Why has America failed to broker a Middle East ceasefire?

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Why has America ******* to broker a Middle East ceasefire?

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==BBC

A year ago, after the October 7 attacks and the start of *******’s offensive in Gaza, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit ******* at a time of war. I watched him fix his gaze at the TV cameras after meeting ******** prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv, and tell the country: “You are not alone”. But he also urged its leadership not to repeat the mistakes an “enraged” America made after 9/11.

In September this year at the ******* Nations in New York, President Biden led a global roll call of leaders urging restraint between ******* and Hezbollah. Netanyahu gave his response. The long arm of *******, he said, could reach anywhere in the region.

Ninety minutes later, ******** pilots fired *********-supplied “bunker buster” ****** at buildings in southern Beirut. The strike ******* Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It marked one of the most significant turning points in the year since ****** unleashed its ******* on ******* on 7 October.

Biden’s diplomacy was being ******* in the ruins of an ******** airstrike using *********-supplied ******.

I’ve spent the best part of a year watching US diplomacy close up, travelling in the press pool with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on trips back to the Middle East, where I worked for seven years up until last December.

The single greatest goal for diplomacy as stated by the Biden administration has been to get a ceasefire for ******** release deal in Gaza. The stakes could barely be higher. A year on from ****** smashing its way through the militarised perimeter fence into southern ******* where they ******* more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, scores of hostages – including seven US citizens – remain in captivity, with a significant number believed to be *****. In Gaza, *******’s massive retaliatory offensive has ******* nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the ******-run health ministry, while the territory has been reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and hunger.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The UN says record numbers of aid workers have been ******* in ******** strikes, while humanitarian groups have repeatedly accused ******* of blocking shipments – something its government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to the occupied West Bank and to Lebanon. Iran last week fired 180 missiles at ******* in retaliation for the ******** of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. The conflict threatens to deepen and envelop the region.

Wins and losses

Covering the US State Department, I have watched the Biden administration attempt to simultaneously support and restrain ******** Prime Minister Netanyahu. But its goal of defusing the conflict and brokering a ceasefire has eluded the administration at every turn.

Biden officials claim US pressure changed the “shape of their military operations“, a likely reference to a belief within the administration that *******’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza’s south was more limited than it otherwise would have been, even with much of the city now lying in ruins.

Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a single consignment of 2,000lb and 500lb ****** as he tried to dissuade the Israelis from an all-out ********. But the president immediately faced a backlash from Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu himself who appeared to compare it to an “arms embargo”. Biden has since partially lifted the suspension and never repeated it.

The State Department asserts that its pressure did get more aid flowing, despite the UN reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year. “It’s through the intervention and the involvement and the hard work of the ******* States that we’ve been able to get humanitarian assistance into those in Gaza, which is not to say that this is… mission accomplished. It is very much not. It is an ongoing process,” says department spokesman Matthew Miller.

In the region, much of Biden’s work has been undertaken by his chief diplomat, Anthony Blinken. He has made ten trips to the Middle East since October in breakneck rounds of diplomacy, the visible side of an effort alongside the secretive work of the CIA at trying to close a Gaza ceasefire deal between ******* and ******.

But I have watched multiple attempts to close the deal being spiked. On Blinken’s ninth visit, in August, as we flew in a C-17 US military transporter on a trip across the region, the Americans became increasingly exasperated. A visit that started with optimism that a deal could be within reach, ended with us arriving in Doha where Blinken was told that the Emir of Qatar – whose delegation is critical in communicating with ****** – was ill and couldn’t see him.

A snub? We never knew for sure (officials say they later spoke by phone), but the trip felt like it was falling apart after Netanyahu claimed he had “convinced” Blinken of the need to keep ******** troops along Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of the agreement. This was a deal breaker for ****** and the Egyptians. A US official accused Netanyahu of effectively trying to sabotage the agreement. Blinken flew out of Doha without having got any further than the airport. The deal was going nowhere. We were going back to Washington.

On his tenth trip to the region last month, Blinken did not visit *******.

Superficial diplomacy?

For critics, including some former officials, the US call for an end to the war while supplying ******* with at least $3.8bn (£2.9bn) of arms per year, plus granting supplemental requests since 7 October, has amounted either to a ******** to apply leverage or an outright contradiction. They argue the current expansion of the war in fact marks a demonstration, rather than a ********, of US diplomatic policy.

“To say [the administration] conducted diplomacy is true in the most superficial sense in that they conducted a lot of meetings. But they never made any reasonable effort to change behaviour of one of the main actors – *******,” says former intelligence officer Harrison J. Mann, a career US Army Major who worked in the Middle East and ******* section of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the October 7th attacks. Mr Mann resigned earlier this year in protest at US support for *******’s ******** in Gaza and the number of civilians being ******* using ********* weapons.

Allies of Biden flat-out ******* the criticism. They point, for example, to the fact that diplomacy with Egypt and Qatar mediating with ****** resulted in last November’s truce which saw more than 100 hostages released in Gaza in exchange for around 300 ************ prisoners held by *******. US officials also say the administration dissuaded the ******** leadership from invading Lebanon much earlier in the Gaza conflict, despite cross border rocket ***** between Hezbollah and *******.

Senator Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and who travelled to *******, Egypt and Saudi Arabia late last year, says it’s critical to weigh Biden’s diplomacy against the context of the last year.

“I think there’s responsibility on both sides for a refusal to close the distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that ****** launched these attacks,” he says.

“He has been successful in preventing an escalation – despite repeated and aggressive provocation by the Houthis, by Hezbollah, by the Shia militias in Iraq – and has brought in a number of our regional partners,” he says.

Former ******** prime minister Ehud Olmert says Biden’s diplomacy has amounted to an unprecedented level of support, pointing to the huge US military deployment, including aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear power submarine, he ordered in the wake of October 7.

But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome the resistance of Netanyahu.

“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not to comply, so the main reason for the ******** of this diplomacy was the consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.

Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire deal.

“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages means a major threat to Netanyahu and he’s not prepared to accept it, so he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.

The ******** prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the deal, insisting he was in favour of the *********-backed plans and sought only “clarifications”, while ****** continually changed its demands.

A question of leverage

But whatever the shuttle diplomacy, much has turned on the relationship between the US president and Netanyahu. The men have known each other for decades, the dynamics have been often bitter, dysfunctional even, but Biden’s positions predate even his relationship with the ******** prime minister.

Passionately pro-*******, he often speaks of visiting the country as a young Senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s unerring support for the ******* state – some citing it as a liability, others as an asset.

Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest ******** to use leverage over ******* has been over the scale of bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year of his only term, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, have taken to ********* streets and university campuses denouncing his policies, holding “Genocide Joe” banners.

Biden’s mindset, which underpins the administration’s position, was shaped at a time when the nascent ******** state was seen as being in immediate existential peril, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern ***** Studies at Columbia University in New York.

“********* diplomacy has basically been, ‘whatever *******’s war demands and requires we will give them to ****** it’,” says Prof Khalidi.

“That means, given that this [********] government wants an apparently unending war, because they’ve set war aims that are unattainable – [including] destroying ****** – the ******* States is a cart attached to an ******** horse,” he says.

He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.

“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the ********** in Gaza, except through an ******** lens,” he says.

Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. “They know what the people putting stuff on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.

Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come with the same generational baggage.

However, neither Harris nor Trump has set out any specific plans beyond what is already in process for how they would reach a deal. The election may yet prove the next turning point in this sharply escalating crisis, but quite how is not yet apparent.

Lead image credit: Getty

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#America #******* #broker #Middle #East #ceasefire

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up