By Wesam Bahrani
Timing of U.S. statements raise questions
TEHRAN - Since the Israeli occupation regime launched its relentless bombardment against women and children in the Gaza Strip, the United States provided unequivocal support for Tel Aviv.
From day one on the evening of October 7 when the Israelis began airstrikes, the U.S. offered military, political, diplomatic and media support. The stance of America has stood at odds with the majority of the international community.
Over the past seven months, only the U.S. vetoed UN resolutions aimed at ending the Israeli military’s daily massacres of women and children in Gaza. Washington shielded the Israelis from sanctions and other punitive measures when the international community was calling on Biden to use American leverage against the Israeli occupation and end the Gaza genocide.
Now, the Biden administration has shifted its public position over the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza, but why the sudden change?
What has been said?
Biden told CNN that if the Israeli military goes into Rafah “we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used.”
The U.S. president made clear that Washington will continue to ship weapons to Tel Aviv, but there will be some limits.
The remarks come on the backdrop of reports indicating the same and senior American officials making similar comments that the U.S. will halt some weapons to Israel but this was the first public statement by the president himself.
Validity
The White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government are the staunchest of allies.
Biden had previously used a loophole to quietly send more than 100 arms shipments to Tel Aviv throughout the war on Gaza, so it is impossible to verify if the U.S. administration will indeed block some weapons or whether this is a PR move.
Global focus on how much control the U.S. can exert on the occupation regime is growing.
This could be an attempt by both Tel Aviv and Washington to show that the Israelis don’t take orders from America.
The Israeli regime is also embroiled in cases involving genocide and war crimes at the top UN courts, which is something Biden wants to avoid being tagged along with.
Truce agreement
A U.S.-drafted truce deal was recently offered to Hamas via Qatar and Egypt. The same text was also provided to the Israelis, who accepted it.
Tel Aviv expected Hamas to reject the proposal but Hamas accepted the agreement, which included the main terms the resistance group was seeking.
This took Netanyahu’s cabinet by surprise and Tel Aviv quickly reversed its position by rejecting the truce, which is believed to have caused some friction between Netanyahu and Biden.
U.S. domestic politics
The U.S. presidential election in November is proving to be a major driving force for Biden to see the Israeli war on Gaza come to an end.
If the war ends, the pro-Palestine American student movement will also end. The violent crackdown on students has reignited global debate on America’s human rights record.
Biden is also concerned about losing battleground states such as Michigan over Gaza, which could end his presidency.
Biden thought he had a truce agreement in place but the Israelis appear to have jeopardized it.
Rafah “red line”
To ease public dissent at home, the U.S. president declared the Israeli ground invasion of Rafah as his red line.
The Israeli military has entered Rafah where half of the Gaza population, 600,000 of them children, have taken shelter.
If Biden failed to act it would have made him look extremely weak as his poll numbers have already plummeted.
Israeli military stockpile
The Israeli military is believed to have a large stockpile of U.S. weapons, despite unleashing a record amount of ammunition against the Gaza Strip. Biden made sure that Israeli arms depots were overloaded with offensive weapons.
The same bombs that have killed 35,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Battle of Rafah
The concern among Israelis – if Biden does follow up on his pledge to halt some U.S. arms – is if the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) have enough American arms for the battle of Rafah.
A quick analysis shows the number of bombs and artillery shells used by the IOF in northern Gaza explains why the U.S. was shipping more. The Israeli army was depleting its stocks faster than the U.S. was dispatching.
In Khan Younis, the IOF used several battalions that withdrew under fire on April 7 after four months of fighting with the Palestinian resistance forces. The battle took longer than northern Gaza.
Rafah’s location on the Egyptian border would naturally make it an ideal area where Hamas would set up its logistical, governmental and welfare bases.
To eliminate Hamas in Rafah, judging by the failure to do so in northern Gaza (where the IOF is back fighting against Hamas) and Khan Younis, it would take upwards of seven months of fighting.
Taking over Rafah
The U.S. is aware that the IOF cannot defeat Hamas in Gaza, and is unlikely to have any luck in Rafah than the Israeli army has elsewhere in the Strip.
Speaking to British media, a former Middle East adviser at the U.S. Defense Department said there was a reason Hamas has never been defeated militarily and Netanyahu needs to realize this.
Jasmine El Gamal says “[Hamas] recruits keep increasing the more the Israelis go in.
“We are already seeing Hamas reconstitute in other places in Gaza, so this has really been a game of whack-a-mole than a long-term sustainable solution to the idea of weakening Hamas.”
CIA director William Burns has traveled to Tel Aviv again to hold talks with Netanyahu. El Gamal says Burns will likely tell the Israeli premier that there's “no military solution”.
Humanitarian crisis
What the IOF will do in Rafah will only exacerbate an already dire humanitarian crisis. The image of the Israeli occupation regime that the U.S. has sought to protect over the past seven months will be tarnished much worse as less aid enters Gaza.
Operation True Promise
The wider fear among Biden and other policymakers in the U.S. is the prospect of an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah would trigger a wider regional conflict.
There are many fronts that the U.S. should try and shield its ally from, and America has acted poorly at that.
Undeterred by American and British attacks, Yemen’s Ansarullah leader has vowed to increase operations if the IOF massacres civilians in Rafah by targeting ships of any company related to supplying or transporting goods to the Israeli occupation regardless of their destination.
Abdul Malik al-Houthi said this was a fourth stage of escalation in retaliation to “the Israeli aggression on Rafah”.
“From now on, we are also thinking about the fifth stage and the sixth stage, and we have very important, sensitive and influential choices on the enemies,” he added.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has also significantly increased its attacks against “vital Zionist targets” over the past week, while Lebanon’s Hezbollah is bringing new elements to the battlefield every day. Who says Hezbollah will not liberate the occupied Sheba’a Farms?
The real game changer was Iran’s Operation True Promise in retaliation to Israeli deadly airstrikes on the Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria. The U.S. and its allies could not protect the Israelis from the number of drones and missiles that Tehran fired. Iran says it used just basic projectiles. Another Iranian retaliation could change the geography of the region.
Netanyahu’s headache
The Israeli PM finds himself stuck between listening to Biden to end the war or his fascist ministers who have threatened to withdraw from his cabinet and end Netanyahu’s rule if he does end the war on Gaza. Netanyahu is certain to face more than one court trial over his catastrophic security failure on October 7 and other criminal cases that could lead to his imprisonment.
How will the war end
The U.S. has been deeply involved in the Israeli war on Gaza. But America’s track record over the past several decades shows it cannot win a war let alone Israel’s.
The U.S., like Israel, has the ability to start wars as it did in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria but judging by the outcome of those wars and their stated missions, it is clear that the U.S. was defeated on more than one occasion.
The same applies to the Israeli occupation regime since the year 2000 after the regime’s forces withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Tel Aviv has started many wars but has been incapable of winning. The regime has a terrible track record of its own, which is the infliction of unprecedented suffering and casualties to civilians.
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