Washington, DC – A week before the Israeli government launched a series of attacks on Lebanon – killing nearly 500 people in a single day – the United States sent a diplomat to Israel with the stated aim of promoting de-escalation.
Amos Hochstein, US President Joe Biden’s envoy, landed in the region on September 16 in a bid to prevent daily firefights on the Israeli-Lebanese border between the Lebanese group Hezbollah and Israeli forces from escalating into all-out war.
But a day after Hochstein arrived, Hezbollah-linked communications booby-trapped devices exploded across Lebanon, killing and wounding thousands in an attack many believe was carried out by Israel. More attacks followed.
Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank, said the timing of Hochstein’s visit and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Lebanon highlight a pattern among Israeli leaders to defy what the Biden administration says it wants its key ally to do.
“That’s exactly what’s happened over the last 12 months: they (the Israelis) know that every warning from the administration has been ignored – explicitly and categorically, repeatedly – and there has never been any consequence,” he told Tel Aviv Tribune.
On Friday, Israel bombed a building in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing a senior Hezbollah official and dozens of others, including several children, as gunfire across the Israeli-Lebanese border reached new heights.
And on Monday, the Israeli military launched attacks across Lebanon – killing at least 492 people, including many women and children – in one of the deadliest days in the country’s history.
Elgindy and other experts said that the United States’ unconditional support for Israel, coupled with Washington’s failure to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, encouraged the country to declare an apparent war on Lebanon – and pushed the region to the brink.
“It’s a disastrous failure in terms of policy,” Elgindy said.
“Every aspect of the administration’s policy has been a failure – humanitarian, diplomatic, moral, legal and political – in every conceivable way.”
Gaza War
At the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, Biden – a staunch supporter of Israel – said preventing a regional war was a top priority of his administration.
Yet the United States has continued to provide unwavering diplomatic and military support to Israel, despite warnings that the violence in Gaza risks spreading to the rest of the Middle East.
Indeed, experts have stressed that the conflict in Lebanon is an extension of the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,400 Palestinians to date and shows no signs of abating.
Hezbollah began carrying out attacks on military targets in northern Israel and in disputed border areas that Lebanon claims as its own shortly after Israel began its offensive in Gaza in early October last year.
The Lebanese group said its campaign was aimed at pressuring Israel to end its war against the Palestinians, insisting that a ceasefire in Gaza is the only way to end hostilities.
Israel responded by bombing Lebanese villages and targeting Hezbollah fighters across the border, and sought to dissociate tensions with Hezbollah from the situation in Gaza.
While Washington helped sponsor ceasefire talks in Gaza in an attempt to reach an agreement that would end the war and lead to the release of Israeli captives, the effort appears to have stalled as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu derails the talks.
Biden acknowledged that Netanyahu was not doing enough to reach a deal, but his administration has done little to pressure the Israeli leader to moderate his stance. Instead, the United States continues to supply Israel with billions of dollars in weapons to continue the war.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said the Biden administration has been a “passive enabler” of Netanyahu, who wants to prevent a ceasefire deal to appease his far-right coalition partners and ensure his own political survival.
“The (Biden) administration knows this, or should know this,” Zogby told Tel Aviv Tribune. “If they don’t know this, shame on them. If they know this and let it happen, shame on them.”
The escalation in Lebanon, Zogby added, “can only go south – and badly, in other words.”
“And that is the responsibility of the administration.”
Osamah Khalil, a history professor at Syracuse University, also questioned the sincerity of the Democratic administration’s diplomatic efforts, saying they were aimed at domestic politics ahead of the US elections.
“It was all just negotiations for the sake of negotiations, especially as the war became increasingly unpopular,” Khalil told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Climbing in Lebanon
Beyond their uncompromising support for Israel’s war on Gaza, Biden and his aides have been almost entirely aligned with Netanyahu’s approach to Lebanon.
While clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah have displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Blue Line that separates Lebanon and Israel, the conflict has been largely confined to the border area for months.
Then, in January, Israel carried out its first airstrike on Beirut in years, assassinating Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in the Lebanese capital.
Despite its calls for de-escalation, the White House appeared to welcome the attack, saying Israel had “the right and the responsibility” to go after Hamas leaders. Other Israeli attacks have drawn a similar response from Washington.
The Biden administration also remained silent as wireless communications devices exploded across Lebanon for two days last week, killing dozens and wounding thousands, including children, women and doctors.
The United States has refused to acknowledge that Israel was behind the attack, and the White House and State Department have not condemned the explosions, which legal experts say likely violated international humanitarian law.
The only comment from the Biden administration linking Israel to the attack came from the U.S. envoy tasked with combating anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, who appeared to celebrate the carnage caused by the explosions.
At an event hosted by the Israeli-American Council, Lipstadt was asked whether Israel was perceived as weaker after Hamas attacked the country on October 7. She responded: “Do you want a pager?”
“Climb to defuse”
Officially, the US government continues to say that it does not want escalation and that it is working to prevent a wider conflict.
On Monday, as Israel launched its expanded bombing campaign in Lebanon, prompting Hezbollah to fire hundreds of rockets at targets deep inside Israel, the Pentagon stressed that it did not believe the escalation of violence could be characterized as a regional war.
“I don’t think we’re at that point,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters. “I mean, what you don’t see is multiple nations operating against each other in the region and sustained, prolonged operations.”
Ryder’s comments come just days after US news site Axios quoted unidentified US officials as saying they supported Israel’s “de-escalation through escalation” in Lebanon.
According to Elgindy of the Middle East Institute, the United States refuses to pressure Israel to achieve its own political goals, and is instead trying to change the narrative.
He compared Washington’s refusal to recognize Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon as a regional war to the Biden administration’s insistence that Israel’s invasion of the southern Gaza town of Rafah – which Biden had presented as a red line – was not a major offensive.
“Washington is the only actor that can impose any constraints on Israel, and it consistently refuses to do so,” Elgindy told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“They refuse to do it on the humanitarian issue, on the massacre of civilians, on the ceasefire. So they will not do it to prevent a regional war either. They are only moving the rules of the game. They will redefine regional escalation to give it another meaning.”
Elgindy added that if 500 Israelis had been killed – like the nearly 500 people killed in Lebanon in a single day this week – such an attack would have been considered an undeniable act of war.
According to Zogby of the Arab American Institute, the difference in responses can be attributed to a simple fact: The United States simply does not consider the lives of Arabs and Israelis to be equal. “Our lives just don’t matter as much.”