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

Washington, DC – A week before the Israeli government unleashed 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 promoting de-escalation.

Amos Hochstein, US President Joe Biden’s envoy, landed in the region on August 16 with the aim of preventing daily exchanges of fire at the Israel-Lebanon border between Lebanese group Hezbollah and Israeli forces from leading to all-out war.

But a day after Hochstein’s arrival, booby-trapped communication devices linked to Hezbollah were detonated across Lebanon, killing and injuring thousands in an attack widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. Further assaults would follow.

Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank, said the timing of Hochstein’s visit and the ensuing Israeli attacks on Lebanon highlight a pattern of Israeli leaders defying what the Biden administration says it wants its top ally to do.

“It’s exactly what’s happened for the last 12 months: They [the Israelis] know every single warning from the administration has been ignored — explicitly and emphatically, repeatedly — and there’s never been a 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 other people, including several children. Firing across the Israel-Lebanon border then reached new heights.

And on Monday, the Israeli military unleashed 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 unconditional US support for Israel, coupled with Washington’s failure to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, has emboldened the country to declare an apparent all-out war in Lebanon — and pushed the region to the edge of an abyss.

“It’s a disastrous failure of a policy,” Elgindy said.

“Every aspect of the administration’s policy has been a failure – from the humanitarian, to the diplomatic, to the moral, to the legal, to the political – in every conceivable way.”

Gaza war

Early into the Israeli war on Gaza, Biden — a staunch supporter of Israel — said preventing a regional war was a top priority of his administration.

Yet the US has continued to provide unflinching diplomatic and military backing to Israel despite warnings that the violence in Gaza risked spilling over to the rest of the Middle East.

Indeed, experts have noted 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 sign of abating.

Hezbollah began carrying out attacks against military targets in northern Israel and disputed border areas that Lebanon claims as its own shortly after the Israeli offensive in Gaza began in early October of last year.

The Lebanese group has argued that its campaign aims to pressure Israel to end its war against Palestinians, insisting that a Gaza ceasefire is the only way to end the hostilities.

Israel responded by bombing Lebanese villages and targeting Hezbollah fighters across the border, and it sought to divorce the tensions with Hezbollah from the situation in Gaza.

While Washington has helped sponsor Gaza ceasefire talks to try to secure a deal that would end the war and lead to the release of Israeli captives, the effort appears stalled amid reports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scuttling the talks.

Biden has acknowledged that Netanyahu is not doing enough to finalise an agreement, but his administration has done little to pressure the Israeli leader to moderate his position. Instead, the US continues to supply 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 enabler” of Netanyahu, who wants to prevent a ceasefire deal to appease his far-right government coalition partners and ensure his own political survival.

“The [Biden] administration knows that, or should know that,” Zogby told Al Jazeera. “If they don’t know it, shame on them. If they do know it, and let it happen anyway then double shame on them.”

The escalation in Lebanon, Zogby added, “can go nowhere but south – badly, in other words”.

“And it’s on the hands of the administration.”

Osamah Khalil, a history professor at Syracuse University, also questioned the sincerity of the Democratic administration’s diplomatic efforts, saying they have been for domestic political consumption in the run-up to a US election.

“All this was negotiations for the sake of negotiations, particularly as the war became increasingly unpopular,” Khalil told Al Jazeera.

Lebanon escalation

Beyond their uncompromising support for Israel’s war on Gaza, Biden and his aides have been in near complete alignment with Netanyahu’s approach to Lebanon.

While clashes between the Israeli military and Hezbollah displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the so-called Blue Line that separates Lebanon and Israel, the conflict was largely contained to the border area for months.

Then in January, Israel carried out its first air strike in Beirut in years, assassinating Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in the Lebanese capital.

Despite its calls for de-escalation, the White House appeared to welcome the assault, saying that Israel has a “right and responsibility” to go after Hamas leaders. Further Israeli attacks received a similar reaction from Washington.

The Biden administration was also mum when the wireless communication devices blew up across Lebanon over two days last week, killing dozens and injuring thousands, including children, women and medics.

The US has refused to acknowledge that Israel was behind the attack, and the White House and Department of State have not condemned the explosions, which legal experts have said likely violated international humanitarian law.

The only Biden administration comment linking Israel to the attack came from the US’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, who appeared to celebrate the carnage caused by the explosions.

During an event at the Israeli-American Council, Lipstadt was asked whether Israel is perceived as weaker after Hamas’s October 7 attack on the country. She responded, “Do you want a beeper?”

‘Escalate to de-escalate’

Formally, 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 does not believe the surge in violence can be called a regional war.

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point,” Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder told reporters. “I mean, what you don’t see is multiple nations conducting operations against one another in the region and protracted, sustained operations.”

Ryder’s comments came just days after the US news site Axios cited unidentified US officials as saying that they support Israel’s “de-escalation through escalation” in Lebanon.

According to Elgindy, of the Middle East Institute, the US is refusing to pressure Israel to achieve Washington’s own policy goals, so it is trying to change the narrative instead.

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 had presented as a red line – was not a major offensive.

“Washington is the only actor that can impose any kind of constraint on Israel, and they consistently refuse to do it,” Elgindy told Al Jazeera.

“They refuse to do it on the humanitarian issue, on the killing of civilians, on the ceasefire. So, they’re not going to do it to prevent a regional war, either. They just keep shifting the goalposts. They’ll redefine regional escalation to mean something else.”

Elgindy added that if 500 Israelis had been killed — like the nearly 500 people who were killed in Lebanon in a single day this week — such an attack would have been viewed as an unmistakable act of war.

Zogby, of the Arab American Institute, said the difference in responses can be attributed to a simple fact: the US simply does not view Arab and Israeli lives as being equal. “Our lives just don’t matter as much.”