‘Disastrous failure’: How Biden emboldened Israel to attack Lebanon Trending Global News

Washington DC – A week before the Israeli government launched a barrage of attacks on Lebanon — killing nearly 500 people in a single day — the United States sent a diplomat to Israel with the stated goal of easing tensions.

US President Joe Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein landed in the region on August 16 with the aim of stopping the daily gunfights along the Israel-Lebanon border between the Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Israeli army that could lead to a full-blown war.

But the day after Hochstein arrived, communications equipment linked to Hezbollah in Lebanon was blown up, killing and wounding thousands. The attack is widely believed to have been 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 attack on Lebanon highlight a pattern of Israeli leaders defying the Biden administration’s dictates about what it wants from its top ally.

“It’s exactly what’s happened over the last 12 months: they [the Israelis] “I know that every warning from the administration has been ignored – clearly and emphatically, over and over again – and there has never been any consequence,” he told Al Jazeera.

On Friday, Israel bombed a building in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing a senior Hezbollah commander as well as dozens of others, including several children, as gunfire along the Israel-Lebanon 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 the US’ unconditional support for Israel and Washington’s failure to ensure a ceasefire in Gaza had encouraged Israel to apparently declare a full-blown war in Lebanon – and pushed the region further into the abyss.

“This is a catastrophic failure of policy,” Elgindy said.

“Every aspect of the administration’s policy has failed — humanitarian, diplomatic, ethical, legal, political — in every possible way.”

Gaza War

At the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, Biden — a staunch supporter of Israel — said preventing a regional war was his administration’s top priority.

Yet the United States continues to provide unwavering diplomatic and military support to Israel despite warnings that violence in Gaza could spill over into the rest of the Middle East.

Indeed, experts have said the conflict in Lebanon is an extension of the ongoing war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,400 Palestinians so far and shows no signs of abating.

Soon after the Israeli offensive into Gaza began in early October last year, Hezbollah began attacking military targets in northern Israel and the disputed border area, which Lebanon claims as its own.

The Lebanese group has argued that its campaign aims to pressure Israel to end its war against the Palestinians, and has stressed 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 attempted to separate tensions with Hezbollah from the situation in Gaza.

Although Washington has helped sponsor ceasefire talks in Gaza aimed at ensuring an agreement that would end the fighting and release Israeli prisoners, the effort appears to be stalled amid reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to sabotage the talks.

Biden has acknowledged that Netanyahu is not doing enough to finalize the agreement, but his administration has done little to pressure the Israeli leader to soften his stance. Instead, the US continues to provide Israel with billions of dollars worth of weapons to continue the war.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said the Biden administration has been a “passive supporter” of Netanyahu, seeking to stall a ceasefire deal to appease his far-right government coalition partners and ensure his own political survival.

“The [Biden] “The administration knows this, or should know this,” Zogby told Al Jazeera. “If they don’t know this, they should be ashamed. If they know this, and still let this happen, they should be doubly ashamed.”

Zogby said the escalation of tensions in Lebanon “cannot go anywhere but south — in other words, badly.”

“And that’s in the hands of the administration.”

Osama Khalil, a history professor at Syracuse University, also questioned the sincerity of the Democratic administration’s diplomatic efforts, saying these efforts were made for domestic political gain ahead of the US election.

“It was all negotiation for the sake of negotiation, especially as the war was becoming increasingly unpopular,” Khalil told Al Jazeera.

Tension escalates in Lebanon

Aside from his unwavering support for Israel’s war on Gaza, Biden and his allies are almost entirely in agreement with Netanyahu’s approach to Lebanon.

While clashes between the Israeli military and Hezbollah displaced thousands of people on both sides of the so-called Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel, the conflict remained largely confined to the border area for months.

Then in January, Israel carried out its first airstrike on Beirut in years, killing Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in the Lebanese capital.

Despite its calls for de-escalation, the White House welcomed the attack, saying Israel has a “right and responsibility” to strike Hamas leaders. Further Israeli attacks drew a similar response from Washington.

The Biden administration was also silent when wireless communications equipment exploded in Lebanon over two days last week, killing dozens and injuring thousands, including children, women and medics.

The United States has refused to acknowledge that Israel was behind the attack, and the White House and State Department have not condemned the blasts, which legal experts have said may have violated international humanitarian law.

The only comment linking Israel to the attack came from Deborah Lipstadt, the US envoy for combating anti-Semitism, who appeared to celebrate the carnage caused by the blasts.

During an Israeli-American Council event, Lipstadt was asked if Israel was being seen as weak after Hamas’ attack on the country on October 7. She replied, “Do you need a beeper?”

‘Increasing stress to reduce stress’

Formally, the US government has consistently stated that it does not want to escalate tensions and is working to prevent a wider conflict.

On Monday, as Israel launched its expanded bombing campaign in Lebanon, leading Hezbollah to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel’s interior, the Pentagon stressed it did not believe the escalation of violence could be called a regional war.

“I don’t think we’ve reached that point,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder told reporters. “I mean, you don’t see that many countries in the region conducting operations against each other and conducting long-term, sustained campaigns.”

Ryder’s remarks came just days after US news site Axios quoted unnamed US officials as saying they support Israel’s efforts to “de-escalate tensions through de-escalation” in Lebanon.

According to the Middle East Institute’s Elgindy, the US is refusing to put pressure on Israel to achieve its policy goals, so it is attempting to change the narrative.

He compared Washington’s refusal to recognise the Israeli bombing of Lebanon as a regional war to the Biden administration’s insistence that Israel’s invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah – which Biden presented as a red line – was not a major invasion.

“Washington is the only country that can impose any kind of sanctions on Israel, and they have consistently refused to do so,” Elgindy told Al Jazeera.

“They refuse to do it on humanitarian issues, killing of civilians, ceasefires. So, they’re not going to do it to stop a regional war either. They just keep changing targets. They’ll redefine regional escalation to mean something else.”

Elgindy said that if 500 Israelis had been killed — as nearly 500 were killed in Lebanon in a single day this week — such an attack would have been clearly seen as an act of war.

Zogby, of the Arab American Institute, said the difference in reactions may be due to a simple fact: The U.S. does not value Arab and Israeli lives equally. “Our lives don’t matter as much.”