Bibi’s Death Wish

Today on TAP: Can Biden prevent a steady drift to regional war?

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In one 24-hour period, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved the killing of a top Hezbollah leader in an air strike on Beirut, and the assassination of the lead Hamas peace negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. That’s one sure way of destroying the peace talks.

Of all the Hamas leadership, Haniyeh was reportedly the most in favor of making a deal with Israel that traded a hostage release for a cease-fire and staged regional settlement. Now, talk of a hostage deal is off the table, much less the regional entente that the Biden Administration has been promoting—humiliating President Biden yet again.

Since the assassination of Haniyeh took place at an Iranian guesthouse, the world now waits to see what sort of retaliation ensues. Last April, the Iranians rained down some 300 missiles on Israel, taking care to limit casualties. That attack was in retaliation for Israel’s last assassination, one that also violated diplomatic immunity—the strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate on April 1 that killed seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including two senior commanders. 

Hezbollah was not involved in that carefully limited Iranian retaliation. But this time, Israel is on the verge of a war with Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time. Netanyahu has managed to bring together sworn enemies of each other, Sunni Hamas and Shia Hezbollah. Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah is armed by Iran and capable of inflicting massive damage on Israel in a regional war.

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As Dexter Filkins writes in a definitive piece in the July 29 New Yorker, “Some Israeli officials I spoke to envisioned a war on four fronts—with Hamas to the south, the West Bank to the east, Hezbollah to the north, and Iran.” The piece was written before the latest assassination. Filkins quotes a senior American official, “The Israelis think they are masters of the escalation ladder. But all you need is one mistake—and there’s an all-out war.”

US diplomats have spent the last few days scrambling to prevent the next escalation. But surely the time has come for Biden to break with Bibi and to suspend shipments of offensive weapons. Time after time, threats and pleas have done nothing.

A Mideast war would not only have dire consequences on the ground. It would become a major issue on the US presidential campaign, with Trump stoking Israel-right-or-wrong fever and Biden and Harris working to contain hostilities, but on the defensive politically.

Is Netanyahu deliberately provoking a regional war that will be disastrous for Israel? Unless he is certifiably insane, his motive has to be to drag in the U.S., not as mediator but as more explicit military protector. And the strategy is working. On Thursday afternoon, Biden and Netanyahu spoke by phone. According to the “readout” released by the White House:

The President reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Later on Thursday, Biden upped the pressure on Israel. He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to agree to a truce. “We have the basis for a cease-fire,” Biden told reporters. “They should move on it now.”

But as past actions by Netanyahu have made all too clear, Biden’s words are insufficient. Now that he is not running for re-election, he could make a statesmanlike break with Netanyahu and stop supplying weapons of war. That would make life a lot easier for Kamala Harris, as well for as countless suffering Gazans.

ONE OF THE DISGUSTING PIECES of collateral damage from Netanyahu’s reckless behavior is the rise of antisemitism. Some pro-Palestinian groups in the US have created a narrative in which Jews need to demonstrate that they are not Zionists, otherwise they are defending genocide. And Netanyahu keeps giving them plenty of ammunition.

In these arguments, terms like genocide and apartheid get thrown around far too casually. Israel may not be technically guilty of genocide in the literal sense of wanting to wipe out an entire race. But Israel is certainly guilty of the most barbarous sort of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. And Israel’s reckless killing of civilians in Gaza violates international law as well as human decency, whether or not it meets some legal test of genocide.

If you need a primer on the daily humiliations inflicted on the Palestinian population, you owe it to yourself to read Nathan Thrall’s book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank meet any test of apartheid, and Israel is behaving precisely like a colonial power.

In some respects, the South African apartheid regime was more benign. They didn’t kill Nelson Mandela, and in the end they released him in full recognition that he would be the country’s next president. If only F.W. de Klerk, the last president under apartheid, who recognized the inevitability of Mandela and the end of white rule, were a role model for Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s behavior is so perverse and self-defeating that Biden needn’t worry about alienating Jewish voters or donors. On the contrary, if a tougher stance produced Israeli acceptance of a peace settlement, the vast majority of Americans, Jewish or not, would be thankful and relieved.

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