The United States has no intention of questioning its support for Israel, but is increasingly exasperated by the conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip, to the point of publicly flaunting its differences with Israel's conservative leaders. On Tuesday, the US president asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "change" his government to promote a two-state solution.
"We have concerns and we have expressed them about the military offensive" in Gaza and its impact on the civilian population, a White House spokesman said Wednesday, after President Joe Biden spoke of "indiscriminate" Israeli bombing.
Warnings have been mounting for several weeks now, with senior US officials such as Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking of the "far too high" number of Palestinian civilians killed or of a "gap" in the commitments made by Israel and the reality on the ground, in a Gaza Strip that has been shelled day by day since the beginning of the conflict on 7 October. with the exception of a short humanitarian truce at the end of November. The U.S. appears somewhat isolated in its support, as evidenced by Tuesday's overwhelming vote by the UN General Assembly calling for such a ceasefire.
White House National Security Adviser in Israel
Since the beginning of the conflict, provoked by the massacre perpetrated by the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israeli soil, the United States has been trying to exert pressure on its ally both to unlock humanitarian aid for Gazans, to free the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on the day of the attack and to encourage Israel to adopt a more "targeted" military strategy.
In a sign of the constant pressure on Israel, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will visit Israel on Thursday and Friday, the US executive said. It's clear that I'm going to talk about the timing and how they (the Israelis) see it," he told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, suggesting a shift "to a different phase than the kind of high-intensity operations that we see today."
#WorldNews: The spokesperson for the National #security Council, Adrian Watson, announced that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor at the White House, is set to travel to #Israel on Thursday and Friday.https://t.co/g4MMckzNTX
— LBCI Lebanon English (@LBCI_News_EN) December 13, 2023
And President Biden received for the first time at the White House on Wednesday families of American hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.
A turning point for the United States?
Does this mean a turning point in the U.S. positioning? For James Ryan, who heads the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, "it has a lot to do with the domestic political situation," as the Democratic president campaigns for re-election in November 2024. "There's a lot of pressure on the Biden administration from within his own party and from his base," the expert said.
But, he adds, "it also reflects the tacit recognition" that the United States' ability to influence the Israeli government, the most right-wing in the country's history, is limited. It is precisely what will happen after the conflict is over that the differences between the Democratic administration and the Israeli government are most glaring, raising the prospect of difficult negotiations.
Washington insists on the two-state solution as the only way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the long term, which Israel rejects. As for governance in Gaza after the conflict, the United States and Israel are also at odds over the idea of handing over the reins to a revitalized Palestinian Authority.