Israel’s Rafah offensive: a tipping point for US support?
PRESIDENT Joe Biden’s patience with Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip is wearing thin.
Only days after describing the conduct of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7 as “over the top”, the US president made a specific and immediate demand.
The military operation planned for Rafah, a city along the border with Egypt where 1.5mn people — more than half of Gaza’s population — have sought sanctuary after being forced from their homes, “should not proceed”, Biden said, without a “credible plan” to ensure the people there are not in harm’s way. They are “exposed and vulnerable”, the president added. “They need to be protected.”
Biden did not detail consequences, nor did he denounce the potential Rafah offensive in as stark terms as US allies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, whose leaders issued a joint statement warning the operation would be “catastrophic.”
But he made clear his “expectation” was that the Israelis would not make any “massive land invasion” while negotiations for a temporary ceasefire to allow for the release of hostages detained by Hamas were ongoing.
These blunt statements point to Rafah’s fate as a potential tipping point in the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, and the Middle East conflict.
US officials including Biden have consistently stood by Israel since its conflict against Hamas began, but their tolerance is fast eroding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to it and the deepening humanitarian crisis.
The Gaza health ministry says Israeli strikes have left over 28,500 dead and 68,000 wounded, and about 80 per cent of northern Gaza’s homes and buildings have been destroyed. UN agencies warn that at least a quarter of the strip’s population is at risk of famine.
The US has in recent weeks pressed Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, to work with the Palestinian Authority to forge a postwar plan, and to tackle worsening unrest in the West Bank, all without success. Washington had also hoped and expected that Israel would have by now shifted its operations to a lower-intensity counterterrorism strategy, yet with regards to Rafah it seems to be planning the exact opposite.
Netanyahu pledged “powerful action” in the city to achieve “complete victory” in Gaza. He said civilians would be allowed to leave, but with the Egyptian border closed there is nowhere further for them to flee.
If Israel does disregard Biden’s warning and pursues a heavy-handed ground offensive in the city heedless of civilian lives, it would damage efforts to secure a deal to release hostages and diplomatic attempts to broker a broader settlement to the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But it could also stretch the tense relationship between Biden and Netanyahu to breaking point, and threaten a wider backlash from Democrats on Capitol Hill as the US president hopes to consolidate party support ahead of his re-election bid in November.
Worse, Israel’s continuing defiance — and the reluctance of the US to utilise its unrivalled leverage over the country — both fuels doubts about how much influence the US really has in a region where it has sought to hold sway for decades, and also further tarnishes its image in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
“The perception is that the US cannot and will not exert sufficient pressure on Israel to get its way and Israel can very easily push back against the world’s most important superpower and its main benefactor”, says Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “The United States is looking weak before the world — especially in the Middle East. And it’s looking weak at home,” he says.
Alarm is mounting in some corners of Washington at the prospect of Israel’s offensive moving to Rafah. “I have been flummoxed frankly by this approach. I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve,” says Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman from Colorado who served in the US Army in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“If you don’t protect civilians, and if you aren’t more precise in your military operations, that creates more problems than you solve. And what we’re seeing here right now is massive public sentiment blowback against Israel, which is not making it safer.”
Crow, who sits on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees of the House of Representatives, says Biden needs to be firmer with the Israeli leader. “It’s time to be extremely clear that the United States will not support a ground offensive in Rafah. It’s going to derail opportunities for peace. It’s going to derail our chances of securing a hostage deal. It will be very difficult for US national security in the region,” he says.
Other members of Biden’s party have used even stronger terms. The “elaborate withholding” of aid to Gaza by Israel is a “textbook war crime”, Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland senator, said in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday. “So now the question is: what will the United States do? What will we do? What will President Biden do?”
The answer on Capitol Hill, where support for Israel remains an unshakeable bedrock of American foreign policy, is: not much. Some 70 US senators out of 100 voted for Biden’s $95bn national security funding bill this week that included money for Israel as well as Ukraine and Taiwan. It is unclear whether the legislation will pass the Republican-controlled House, but that uncertainty is mainly because of the backlash against Ukraine aid, rather than Israel aid, and their intransigence on immigration policies at the border with Mexico.
