On the surface, Joe Biden gave Israel a clear green light to continue its military campaign in Gaza on Wednesday night, and endorsed its claim that Hamas has been using the al-Shifa hospital as a command and control headquarters.
His remarks in San Francisco after a meeting with Xi Jinping will delight Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
But the pattern of US behaviour since the war started is to provide public support alongside private caution. Behind the scenes the tensions are escalating, and issues around the Israeli strategy are unresolved.
Indeed, the frank admission by Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister, on Monday that Israel had “two to three weeks” before it faced significant diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire may prove optimistic. It is said the IDF has prepared short- and long-term campaign plans, dependent on the political environment in which they operate.
Clues that Israel is under pressure are surfacing.
In San Francisco, Biden said the Israeli modus operandi in raiding the al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza showed Israel had changed. He said: “It is a different story than I believe was occurring before, an indiscriminate bombing,” implying the US had demanded a different tactic.
Western officials continue to ask searching questions about Israel’s future strategy.
One British diplomat said: “This idea of safe zones [for Gaza civilians] makes us very leery. You have to make sure you do not put people into jeopardy by kettling them into a location. The UN is very leery about safe zones and they are 100% correct because they all remember what happened in Srebrenica, northern Iraq and Rwanda. Yes, you can put a tented camp in the left-hand corner of Gaza, 5km up the coast and 1km in, it might sound good on paper, but the reality on the ground is you cannot do that unless everyone with a gun agrees to respect it.”
Similarly, the raid on the al-Shifa hospital has not been seen in Israel and the American press as quite the slam-dunk moment Biden presented. It was high-risk and high-reward in that it would, according to Israeli claims backed up by the US, reveal Hamas had indeed been using the hospital as a command and control centre.
The Jerusalem Post analysis, broadly supported by New York Times investigations, asked how 2,000 Hamas fighters had evaporated. Saudi, UAE and Qatari diplomats all issued statements dismissing the Israeli claims.
Israel may legitimately argue it needs more time to search through a vast complex and dig deep beneath the building, but more time was the plea of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2003, and eventually they drew an embarrassing blank.
Most western officials are more inclined to believe Israel rather than Hamas, and it is striking that US intelligence before the raid claimed independently that Hamas had committed a war crime by installing a command post in the hospital. But in a very polarised war, each side is going to interpret the evidence to fit their prejudices.
The US also seems unhappy with what it is hearing of Israel’s postwar plans. In an interview with the Financial Times, the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, insisted Israel could not leave a vacuum in Gaza and that this would require a very strong Israeli presence. As he was saying this, Biden was reiterating that an Israeli re-occupation of Gaza would be a very big mistake.
In New York, the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said a sustained peace must put “Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza”. She added: “It must include Palestinian-led governance, and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. It must include a sustained mechanism for reconstruction in Gaza. And it must ensure there is no use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism or violent attacks. And it must include a pathway to a two-state solution”. That leaves the US and Israel some way apart.
In this context it is possible to see the US decision to abstain rather than veto the UN security council resolution calling for prolonged humanitarian pause on Wednesday as significant. It was the UN’s fifth attempt to reach a common position.
The US had on 18 October raised a lonely hand to veto a more ambitious Brazilian resolution on the basis that the resolution did not criticise Hamas, or assert Israel’s right to self-defence. The latest resolution, drafted by Malta, also contained no criticism of Hamas – a point the US envoy made to the security council – but the US clearly felt the climate of diplomatic and public opinion had swung against Israel enough in the past month to make a further veto inadvisable.
It was the first time the UN security council had come to a collective view on Israel and Palestine since 2016. The resolution may have been a tepid call for pauses, and one that Israel immediately rejected, but as one NGO observer said sometimes you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
There is a further concern; western capitals are deeply worried by the spillover effect of Gaza on the global south’s support for sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine.
One senior former British diplomat said this week: “There is a lot of distrust here and a suspicion amongst their leaders that when we urge them to impose sanctions, the west does not hurt that much from sanctions but they do. This I fear will get worse because of what is going on in Gaza at the moment where they believe we show double standards and give what they will see as unconditional support for Israel. So the sooner that Gaza is over the better, but I would be surprised if there are no scars from this.”
Ultimately this may come down to political calculation. Netanyahu, judging by the polls, has no option but to plough on in the hope that he can regain the mantle of Mr Security and save his job by eliminating Hamas.
But Biden, a friend of Israel but not of Netanyahu, has his own calculations to make. The US’s strength is built on the quality and range of its international alliances, the so-called “shield of the republic”. That shield is looking battered to the extent that Iran, playing a canny diplomatic game, is broadening its friendships across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, no friends of Hamas, want this war over.
Most worrying for Joe Biden, so do the American people. A Reuters-Ipsos poll showed 68% of Americans supported a ceasefire.