Joe Biden arrives in Israel on Wednesday on a high-stakes visit overshadowed by catastrophe even before Air Force One touched down at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.
Eleven days after the Hamas attack that killed at least 1,400 Israelis, the US president faced the already tricky task of providing solace to a grief-stricken nation while attempting to persuade its leaders to prevent humanitarian crisis and even regional conflict.
But that delicate mission became infinitely more complicated on Tuesday when an explosion at the al-Ahli Arabi Baptist hospital in Gaza killed hundreds of Palestinians sheltering from Israel’s bombing campaign. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military claimed the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket barrage.
The incident was enough to further dampen already limited expectations from the visit. Almost immediately Mahmoud Abbas announced he was pulling out of a planned summit in Jordan where Biden had been due to hold talks with the Palestinian Authority leader, King Abdullah of Jordan and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, told Al Jazeera the summit was cancelled because “there is no use in talking now about anything except stopping the war”.
The White House later issued a statement, saying the trip had merely been postponed, after consultation with Jordan. But the dispiriting eve-of-trip events further highlighted the fact that the president is walking a diplomatic tightrope.
Biden’s trip follows an invitation from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – and followed careful deliberation with his national security and intelligence advisers.
In its importance and profile, the visit is being compared to the president’s visit to Kyiv last February, where he made a surprise appearance on the first anniversary of Russia’s attack on Ukraine to show solidarity with the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
He has the humane mission of soothing a society deep in mourning from the effects of the devastating 7 October onslaught, which has shaken Israelis’ faith in their country’s vaunted security capacities.
At the same time, having affirmed the Jewish state’s right to self-defence in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he has the more complicated assignment of talking Netanyahu and his newly formed security cabinet out of a rushed ground invasion that US officials believe could be both intractable and so costly in terms of Palestinian lives that international sympathy would quickly drain away from Israel.
Even more urgent from the president’s standpoint is the need to gently deter Israel from a response that could provoke a wider conflict, involving Iran and its proxy, the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah.
At stake for Biden is the credibility of a Middle East diplomatic strategy that was already under fire even before Hamas’s devastating actions.
The administration is desperately trying to save a treasured goal of brokering historic formal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a move that could transform the region’s diplomatic landscape. Already teetering from the post-7 October fallout, a bloody and extensive Israeli offensive in Gaza provoking widespread anger in the “Arab street” would torpedo the planned normalisation entirely.
That would be a geopolitical body blow for the Biden administration, which has invested the rapprochement with much hope as a bulwark against regional encroachment by China, seen as a growing threat after Beijing earlier this year brokered the restoration of long-severed diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Biden has also been pursuing rapprochement with the Saudi kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – who he had once vowed to make a “pariah” in response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has left Washington’s European allies looking to the oil-rich Gulf nations as an alternative energy source.
On the plus side, the president has credit in the bank with Israel thanks to a relationship with Netanyahu stretching back decades and an empathetic response to the attacks, which he described as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
“This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty – not just hate, but pure cruelty – against the Jewish people,” Biden told a gathering of American Jewish leaders at the White House.
In contrast to his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama – who had a chilly relationship with Netanyahu – Biden can at least fall back on warm personal ties with the Israeli prime minister, a resource that might prove useful to the president in conveying the wisdom of his view that Israel would be gravely mistaken by re-occupying Gaza, from which it withdrew in 2005.
But failure to meet with Abbas or any Palestinian officials, and only holding talks with Israelis, may undermine Biden’s calls for a diplomatic solution, and give fuel to his critics.
Whatever the costs-benefits at stake internationally, the risks are less obvious domestically. Analysts discount the current crisis’s electoral significance in next year’s likely presidential rematch with Donald Trump, who has already courted controversy by criticising Netanyahu and praising Hezbollah as “smart”.
“I don’t think Biden could avoid doing this. It was an opportunity that any sitting president would have taken, given that support for Israel is widespread,” said Dr Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia.
“Voters like presidents to take action and this puts Biden at the centre of the action in the Middle East. So it certainly helps his image, but Americans don’t respond to international events electorally unless US troops are involved directly.
“Biden could solve the Middle East process and it will not affect how people vote. I always remember Jimmy Carter and the Camp David summits with [then Israeli prime minister Menachem] Begin and [Egypt’s president, Anwar] Sadat. He got lots of praise but it had zero impact on the next presidential election.”