The White House has taken some steps that will frustrate Israel. On February 1, it made the rare move of imposing financial sanctions on four Israeli settlers for extremist violence in the occupied West Bank, and last week issued a national security memorandum requiring that any US military aid needed to be used in accordance with international humanitarian law, hinting at stricter enforcement of US laws that could impose conditions on sales of weapons to Israel.
But the Biden administration has not been willing to go much further. It has not threatened to withhold military aid, and continues to push Congress for the approval of over $14bn in assistance to Israel. It has also not moved to formally recognise a Palestinian state — which would bolster US commitment to a two-state solution but is opposed by Israel.
Behind the scenes, analysts say Biden has made clear to Netanyahu that he will eventually need to make tough choices to bring the conflict to an end and move towards a long-term settlement with the Palestinians.
“Biden tends to be pretty direct, especially in private, so I don’t think he’s leaving a lot to the imagination,” says Dennis Ross, a former Middle East peace negotiator who served under three presidents and is the counsellor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The two leaders have known each other for 40 years but have rarely seen eye to eye. At a White House Hanukkah reception in December, Biden rehashed a favourite anecdote about Netanyahu: he described how the Israeli leader displays a photo in his office of the two of them when they first met as younger men. Biden inscribed it with “Bibi I love you, but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say.”
Since then, the strains in the relationship have become even more apparent. The past few weeks have been the frostiest between Biden and Netanyahu since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, when at least 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage.
There have been reports on NBC and Politico that Biden has been privately furious at Netanyahu, to the point that he has called him an “asshole” and a “bad fucking guy”. The FT could not verify that language, and the White House declined to comment. Despite the disagreements, the White House says the two have kept talking, including two separate conversations this week.
In fact, current and former US officials note that Biden has plenty of experience dealing with Netanyahu and understands how difficult he can be. “Biden knows from his long experience with Netanyahu that he will always put his political survival above the interests of the state,” says Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel and the Lowy distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite their growing frustration, Biden administration officials see no immediate alternative to working with Netanyahu and understand he is probably their only interlocutor if they want the war to end sooner rather than later. “Netanyahu is the Israeli prime minister and for all the talk about bringing his government down, that doesn’t seem in prospect,” Indyk adds.
The lingering question for Biden is what the political cost might be of maintaining the status quo with Israel, as he heads into a tough reelection battle this autumn, probably against Donald Trump.
The president’s aides believe his staunch backing for Israel in the wake of the October attacks is broadly in line with the views of the US public. But the mood may be changing. An AP-NORC poll released in January showed that 50 per cent of US adults — including a growing majority of Democrats and a majority of independents — believe Israel’s military response in Gaza had “gone too far”, compared with 40 per cent in early November.
Further complicating matters for Biden, ArabAmerican communities that traditionally vote Democratic in key swing states such as Michigan could suffer from low turnout or see a greater share of votes for third-party candidates as residents seek to protest against US policy.
Several of Biden’s top aides, including deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, recently travelled to Michigan to address their concerns. In a leaked recording, Finer said the Biden administration left “a damaging impression” about how the US values the lives of Palestinians and expressed regret about the administration’s “mis-steps” in handling the conflict.
But such contrition may turn out to be meaningless if the Biden administration is seen to be powerless to prevent the Rafah operation. The unhappiness could spread to other parts of Biden’s coalition, especially young people whose sympathies are tilted towards Palestinians.
A New York Times/Siena College poll in December found 46 per cent of American voters aged 18 to 29 sympathise more with the Palestinians, compared with 27 per cent who said the same about Israel.
“People are very angry and it’s not just Arab Americans or Muslim Americans who matter to Michigan,” says Nasr. “These types of issues have now become domestic politics.”