Following the war in Gaza, you often feel like you’re going crazy, and not just because of the daily atrocities carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). No, it’s that it feels like you’re stuck in a time loop, a geopolitical Groundhog Day where every week or so the same pattern unfolds: Israel slaughters dozens of Palestinian civilians while escalating things to the brink of regional war, Washington tut-tuts and loudly announces a cease-fire deal it claims is backed by Israel and is oh-so-close to being finalized, at which point Israel rejects the deal and continues bombing and escalating, prompting calls to cut Israel off from US military support entirely — which the White House ignores, letting us repeat the cycle all over again.
This is exactly what’s happened this week. Israel has effectively started a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching a massive bombing campaign against the country that killed more than five hundred people in a single day, most of them civilians, including fifty children. Though Hezbollah has not quite responded in kind yet, launching a limited amount of rockets at Israeli military bases and some cities, things are close to tipping over the edge, with Israel threatening a ground invasion and Iran’s president ominously warning that “Hezbollah cannot stand alone” against it.
To prevent the Middle East from erupting into all-out war, President Joe Biden and his administration, together with a handful of allied leaders, has put forward a twenty-one-day-long cease-fire proposal that it says Israel supports, while publicly backing Israel’s actions. The deal would, depending on who you listen to, either be unconnected to a deal between Israel and Hamas or possibly serve as an on-ramp to one, or even see Israel announce an end to its systematic destruction of Gaza, the main condition under which Hezbollah has said it would end the rocket attacks that are ostensibly the reason Israel is now attacking Lebanon.
It would be an ideal solution for Biden and the Democrats, who have been trying to find a way to sputter over the finish line this election without getting embroiled in a major war, but without cutting off US military support for Israel. The only problem? Israel refuses to go along with it.
Just as they have for months and months on Gaza, a parade of Israeli officials have in no uncertain terms rejected the deal Biden said they supported on Lebanon and reiterated they will keep their war going there.
“The news about a ceasefire is incorrect. This is an American-French proposal, to which the prime minister did not even respond,” was the statement from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, adding that he had ordered the IDF “to continue the fighting with full force.”
“We will continue throwing Hezbollah off balance and deepening their loss,” said defense minister Yoav Gallant, who has recently butted heads with Netanyahu.
“There will be no ceasefire in the north,” Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz tweeted.
Numerous right-wing politicians, including from Netanyahu’s own party, have spoken out against the idea. So have the head of one of Israel’s “liberal” opposition parties and the heads of frontline authorities in northern Israel, rocket attacks on which are the public reason for why Israel has started this war. The head of the IDF is rhapsodizing about how it “has been waiting for this opportunity for years,” so Israel must “continue attacking Hezbollah.”
Maybe most important, so have Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners, including national security minister and convicted terrorist supporter Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has threatened he will stop cooperating with and even leave government if Netanyahu agrees to the cease-fire with Hezbollah. This threat is reportedly what led Netanyahu to backtrack on early support for the cease-fire idea, which is quite literally the exact same sequence of events that has happened repeatedly with a Gaza cease-fire deal.
Once again, the Biden administration is confronted with the fundamental contradiction of its deluded Israel-Gaza policy: they want to end the war in Gaza and prevent it from spiraling into a regional war that could draw the United States in, but they also want to do so while maintaining public support for Israel and continuing to feed it endless weapons and military support.
This is an impossible scenario because, as we’re now seeing for the hundredth time, not only is the entire Israeli establishment committed to war, but Netanyahu couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to — because his coalition partners will collapse his government, at which point he will stand trial and possibly face prison.
In other words, the one thing the Biden administration doesn’t want to do to stop a regional war — cut off military aid to Israel, so that it physically cannot keep waging war — is the only thing that can do so. Luckily, the idea has majority support from both Democrats and independents, while a Middle Eastern war breaking out would be electorally toxic a month out from voting. So pulling the trigger on this now is a clear no-brainer for the Biden White House, right?
Apparently not. As Israeli officials clarified their rejection of the president’s cease-fire proposal, they announced they had just secured another $8.7 billion worth of US military aid. War it is.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU’S claim to be working with the US on a ceasefire in Lebanon is nothing but stalling. He has changed his tune in the last 24 hours: his office issued a social media statement on Thursday boasting that “the prime minister has not even responded” to the US-French ceasefire plan.
An overnight clarification, claiming that Israel was engaging with the proposal and “appreciates the US efforts in this regard because the US role is indispensable in advancing stability and security in the region,” followed. Perhaps the White House objected behind the scenes to being publicly humiliated by a leader whose war machine would soon grind to a halt without its supplies, funding and military back-up.
If so, it should not be pacified by flattering remarks. Keir Starmer was right to warn at the UN that we are on the brink of a war “no-one can control and with consequences that none of us can foresee.”
So where is the action to match this urgency?
Where is the total arms embargo that would show Israel Starmer is serious about an immediate ceasefire? Where is the closure of RAF bases on Cyprus to US traffic that would impede the supply of weaponry? The public demands that the US act to rein Israel in, or the diplomatic penalties for its continued efforts to set the Middle East on fire?
There is no point in trusting Netanyahu when he says he is pursuing a ceasefire (especially within 24 hours of his denying exactly that). He has said the same over Gaza for nearly a year, while repeatedly derailing talks whenever they get close to agreement — whether through suddenly adding new Israeli demands, or by assassinating the leader of the organisation he is supposed to be negotiating with.
Instead, he is lashing out in every direction. Had he agreed a ceasefire with Hamas and secured the return of the hostages it holds — the demand of enormous rallies in Israel’s own capital, week after week, the demand of the United Nations, a demand backed at least officially by our own government following months of pressure from street protests — then the Hezbollah rocket fire would have stopped, and the residents of northern Israel who have fled would be able to return home.
Instead he has deliberately ratcheted up the confrontation with Hezbollah, with bigger and bigger bombing raids, the exploding-pager terrorist attack and now the threatened ground invasion. Nor has he confined this escalation to Lebanon, with Syria reporting the Israeli bombing of one of its military bases near the Lebanese border today.
These are the acts of a government hell-bent on wider war, and empty words from Washington and London will do nothing to stop it.
If people power mobilised on the streets forced the shifts we have seen so far in British government policy — grudging support for a ceasefire at the UN, and a partial halt to certain arms export licences — then that power must be redoubled in a protest movement that forces ministers to go further.
The war must be contained, because its capacity to spread through the region is obvious. There is no guarantee an Israeli government as reckless as Netanyahu’s is proving would never escalate to the use of nuclear arms in such a wider conflict.
But containing it must be the first step to stopping it. The daily horror in besieged Gaza, a tiny, overcrowded strip where a trapped people have nowhere to run from Israel’s bombs, continues as the world watches Lebanon.
And the destruction of Gaza is accompanied by daily outrages visited on the Palestinians of the West Bank. This war is about creating a greater Israel across all of historic Palestine: and now eyes have been opened to that fact, we must stop British governments conniving in that ethnic cleansing project.
