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US president Joe Biden was betting that a whirlwind visit to the Middle East this week could help prevent the conflict between Israel and Hamas from spreading across the region, temper its ally’s response to the October 7 attacks and soothe fears in Arab capitals of a widening conflagration.
From the start, it was a diplomatic mission fraught with risk, and potential reward — and as Biden left Tel Aviv to fly back to Washington on Wednesday, he could not be certain that it had succeeded.
The US president’s gambit was already at risk of backfiring on Tuesday after an explosion at a hospital in Gaza killed hundreds of people, according to Palestinian officials. In response, Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas pulled out of a planned meeting with Biden in Jordan, and the White House announced that the entire second leg of his trip to meet King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt was cancelled.
Biden nonetheless pressed ahead with the trip to Israel alone to express his solidarity with an ally and hold talks with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — associating him even more with a forthcoming ground invasion of Gaza that risks triggering further anger with the US. And while countries in the region and officials in Gaza quickly blamed Israel for the hospital attack, Biden said it was caused by an “errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza” — echoing the Israeli assessment. “It appears as though it was done by the other team,” he said.
The hospital explosion and its fallout marked a stunning turn for a president who was willing to gamble that his powers of negotiation and empathy could help calm a region that King Abdullah says is now “on the brink of falling into the abyss” following Hamas’s attacks on Israel of October 7 — and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza.
Just weeks ago, the White House was closing in on a grand bargain to normalise ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The administration had also made progress with Iran, agreeing a prisoner swap that brought hopes of a further thawing in relations between Tehran and Washington.
Now Biden is fighting to salvage any of that diplomatic progress.
John Kirby, the co-ordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, said Biden planned to speak on the phone with Abbas and Sisi on the way back to Washington.
“He would always prefer face-to-face diplomacy, that’s the president’s stock-in-trade. But he also understands in the wake of the explosion at the hospital that it’s not the appropriate thing to do, certainly for the leaders that are there, and he understands that,” Kirby said.
Yet the diplomatic repercussions from the carnage in Gaza may only just be starting for Biden.
Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, said his visit to Israel would now be read in many capitals in the region as the US “okaying the killing of people” in the hospital blast.
“This will be very hard to navigate for the US administration and almost impossible to balance,” Khurma said. “People in Ramallah, Amman and Tunis and elsewhere are already out in the street condemning Israel and calling for the killing of Palestinians to stop.”
“The peril, of course, is a situation like this,” added Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Program. “If in general Israel isn’t amenable to American pressure to exercise restraint or bring the conflict to an end, it could harm US standing in the region.”
To pave the way for the visit, US secretary of state Antony Blinken held marathon talks with Netanyahu, including about how to rush humanitarian aid into Gaza and how to create safe zones in the enclave ahead of any ground invasion by Israeli forces. After Biden’s meeting with Israel’s war cabinet, the US announced that Israel was ready to start allowing aid into Gaza through Egypt. “The people of Gaza need food, water, medicine, shelter,” Biden said.
The images of the US president standing shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv confirmed — for US audiences and Middle Eastern ones — that American support for Israel remains steadfast.
Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said backing for Israel was “imprinted in [Biden’s] emotional DNA” after a half-century of public service in Washington. This would allow him to have “the tough conversations” that were needed with Netanyahu on Israel’s response to Hamas and its consequences. Biden did urge Israel to be careful in the coming days and weeks, saying it should not be “consumed” by rage and should avoid repeating the “mistakes” made by the US in its response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
“I know the choices are never clear or easy for the leadership. There’s always a cost and it requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions, it requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you’re on will achieve those objectives,” Biden said.
Even before his arrival in Israel, he had stressed the importance of respecting international law and warning Israel not to aim for an occupation of Gaza.
But whether Biden’s advice will be heeded remains an open question — and the timing and nature of Israel’s offensive will probably determine how his diplomatic efforts are perceived.
“If it occurs immediately after he leaves, it will appear that the US has blessed the operation,” said David Schenker, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a previous assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs.
“The US position has been that Israel has to do what Israel has to do to defend itself and to support that, but not get involved in the operational details,” he said.
At home, the president has benefited politically from his strong embrace of Israel after the Hamas attacks. But that could change as the conflict deepens or spreads, and as the civilian death toll from Israel’s response rises.
“Biden is going to own the ground campaign, he probably already owns it,” said Miller. “Biden is entering a very complicated picture.”
