Now It Makes Sense
Noah Rothman for National Review November 27, 2024 8:46 AM
When it was initially announced, the cease-fire with Hezbollah via the Lebanese government, to which Israel acquiesced on Tuesday, didn’t make much sense to me.
Why would Jerusalem agree to put a halt to the war it was prosecuting so expertly with only some of its objectives secured and in response to security guarantees that look a lot like the failed architecture of the past? Now we know. Israel wasn’t persuaded to take a risk on peace. The Jewish state was blackmailed into it.
In a press release, Senator Ted Cruz alleged that the Biden administration muscled Israel into a cease-fire by threatening not just to choke off the aid and materiel flowing into Israel. He threatened to join the cast of Middle Eastern jackals set on throwing the Israeli people into the sea.
“Obama-Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies into accepting the ceasefire by withholding weapons they needed to defend themselves and counter Hezbollah, and by threatening to facilitate a further, broader, binding international arms embargo through the United Nations,” he wrote.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides confirmed the broad strokes of Cruz’s account. The Israeli government claimed that the outgoing administration threatened to embargo arms transfers while promising to stand aside while the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions compelling Israel to put a halt to the fighting not just in Lebanon but Gaza, too.
The Biden White House denies the Netanyahu government’s account. Democratic officials maintain that the Israeli government is trying to craft a narrative that ingratiates itself with the incoming Trump administration and soothes frayed nerves among members of Netanyahu’s coalition who are skeptical of the cease-fire.
For its part, the center-left Israeli outlet Haaretz insists the “truth lies somewhere in between these contradictory stories.” And yet, the truth seems to be that Israeli officials believe the slow disbursement of aid is “a deliberate attempt to constrain it” and “that Biden could at any moment order his representative there not to cast a veto” in the UNSC. So, even if we’re in between truths here, we seem to be markedly closer to the Israeli version of events.
If there is a reward for Israel in this, it seems to be that the European powers that initially entertained a willingness to enforce the International Criminal Court’s warrant seeking the arrest of Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant have backed off their pledge. Promising the non-enforcement of a non-enforceable edict issued by one of the U.N.’s contemptible appendages is some consolation prize. Given all the objectives Israel may have sacrificed, this hardly suffices for comfort.
Commentary editor John Podhoretz summarized Biden’s Obama-like final insult to the Israeli people:
Yes, Biden and his people have secured a ceasefire, as though a ceasefire means anything but its literal definition — a pause in the use of projectile force. It means nothing else. It does not mean peace. It does not mean negotiations. It does not mean a change in the relative positions of the forces at war. It’s a freeze. And when such a freeze freezes the military that’s on the march, it implicitly favors the side that is on its back foot. Thus America has, in effect, sided with Hezbollah.
And for this morally degenerate compromise, Biden didn’t even get his cease-fire. “Hours after Israel’s cease-fire agreement with Lebanon went into effect on Wednesday, the IDF shot at a vehicle believed to be violating the terms of the deal,” Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reported on Wednesday.
As for the stated goal of Israel’s offensive in Southern Lebanon — getting the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by rocket and mortar fire back into their homes in Israel’s northern territories — that, too, is in doubt. As the Financial Times and others report, neither the IDF nor Netanyahu have altered their guidance to displaced Israelis to stay away from their abandoned residencies.
Unless you were only rooting for Joe Biden to secure something he could plausibly call a cease-fire so he might burnish an otherwise historically klutzy legacy, there is little here to celebrate. Biden and his allies spent much of this administration sifting through the wreckage his policies produced for something resembling a victory they could tout for the cameras. The goal was only ever to win the news cycle, even at the expense of more salient objectives. Posterity will take a longer view of Biden’s dismal presidency.