How can Israel, more isolated than ever before, win back its disillusioned allies?
IT WAS a demonstration of raw American power.
Last Thursday night, President Joe Biden told Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to ease humanitarian suffering in Gaza or face “changes” in American support. Within hours, Israel’s war cabinet agreed to reopen the Erez crossing into northern Gaza for the first time since the war began last October.
It not only demonstrated the influence American presidents can bring to bear on Israel if they choose. It also marks just how much six months of war has driven a wedge between Israel and even its closest allies.
For some, this moment was a long time coming: Hamas laid a trap, and Mr Netanyahu walked straight into it. “Israel’s response would have been well known to Hamas and entirely predictable – and Israel is entirely predictable,” said Alastair Burt, a former minister for the Middle East and an erstwhile member of the Conservative Friends of Israel group.
“There’s an argument that Israel lost this on the morning of October 7. Almost everything since then has compounded Israel’s situation because of its inability to take any course of action beyond what was the most likely ... for them [and] which was not likely to be, in my mind, a success.”
He says the sheer violence of Israel’s response has fuelled Hamas’s popularity in the Arab world while the streets in Arab states are in ferment over Gaza, much to the concern of a number of Arab rulers. There is also no end in sight beyond continued military action because the Israeli government has not set out a plan for “the day after” while a strategy of seeking to destroy Hamas and free more than 100 Israeli hostages in Gaza has not worked so far. And there’s now another, political frustration coming into play, he says: “I do think now allies are worrying that the Israeli government’s survival depends on continued conflict rather than a resolution of issues around the Palestinians.”
It was last week’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) staff and security advisers in a precision missile strike as they travelled on a “deconflicted” route during an aid mission that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) knew about, that has proved to be the last straw and the shift in the consensus was rapid and dramatic.
In Britain, those who joined calls for the UK to halt arms supplies to Israel included Sir Alex Younger, a former head of MI6; the Labour Party, which has spent enormous political capital facing down critics of Israel within its own ranks; and more than 600 prominent former judges and lawyers.
France said the incident could not be justified. The foreign minister of Germany, the most reluctant of all European countries to criticise Israel, called for a full investigation and warned that “incidents like this cannot be allowed to happen”, while Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told the BBC that “even if we accept the Israeli claim that the IDF thought there was a terrorist in the convoy”, their willingness “to sacrifice seven innocent people for someone who is not an immediate danger … is a moral hazard that we don’t think is acceptable”.
However, it is the shift in the United States , Israel’s strongest ally and most important benefactor, that is most significant. “I’m sorry it has come to this,” Richard Haass, a veteran US diplomat who advised four presidents and is considered a stalwart conservative defender of the special relationship with Israel, told the broadcaster MSNBC. To get Mr Netanyahu to take America seriously, he said, “we would have to basically have some sanctioning of what Israel is doing. Not just stuff at the UN. It has got to be conditioning arms deliveries and it’s got to be, I would think, some trade sanctions against goods coming out of West Bank settlements.
“We can’t have a policy based on persuading Israel. We have to ... have an independent policy that reflects our interests and values.”
The change in tone has not gone unnoticed in Israel.
“When someone like Richard Haass is joining progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders, it is very problematic,” acknowledged Eldad Shavit, the director of the American programme at INSS, Israel’s leading defence and security think tank. “I read somewhere that there are 17 senators, Democrat senators, who call on Mr Biden to condition arms. That’s a lot of senators ... it is not a development we can ignore. Something is happening.
“But I wouldn’t characterise it as a crisis. I would characterise it as rising tensions,” he added.
Crisis or mere tensions, it did not come out of nowhere. This month’s rift is the result of “a series of events, peaking with the WCK strike, that started with the flour massacre in February,” said Mairav Zonzsein, Crisis Group’s senior Israel researcher, referring to the killing for more than 100 people when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd around an aid convoy on Feb 29. “There are more and more incidents that are building up a massive amount of evidence [as to] why this war is not going the way Israel and the US may have hoped,” she added.
The sign of a major turning point came in March when Washington, for the first time, refused to use its veto to stop a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire.
This is not uncharted territory. Margaret Thatcher’s government imposed an arms embargo on Israel over its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Tony Blair’s government did the same over its behaviour on the West Bank in 2002. In 1991 George H W Bush’s White House clashed with Yitzhak Shamir’s government when he delayed US loan guarantees over the settlement of Soviet emigres in the Occupied Territories. And, back in 1956, the US forced Israel, France and Britain to abort their invasion of Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis.
Mr Biden’s White House, however, has made it clear that it is not calling on Israel to agree to a ceasefire without a deal to release the hostages. For that reason there is still confidence in Israel of continued American support. “They have a lot of criticism of Israel ... they talk, but they don’t act,” argued Mr Shavit (speaking before last Thursday’s phone call between Mr Biden and Mr Netanyahu).
“They don’t act, not because they feel Israel is doing what they want, but because they understand the situation is sensitive. If we lose the war it will be their loss too. I don’t think the decision of the administration to not veto the last Security Council resolution is an indication they believe it is time to force Israel to force a ceasefire without conditions.”
“This isolation is still in the realm of rhetoric rather than policy change,” agrees Ms Zonzsein. “Allowing the UN resolution to pass was a signal but it didn’t lead to a ceasefire ... it is surprising that it has taken this long.
“If it didn’t take a strike targeting an aid convoy in a deconflicted zone, if it didn’t take 30,000 dead – what is it going to take for people to really put their foot down, ”she asks.
The next point of contention is Rafah – the southern Gaza border town where 1.4 million civilians, many of them refugees from Israeli military operations in northern Gaza, are living in atrocious conditions. Israel says there are four Hamas brigades in Rafah, and its war aim of destroying the group’s military force and political leadership cannot be completed without an offensive there. Both humanitarian groups and the Americans have warned that such an offensive would be a bloodbath.
Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, has warned that a Rafah offensive “risks further isolating Israel around the world”. Kamala Harris, the vice president, has said it “would be a huge mistake”.
Mr Netanyahu is under pressure from his far-right coalition partners, including Itamar Ben-gvir, to push ahead regardless and he still refuses to rule it out.
That speaks to a division in Israeli society. The public remain overwhelmingly supportive of the goal of eliminating Hamas no matter what but liberal Israelis are very concerned about international isolation, added to their contention that Mr Netanyahu is unfit to govern. “If you look at farright politicians in Israel they completely take US support for granted,” says Ms Zonzsein. Only “a serious conditioning of weapons to Israel would have a significant affect ... they don’t understand what it means to have consequences for their actions.”
Mr Shavit, a retired colonel who served in the IDF’S intelligence branch, believes an operation in Rafah is probably necessary and argues the US is concerned about how it is done rather than if it is done. He also acknowledges that doing it without co-ordination with the Americans could trigger a more significant change in US policy.
Mr Burt believes a more serious shift is under way. The war has breathed new life into the long-moribund idea of a two-state solution.
The announcement, earlier this year, by Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, that Britain would be prepared to consider bringing forward recognition of a Palestinian state is an indication of that shift. That may be a distant prospect, and Mr Netanyahu and his Right-wing allies are adamantly opposed. But, for Israel’s allies, a perpetual war that strengthens the hand of Iran and terrorist groups while undermining political stability and security is simply a non-starter, argues Mr Burt. “I must come back to this point; it is very easy to say Israel is losing sympathies of the West. Nothing of the sort is happening. The depth of feeling for Israel is still there,” he said. “What you have now is a worry that actions of the Israeli government ... threaten the security and viability of Israel in ways we have not seen.”
‘The US understands the situation is sensitive. If we lose the war it will be their loss too’