America’s blank cheque to Israel

Hussein Haridy
Tuesday 15 Oct 2024

The Biden administration has given Israel its full support in carrying out the most destructive wars ever seen in the Middle East region, writes Hussein Haridy

 

In a readout dated 9 October of a telephone call between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, joined by US Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden underlined the need for a “diplomatic arrangement” in Lebanon that would lead the way to the safe return of Lebanese and Israeli people displaced from their homes in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

According to the readout, Biden affirmed the right of Israel to protect its citizens from Hizbullah “attacks” and he and Netanyahu discussed the “urgent need” to “renew” diplomatic efforts to release the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Biden also underscored the “imperative” need to restore access to the northern part of Gaza, including by “reinvigorating” the corridor from Jordan “immediately”.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army resumed its bombardment of northern Gaza in the context of the so-called “General’s Plan” to turn this part of Gaza into a security zone that would necessitate the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians further south. The pretext for this, as always, is to prevent Hamas from reorganising in the area.

According to the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 13 October, Israeli military commanders in Gaza believe that the recent decision to undertake new operations in northern Gaza was taken without proper deliberation and is apparently aimed at pressuring civilians in the area to relocate. It said that “senior defence officials” believe that the Israeli government is “not seeking to revive the ceasefire talks”.

The Associated Press also reported last week that Netanyahu is mulling over plans to cut off humanitarian assistance to northern Gaza, thus pushing civilians to flee to the centre of Gaza or to the south. Those remaining behind would be considered “combatants”, meaning easy prey for Israeli fire.

Israel’s targeting of northern Gaza coincided with an announcement by the Pentagon on 13 October that on the orders of the US president the United States would deploy an advanced anti-ballistic missile system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), in Israel along with a crew of 100 troops. No date has been provided as to how soon this deployment will take place.

From the outbreak of the war on Gaza last year, the US has continuously said that it will not send US forces to Israel. When it built a pier off the coast of Gaza earlier this year to provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians in the Strip, it insisted that the US forces operating the artificial pier would not participate in “military operations”. The pier has since been dismantled.

The Pentagon announcement last Sunday came in the context of the then ongoing discussions between the US administration and the Israeli government on the nature of the expected Israeli retaliation against the second Iranian missile attacks against Israel on 1 October. The US has opposed Israeli plans to target Iranian nuclear installations or the country’s oil industry. However, short of that the Americans have given the Israelis the green light to go ahead with their “retaliation” against Iran under the protection of the THAAD deployment.

With this deployment the US administration is sending a message to Iran that US forces will be on the ground in Israel in case the Iranian military high command plans a major attack against Israel. This is a direct message of deterrence to Tehran. In the meantime, the Israeli Security Cabinet met on 10 October to approve a list of targets in Iran that the Israeli military would target. It empowered Netanyahu and Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant to agree on the targets as well as the timing of the attacks against Iran.

Emboldened by such full US support both militarily and diplomatically, Netanyahu wrote to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on 12 October demanding that the UN withdraw its peacekeeping forces, called UNIFIL, from southern Lebanon. In a veiled but at the same time brazen threat, Netanyahu said that “refusing to withdraw UNIFIL forces means leaving these in the hands of Hizbullah, which endangers their lives” and the lives of Israeli soldiers.

It goes without saying that any decision to remove UN peacekeeping forces from southern Lebanon cannot be made by the UN Secretary-General alone. It is up to the UN Security Council to decide. There had been no official reaction on the part of the Biden administration to this Israeli demand at the time of writing.

One senior US official was quoted at the time as saying that Biden is now “the most Zionist American president” ever. He has been demonstrating this on every available occasion, and Netanyahu has been making the most of it over the last 12 months and continues to do so today.

The Biden administration has given Netanyahu, a wrecker, a blank cheque to carry out the most destructive plans ever seen across the Middle East under the illusion of redrawing the map of the region.

This redrawing will not come to pass.

 

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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