A hostage and ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel is “not dead,” a senior U.S. official says, but only if Netanyahu holds off on invading Rafah.
It took seven months almost to the day, but Joe Biden appears to have, finally, reached a public moment of reckoning over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. On Wednesday morning, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that the Biden Administration had paused delivery of thirty-five hundred heavy bombs to Israel. That evening, the President himself explained why, admitting that “civilians have been killed in Gaza” as a result of American-supplied weapons and saying flatly that he could not accept them being used in a military offensive against Hamas in the densely populated city of Rafah, which Israel has threatened to carry out. Biden insisted that the U.S. would continue to help Israel secure itself from external threats, but he laid down what appeared to be an uncrossable line for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “If they go into Rafah,” the President told CNN’s Erin Burnett, “I’m not supplying the weapons.” His decision amounts to the most high-profile example in decades of a U.S. President publicly imposing such limits on American military assistance to Israel, and it came accompanied by a stark rebuke of how Israel has treated Palestinian civilians. “It’s just wrong,” Biden said.
Translation: the long Biden-Bibi bear hug is over. The President of the United States is now all but publicly daring the Prime Minister of Israel to defy him.
The reaction from the American right was swift, loud, and hyperbolic. Republican congressional leaders put out a statement on Wednesday night warning that Biden “risks emboldening Israel’s enemies.” By Thursday, the ranking G.O.P. member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator James Risch, of Idaho, said that the President “has handed a great victory to Hamas,” and the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post carried the headline “BETRAYED,” claiming that Biden “Vows to Cut Off Weapons if Israel Tries to Finish Off Hamas.” Donald Trump, unsubtle as ever, elevated Biden’s actions to something close to treasonous, attacking him in a social-media post for “taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses.” Netanyahu, for his part, put out a defiant statement saying that Israel would “stand alone” if it had to. “If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails,” he added. “But we have much more than fingernails.”
Of course they did not bother with what Biden actually said. But even some Democrats who are vocal supporters of Israel expressed concern about Biden’s “mistake,” as Dennis Ross, the former longtime U.S. envoy in the region, put it, fearing it would embolden Hamas to fight on at a delicate moment. As for Biden’s critics on the left, there seemed little hope that the President’s move would suddenly make the encampments of students protesting the war on college campuses disappear. That is just not a realistic hope in toxic 2024.
