Do you remember how the longest war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict started? With Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, boasting: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
In Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Israel has had two of the most permissive US presidents in the relationship between the two states. Late Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush were stalwarts in comparison.
In peacetime, Trump allowed Israel to annex the occupied Golan Heights, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, and launched the Abraham Accords, an attempt to get the richest Arab states to recognise Israel without a Palestinian veto.
In war, Biden flooded Israel with arms, voted repeatedly against an immediate ceasefire, and when he attempted to apply the brakes on an offensive in Rafah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored him.
The “bear hug” strategy failed again.
The results of each US presidency can be seen in the behaviour of the Israeli prime minister, who remains the main obstacle in the negotiations about releasing the hostages and ending the nine-month war, far more so than Hamas, the mediators, or indeed Israel’s own negotiators.
To reinforce the point that Israel won’t withdraw its forces from the Rafah border or the Philadelphi corridor, which would be required under the first phase of the agreement that Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps saying is a done deal, Netanyahu visited Rafah to declare – once again – that victory was in sight.
He then bombed a major oil terminal at the Yemeni port of Hodeidah over the weekend in response to Yemen’s Houthi strike on Tel Aviv on Friday.
Threatening stability
Israeli commentators were quick to seize on the strategic significance of Israel’s attack.
It was more than a tactical strike against the Houthis, known as Ansar Allah, for their drone attack on Tel Aviv that killed one Israeli and injured several others, they wrote.
The strike on the oil port was a message to Iran, saying that Kharg Island, its principal oil export terminal, was potentially vulnerable to the next retaliatory strike by Israeli war planes.
But Israel’s strike was also aimed at the international community of which it claims to be part. It was that Israel could disrupt the energy lifeline of the Middle East.
Commentator Morielle I Lotan wrote: “This move also reminds the international community of the broader implications of regional instability. The global economy is intricately linked to the steady flow of oil from the Middle East.
“Any significant disruption, especially involving major export terminals like Kharg Island, would have profound economic consequences worldwide. By illustrating the potential for such disruptions, Israel is implicitly urging global powers to take the Iranian threat seriously and to support efforts to curb Tehran’s destabilizing activities.”
In other words, Israel explicitly threatened the stability of the international oil trade by attacking the port at Hodeidah.
This is yet another dangerous turn of the screw that Netanyahu has applied as he flies to Washington in preparation for his speech this week to Congress.
As any skipper of a western registered tanker or container ship going through the Bab el-Mandebstrait at the mouth of the Red Sea will tell you, western shipping is more vulnerable to the Houthis attacks, than the Houthis or Iran are from an attack by Israel.
So indeed is Aramco in Saudi Arabia, whose production was halved by a drone attack in 2019, or the oil tankers picking up cargo in ports of the United Arab Emirates from Iranian naval mines. Both Gulf states got the message of their vulnerability, a message which applies to this day.
Biden’s legacy
This, then, is the legacy of Biden’s first and only term in office. Under his watch and with his active encouragement, Israel for nine months has launched a genocidal war, which has levelled and starved Gaza, but failed to dislodge Hamas, and has taken the whole region to the brink of war.
Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen are bolder and more militarily capable to strike back than ever before in the 76-year conflict
Under his term, Israel had definitively rejected the two-state solution. Under his term, it has officially become an apartheid state in the eyes of international law.
America is now in an open conflict with the two top courts of international justice: the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), while continuing to argue it is defending a rules-based world order.
Worst of all, Biden has allowed Israel to starve Gaza through all its land crossings, and the aid traffic that should have landed on that ill-fated pier is now going through the Israeli port of Ashdod.
On top of this, the US still withholds funds from Unrwa, the only UN agency which recognises Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Last March, Congress passed a law prohibiting any further funding to Unrwa until at least March 2025.
But far from gaining deterrence during this war, Israel has lost it.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian and Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are bolder and more militarily capable to strike back as never before in the 76-year conflict.
In Gaza, the tunnel network is still intact. Hamas demonstrated this by striking Israeli tanks from the north, centre and south of the strip simultaneously and getting the tape out on Al Jazeera Arabic within hours.
Israel was surprised that after nine months Hamas still retained this national control over the strip.
Furthermore, the army admitted that Hamas had damaged so many tanks, that it did not have enough left to invade Lebanon.
In a legal filing to the Israeli Supreme Court, in response to a petition demanding the incorporation of women fighters into the army’s Armored Corps, the army said that many of its tanks were damaged in the war in Gaza and they did not have enough ammunition.
“The number of operational tanks in the corps is insufficient for the needs of the war and for conducting experiments of the deployment of women,” Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot reported, citing the court filing.
In northern Israel, Hezbollah’s drone and missile strikes against Israeli signals and intelligence gathering centres have been so accurate that they have temporarily rendered parts of southern Lebanon blind to Israeli drones and other operations.
Even if it wanted to launch an offensive to push Hezbollah away from the border and withdraw to the north of the Litany River, the Israeli army is in no condition to open a second front. It needs time and ammunition to recover from Gaza.
A new era
The era of short punitive expeditions to “cut the grass” and establish deference that will last years, is over.
Israel has entered a new era where resistance groups do not hoist the white flag after a few weeks of fighting. They don’t go into exile and nor will they easily release their hostages.
They fight back and exact a price on the tanks, the reservists who man them, and the economy of Israel. The price of such wars has increased exponentially for Israel.
Furthermore, the whole of the Arab world is seething with anger.
One small but indicative sign is the story of the late former soldier Ahmed Ahed al-Mahameed, from Ma’an governorate in southern Jordan.
