President Joe Biden’s quick visit on Wednesday to wartime Israel was designed as a show of support for the close US ally, one that inspired confidence in Israel as it pursues its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. His presence, it was thought, would calm things down.
But that only addresses one side of the conflict. If Biden fails to do everything he can to curtail the violence now, say analysts and insiders, his visit may ultimately damage the United States’ standing in the Middle East and its ability to lead in the world. That’s because the short-, medium-, and long-term implications of Israel’s operation against Gaza, should it continue unabated, will be much worse than the political risks Biden would need to take to secure a ceasefire and invest in a sustainable political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As Biden boarded the plane to Israel on Tuesday, an explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed at least 471 people. The cause remains unclear and hotly disputed; the Gaza Health Ministry blamed an Israeli strike, while Israel pointed the finger at the armed group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The White House National Security Council released a rare statement on its intelligence-gathering, largely siding with Israel: “our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.”
In any case, that preliminary conclusion, which has yet to be independently verified, will do nothing to contain the massive demonstrations in the Arab world sparked by the fatal explosion, as well as the ongoing bombing of Gaza. Even as Biden was en route to Israel, anger over the deaths also led Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestine Liberation Organization to cancel a planned summit in Amman that would have been the second leg of his trip. That Egypt and Jordan — close security partners of the US — would snub…
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