera” plan, and followed this by embracing elements of the Arab peace plan – but only after Mr Netanyahu had been given the opportunity to amend it.
When the plan was announced a little over a month ago, President Trump boasted that it was “the greatest day in human history” that would transform the entire Middle East. One month later, Israeli bombs are still falling on Lebanon and Gaza, though with less frequency and intensity, and there has been an exchange of captives between Israel and Hamas. But with the exception of these developments, little else has changed on these or other fronts in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Palestinians in Gaza continue to be strangled by a constrictive Israeli occupation. More than one million souls are crammed into congested tent camps in the less than one half of Gaza from which the Israelis have withdrawn, with little or no access to food, clean water, medical attention, electricity or sanitation facilities.
There are battles between Hamas and clan-led groups armed by Israel. And Israel shows little or no interest in surrendering its newly expanded Gaza “security perimeter” and moving ahead to the next phase of the “peace plan”.
Israel has established five military outposts in southern Lebanon and continues to bomb Lebanese villages and UN teams that are in the south. Israel has expanded its occupation of southern Syria and is insisting that it will remain there, using as justification the need to “protect” the Druze population.
While withdrawing Knesset legislation to formally annex the West Bank, Israel’s military and organised settler movement have continued to seize land, terrorise and evacuate villages, deny Palestinians the opportunity to harvest their olive crop – vital for their survival – and detain and kill Palestinians who protest against these oppressive behaviours.
The bottom line is that Mr Biden’s 2023 cautionary note was clearly ignored. Not unlike Mr Bush’s disastrous war and occupation of Iraq that was supposed to transform the Middle East but only led to a decade of war and consequences that continue to take a toll across the region, Mr Netanyahu’s overreach, supported by the US, has indeed transformed the Middle East – but not for the better. Israel will now be more deeply than ever enmeshed in active conflict on multiple fronts, with no end in sight.
The problem for Israel is that its occupations and conflicts are costly and require US support, but with Democrats and a still small but growing number of Republicans becoming increasingly disinclined to financially underwrite the costs of Israel’s wars, the days of its deplorable behaviours may be numbered.