As a perk, soldiers from the Jordanian army can apply for a housing loan from the Jordanian Armed Forces after 20 years of service. After his death, his family only discovered from his lawyer that Al-Mahameed had given the entire proceeds of the loan he obtained to people in Gaza.
Money and arms are pouring into the Occupied West Bank. As night follows day, the level of resistance to Israeli raids is increasing. Two lethal and sophisticated Iraqi-style roadside bombs were used in attacks on Israeli soldiers and armoured vehicles in the last month.
From this flows a second major strategic loss for Israel since 7 October last year.
In intercepting most of the ballistic missiles and drones that Iran launched in response to the Israeli attack on its embassy in Damascus, many over Jordanian airspace, Israel boasted it had the support of its neighbours. It doesn’t.
Arab rulers are only too aware of their inability to keep the lid on the kettle of anger at home.
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Anyone in either the departing Biden administration or the incoming Trump one who imagines that after the war is over in Gaza, Saudi Arabia will meekly sign on the dotted line of the Abraham Accords and the US and Israel can return to an era where normalisation with the richest Gulf states proceeds over the heads of the Palestinians, is living in dreamland.
This era too is over.
Arab rulers are only too aware of their inability to keep the lid on the kettle of anger at home
Of course the signature of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman could still appear on a document presented to him by Trump, but it would mean significantly less than it did on 6 October.
Israel has lost the ability to dictate the future of this conflict. It can keep the Palestinian Authority on financial life support, but today it is less in a position to dictate or engineer whom the next Palestinian president will be.
The moment the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas goes, so too will his two chosen successors, Hussein el-Sheikh, the general secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or Majed Faraj, his security chief. Each has substantial power under Abbas, but neither has legitimacy or authority even within Fatah.
The political post-Oslo accords formula of vetting and dictating who represents the Palestinians while dangling the prospect of talks in front of them, which never happen or never conclude, is gone.
This is as much Israel’s doing as Hamas’.
Israel: A sinking ship
Last week, the Knesset voted to reject a two-state solution by an overwhelming majority, which included the so-called moderates in this debate, opposition leader Benny Gantz and his party.
The global sanctioning of Israel is already under way
The motion read: “The establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilise the region.”
The motion said it would only be a matter of time before Hamas took it over and turned it into “a radical Islamic terror base”. But the keywords here, and its true Zionist message are the words “in the heart of the Land of Israel”.
This motion is not just, as Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative said, the death of Oslo.
It’s a proclamation of a one-state solution, a Jewish minority state which controls all the land from the river to the sea, creating a Jewish state which is synonymous with the biblical Land of Israel.
This has been the Zionist aim all along.
Supporters of a two-state solution – which number every western government and the UN – cannot continue ignoring this particular fact on the ground. A Palestinian leader who recognises Israel has no one to talk to.
Nobody has done more to destroy the argument that international economic sanctions impede progress towards a political solution on a two-state solution than the Israeli Knesset itself. It has done more to bury this particular corpse than the settlers themselves.
This leads us onto the fourth thing Israel has lost as Netanyahu prepares his speech to Congress: world opinion.
An entire generation of American youth can see that Israel will never allow a Palestinian state to bloom, and the Palestinian national cause has become the world’s number one human rights issue.
Netanyahu can dismiss the International Court of Justice’s landmark ruling on the Occupied Territories last week as “absurd“.
“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), our historical homeland,” Netanyahu said on X.
But they very much are, in world opinion and international law.
The court’s ruling did several things. It threw out the argument that the UK, Germany and US had been trying to make that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Israel’s actions in the occupied territory because, under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority cannot prosecute Israeli troops.
The ICJ said that international law trumps treaties.
In saying not just that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land was unlawful and should be brought to an end “as rapidly as possible”, but that every member state of the ICJ had a duty to make that happen, the ICJ gave legal backing to the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It also declared Israel an apartheid state.
Now, the US will ignore the ruling.
During Donald Trump’s first term of office, the then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, had little difficulty imposing sanctions on the then ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, and another senior prosecution official, Phakiso Mochochoko, as well as restricting the visas of others involved in the ICC investigation. No doubt this can happen again.
But Europe, which is a continent whose unity and identity rests on the shoulders of the institutions it has built, will have more difficulty orphaning its own child, the ICJ in The Hague.
And this will matter to Israel, because above all else Israel is populated by the descendants of refugees from Europe.
Israelis would not be so anxious about acquiring a bolt hole in Europe if they were confident in staying in the Palestinian lands they have colonised
And it will be to Britain, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain and Greece that Israelis will flee if they lose this conflict and are forced to negotiate with the Palestinians.
Why are many Israelis so keen right now to get European passports? They would not be so anxious about acquiring a bolt hole if they were confident in staying in the Palestinian lands they have colonised.
Such a verdict will enforce public opinion and exert pressure on governments throughout Europe to change their line. The governments themselves are already on the back foot, hard put to defend their arms contracts with Israel.
The ICJ does one more thing. It does not have executive power to enforce its ruling. But it does allow any court in a member state, which does have jurisdiction over government policy, to challenge arms sales or indeed any commercial contract with Israel.
If Israel loses the moral high ground, if it becomes officially an apartheid state – not in the opinion of non- governmental organisations, but in the opinion of the highest international court – if it has created an opposition millions strong around the world, a lot of companies will cease trading with Israel. The global sanctioning of Israel is already under way.
The loss of deterrence, the abandonment of negotiations by the unambiguous declaration that all the land belongs to the Jewish people, the loss of world opinion, and now the legal damnation of international law – should all lead pragmatic Israelis to one conclusion: it is time to stop fighting and to talk.
At the moment they show every sign of going down with the sinking ship.
