Blinken goes to Mideast as tensions grow with Israel
ISTANBUL — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is returning to the Middle East this week with the goals of getting Israel to curtail attacks that are killing thousands of Palestinian civilians and preventing the war from spreading across the region.
But previously unreported details of a clash between Blinken and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel point to the challenges ahead.
During a private meeting in November, Blinken told Netanyahu that the Israelis would have to agree to a series of pauses in the fighting in the Gaza Strip to let more aid flow into the war zone and to allow civilians to leave areas under attack.
Netanyahu refused, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation in Jerusalem. Blinken then said he would announce the Biden administration’s demand in a news conference, which prompted Netanyahu to scramble to preempt him by issuing a defiant statement by video. “‘I told him, ‘We swore and I swore to eliminate Hamas,’ ” Netanyahu said. “Nothing will stop us.”
The Israeli military started doing pauses of about four hours at a time in a few areas within days of the diplomatic clash, despite Netanyahu’s bluster.
That episode on Nov. 3 brings into sharp relief the evolving relationship between the United States and its most important partner in the Middle East, a relationship that President Joe Biden has charged Blinken with shepherding during a spiraling crisis.
Since the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, Biden has strongly supported Israel’s war in Gaza, in which the Israeli military, armed with U.S. weapons, has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
But as Blinken flies into the Middle East for the fourth time since October, Biden and his aides are increasingly struggling with their Israeli counterparts over a range of critical issues, including the need to lessen civilian casualties, the risks of a wider regional war and the shape of a post-conflict Gaza.
Those disagreements are likely to continue when Blinken arrives in Israel amid a marathon of stops over a week: Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He also plans to visit the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Blinken landed in Istanbul on Friday night and is scheduled to meet with senior officials there on Saturday.
“We don’t expect every conversation on this trip to be easy,” the State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told reporters Thursday. “There are obviously tough issues facing the region and difficult choices ahead.”
For Blinken, it is a New Year’s return to intensive Middle East shuttle diplomacy that began last fall, after two years of overwhelming focus on Russia’s war in Ukraine and on China. By some measures it is the most challenging assignment of his tenure as secretary of state.
Miller said that Blinken’s priorities in Israel would include discussing “immediate measures to increase substantially humanitarian assistance to Gaza” and plans for Israel’s military to “transition to the next phase of operations” and new steps to protect civilians.
Blinken will also speak with officials across the region about freeing the 129 hostages, including about eight Americans, who Israel says are still being held in Gaza. And he intends to tackle the thorny topics of plans for governing Gaza and prospects for reaching a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians once this conflict is over.
“It’s going to be a lot of hard conversations,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Elgindy was skeptical that Blinken could make much progress in winning more protections for Gaza’s civilians or shaping Israel’s post-conflict plans. “I don’t know how well that’s going to go because they’ve been having the same conversation for three months and not made much headway,” he said.