Gaza Tests US-Israel Relations – OpEd

Although the United States and Israel are across-the-board strategic partners, Tel Aviv’s war on Gaza has proved very stressful between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the White House.

Whilst the tension may not amount to too much because the United States is supplying most of the weapons to the Israeli army in this latest conflict, nevertheless, frustrations by the Biden administration over the Israeli conduct of the war on Gaza have come to the fore since 7 October. The tension is mostly behind closed doors rather than brought out into the open although sometimes slips of the tongue are made.

Despite the warnings by US president Joe Biden, stressing the American experience in Iraq and the way their troops were embroiled in urban street wars there, Netanyahu didn’t listen; today the Israeli army finds itself bogged down in different cities, towns and camps of Gaza facing formidable “ghost enemies” and is costing hard in terms of soldiers dead and military hardware.

Tense relations

While Washington continues to back Israel via an air bridge and through large destroyers in the Mediterranean, the USA has made it clear from the start, it is against any reoccupation of Gaza and against any expulsion of the Palestinians into its neighboring Sinai Peninsula that belongs to Egypt.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken who keeps visiting the Middle East region, six times so far, including to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, he continues to affirm that the United States is against any change in developments that would change the basic formation of Gaza.

The recent killing of 21 Israeli soldiers through a Hamas missile 600 meters from the siege that divides Israel from Gaza has brought the controversial discourse over the future of the Palestinian territories into the fore. The soldiers were in the process of blowing up 10 houses to make way for a one-kilometer meter wide Israeli security buffer zone. Hamas fighters got to know of this and fired missiles on the area where the Israeli soldiers – expert engineers – were working to detonate houses there that included a recently constructed explosive depot and a tank.

Tension over the buffer zone is already worsening between the Netanyahu government and the White House officials. They believe such an Israeli action would undermine the territorial integrity of Gaza and the other Palestinian areas since the Biden administration wants to push the peace process forward based on a two-state solution.

A major opportunity 

The Israelis on the other hand, are loath to consider this especially since Biden wants a future state of the West Bank and Gaza to be ruled by the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is based in Ramallah and have been long pushing forward in this direction. Biden and his officials saw Israel’s war on Gaza as a major opportunity and a way to revive the two-states solutions – Israeli and Palestinians- and extending the PA whilst getting rid of Hamas.

But this is proving to be a bone of contention because Netanyahu doesn’t want to PA to rule Gaza and wants to eliminate Hamas from the enclave – which is also what Biden wants. But this is also proving up till now fanciful, as the Israelis are facing tough battles in in their ground war they begun on 27 October in different areas of Gaza. 

But Netanyahu has an altogether different view from the Biden administration and explains the behind-the-scenes tensions. With the buffer zone, he wants to install different Palestinian rulers in Gaza, ones that are pro-Israelis. But the problem here is fighting the “right” Palestinians who would want to fight with the Israelis.

This is an idea however, that he is still toying while he panders to the extremists in his government like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They want to reoccupy Gaza, fill it up Jewish settlements just as it was before 2005 and evict the Palestinian population through a mixture of force and persuasion.

Regional conflict  

But both ideas are not acceptable to the Biden administration. Whilst it believes the first would be unacceptable, and most of all from the Palestinian Authority, it openly rejects the second solution as not viable and would place the region in a tailspin of instability that would affect American and western interests in the whole of the Arab world. 

Biden is already facing problem in the Red Sea with the Houthis blocking ships from Bab Al Mandeb, the straits that controls 10 to 15 percent of world trade. Despite the fact that the Houthis say they are specifically not allowing ships that go to Israel, the Americans and Europeans fear great economic repercussions to the Yemeni actions and set the scene for a global slump. 

The Biden administration already fears Israel’s war on Gaza is playing although regional actors active on the scene. Israel is already fighting Hezbollah in the north, albeit in a controlled action although Jewish drones have recently hit Hamas offices in south Beirut, another potential area for conflagration.  

Also, America is fighting Shiite militias in Iraq and north east Syria. These groups are now targeting American bases regularly, and allegedly has began, to target Israel with ballistic missiles, similarly to the actions carried out by the Houthis in launching their long-range rockets on Eilat, the touristic Israeli resort which is today experiencing a sever slump. 

So, on the face of it, things appear to be “hotting up” regionally, although the Biden administration keeps saying it doesn’t want a wider regional war but seeks to contain it. But the problem here, becomes one of credibility for the bottom dollar here is the continuing extensive American support for Israel.