Time for Joe Biden to step in and call a halt to the slaughter in Israel and Gaza

In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin, newly re-elected as prime minister of Israel, told a group of visitors from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “I would like Gaza to sink into the sea. But that won’t happen and a solution must be found”. 

Almost 30 years later, Benjamin Netanyahu – a prime minister as unlike Rabin as it is possible to imagine without entering the realm of Game of Thrones – holds much the same opinion. The difference between the two men is that while Rabin pursued peace, culminating in the Oslo Accords (and paid for it with his life at the hands of a Jewish assassin), Netanyahu is doing his best to sink Gaza into the sea. 

The latest outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Gaza (home to more than two million Palestinians crammed into an area less than the size of the Isle of Wight) has followed a familiar pattern. Arabs living in an area of East Jerusalem abutting both the Al-Aqsa Mosque (the third-holiest shrine in Islam) and the Temple Mount (said to be the place at which the Messiah will make his final appearance) were objecting to their proposed eviction from their homes to make way for a new Jewish settlement. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, in response, announced their intention to march through the area to proclaim it as part of Eretz Israel. 

Skirmishes broke out, ending with the occupation during the first week of Ramadan of the Al-Aqsa Mosque site by Israeli riot police who beat up a number of Palestinian demonstrators. Not long after, amid angry protests on both sides that quickly spread to other towns across the country, the first rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, causing little damage but killing several Israelis and a least one Israeli Arab. 

Israeli Air Force jets have since pounded the densely-populated coastal strip south of Tel-Aviv several times a day. Hundreds of homes and businesses, including whole tower blocks, have been destroyed. The number of casualties may never be accurately assessed but is likely to exceed 2,000, with more than 200 killed, the majority of them women and children. 

In Israel, protected by the Iron Dome anti-missile system that intercepts three out of four Hamas rockets, just ten citizens had been killed by Monday morning. But the country, on high alert, was more nervous than at any time since the first and second intifadas and the last attempted demolition of Gaza that took place in 2014. 

It is, as many remarked, a distinctly asymetric conflict. One side has all the power; the other simply refuses to admit that it is beaten. Netanyahu appears determined on the next worst thing to a final solution – the utter destruction of Gaza as a self-sustaining territory. It was reported over the weekend that he had rejected the offer of a ceasefire, brokered by Egypt. Instead, he vowed to to maintain the devastating aerial assault until every last show of resistance by Hamas fighters had been silenced. 

It is hard not to be reminded of Rome’s General Scipio, who after his victory in the third Punic war is said to have ordered that not one stone of Carthage should be left upon another and that the site be sown with salt. 

Netanyahu will not be placing an order for salt anytime soon. He knows how the world would react. But there is little doubt that the thought has crossed his mind more than once. 

Hamas, meanwhile, remains Hell-bent on the destruction of Israel. Motivated by extreme nationalism combined with an uncompromising interpretation of Islamist doctrine, its blood-soaked leaders cling desperately to the belief, against all the evidence, that it is the Jews who will be driven into the sea. 

They appear not to care that their people are being slaughtered. More than that, they hold that everyone who dies in the never-ending Jihad against Israel is a martyr. 

Gaza is a prison community, with the Israeli army and police as its guards, allowing no one in and on one out, not even by sea. Hamas could have negotiated a better future for its followers and their families if it had taken advantage of the Oslo Accords. But it didn’t. Its leaders would rather die than live as vassals of Israel, a nation they refuse to recognise and whose occupied land they would sweep clean of Jews should they ever gain the upper hand. 

How can two such adversaries ever hope to reach agreement on anything? My colleague Bruce Anderson has suggested that there is nothing to be done, literally nothing, other than to sit back and watch as the drama plays itself out. He may be right. It is certainly not an obvious moment for a display of generosity or compromise. Yet if nothing is done, the cycle will continue long into the future, with the dispossessed of Gaza as the principal victims. 

First and foremost, the US must intervene, which means President Biden stepping forward when his every instinct is to step back. It would be satisfying to add that Britain and Europe should also step forward, but even if they did, who would be listening?

It is only Biden, backed by the Pentagon, who can hope to apply the necessary pressure on Netanyahu to stand down and allow space for some kind of rough resolution. To do so, he will have to overcome the powerful Jewish lobby in Congress, a number of whom would rather risk all-out war with Iran than make concessions to Hamas. Even then, his work would only be getting started. “Bibi” is a leader whose very survival as prime minister depends on emerging from the present conflict as his country’s saviour, if not Scipio, then at least (why not?) Sharon or Dayan. 

Prior to this month’s events, the Likud leader was intermittently on trial in Jerusalem’s district court, charged with bribery and corruption, to which were added deception and breach of trust. His career, if he had been found guilty, would probably have ended with him being sentenced to prison. Instead, he is, yet again, a war leader, preserving the Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of a ruthless and unforgiving foe.

A coincidence? History will judge, but the jury is already out.

For America, even-handedness would require Biden to wipe the slate clean and start almost from scratch. Donald Trump was, if anything, Netanyahu’s willing accomplice, moving the American embassy to Jersusalem, approving Jewish settlements in the West Bank and recognising the Golan Heights as part of Israel. Biden has to put all that behind him. What has happened has happened. But he should also tell Netanyahu directly, thus far and no further. And he has to mean it.

As for Hamas, there is probably no use in appealing to its shadowy and shifting leaders, several of whom, in any case, have reportedly been killed by Israeli bombs and missiles. Nor, to be realistic, is there much future in calling on Iran to pull back the support it has given to Hamas in the form of up-to-date weaponry (some of which has sorely tested the effectiveness of Israel’s defences). The Iranians are skilled at proxy war and take delight in torturing both Israel and the United States. 

So it comes down, as ever, to America, preferably with the backing of Britain and Europe and with support from the United Nations. There is no other path. Israel and Hamas are their own and each other’s worst enemies. But the future they put at risk is not just their own, but that of the entire Middle East. Joe Biden must show that, in spite of the understandable distaste he must feel in contemplation of yet another Middle East intervention, he can somehow be a friend to both.

The killing has to stop.