Is Joe Biden still calling the shots in the Middle East? That certainly doesn’t seem to be what Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Trump-loving prime minister, is saying.
Washington awoke this week to news that broke early Sunday morning of the fall of the Assad regime — an end to one of the most murderous and oppressive dictatorships in the world, one that had persisted since the 1970s through consecutive US administrations which opposed it.
As Syrians celebrated across Damascus and elsewhere in the country, other powers in the region took action. Citing a supposed threat from anti-Israel militant groups in a country now undergoing a massive political upheaval, Israeli troops occupied five villages across the Golan Heights, an area in Syria’s southwest. It also struck countless other targets across the country.
The move was immediately denounced as a violation of international law. The backlash cued up an inevitable response from the Biden administration, which for all intents and purposes has been relegated to the role of a public relations firm smoothing over caustic rhetoric and actions from Israeli hardliners, including those in the government.
”The Syrian army abandoned its positions in the area around the negotiated Israeli-Syrian buffer zone, which potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel, would threaten civilians inside Israel,” said State Department spokesman Matt Miller on Monday, though he didn’t give any evidence of those groups having attempted to move in.
He’d go on to say that “this is a temporary action that they have taken in response to actions by the Syrian military to withdraw from that area,” while adding that the Biden administration, which has a little more than a month left in office, would be “watching what steps [Israel] take[s] in the coming weeks”.
Miller’s promise appears to have been even more short-lived than others the Biden administration has been forced to break over the past year — like its vow to take action after 30 days if Israel did not meaningfully improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which Oxfam and other aid groups say it hasn’t.
Even before the end of the business day in Washington, a starkly different message had been issued from a Twitter account operated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office: “The importance of this historic recognition has been underscored today. The Golan Heights will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel forever.”
As Netanyahu made his pronouncement, other Israelis celebrated the apparent land grab openly on social media.
But the timing of Netanyahu’s statement couldn’t have been clearer — a direct rebuke to the diplomatic arm of the Biden administration, which has long been out of step with the right-wing Israeli government. The White House and Biden-Harris campaign, as part of failed efforts to appeal to moderates, sought to portray the administration as a relentless supporter of Israel all while begging their younger base not to abandon the party over Israel’s siege of Gaza. Neither strategy worked, in particular because the Israeli government has been consistently willing to publicly reject the promises and white-washed statements of concern for Palestinian lives uttered by Biden’s talking heads, as well as the president himself.
For months, the Israeli government denied that it would consider the possibility of allowing the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, something the Biden White House has said is a necessary part of a lasting peace process. Now, it rejects the prospect of even staying within its own territory.
By Tuesday’s briefing, the tone had changed at the State Department: “I will let Israel speak to what it hopes to accomplish. I can say, on behalf of the United States, we’re going to discuss this with them privately before I opine publicly,” Miller said at Tuesday’s briefing.
The agency spokesman was grilled in response by Al-Quds News Service reporter Said Arikat, who questioned whether allowing Israel’s military to “conquer” the Golan was a “private matter”, using Miller’s verbiage.
Miller would parry the question by stressing the need to “ascertain what they (Israel) are doing” before commenting on the matter — a difficult prospect given that he had defended the Israeli military’s claim that the occupation was “temporary” just a day earlier, before the admission from the prime minister’s office that it may very well be permanent.
If the meetings between top Israeli officials and President-elect Trump weren’t enough to convince us, this latest development makes it obvious. Joe Biden is no longer in charge of the situation — whether he likes it or not, apparently. US-Israel policy appears to now be fully running through Mar-a-Lago as the State Department plays catch-up and prepares for a Trump takeover.
When January 20 comes around, it may cap off the end of the lamest “lame duck” presidency in modern times.
