Red Line, What Red Line?

It isn’t surprising that the administration has backtracked on this, but the speed with which they run away from a fight with Netanyahu is still remarkable.

The Biden administration wants you to know that you shouldn’t take any of the president’s warnings to Israel seriously:

The White House denied on Tuesday that President Biden had set any “red lines” for Israel in its campaign against Hamas in Gaza but warned again that Israel should not attack the city of Rafah, the southernmost city in the enclave, without protections for more than a million people sheltering there.

“The president didn’t make any declarations or pronouncements or announcements,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, referring to an interview Mr. Biden gave over the weekend in which he was asked whether he had a “red line” Israel should not cross in its prosecution of the war.

It isn’t surprising that the administration has backtracked on this, but the speed with which they run away from a fight with Netanyahu is still remarkable. Many observers have commented on the abject weakness of the administration in its management of the relationship with Israel during this war, and this is one of the clearest examples of that weakness that we have seen to date. It is hard to think of many other examples where an American president has tolerated the open contempt and defiance of a client government to the degree that Biden has over the last five months.

At the moment when the U.S. should be hardening its position and intensifying pressure on its destructive client, the official line from the White House is that there are no red lines at all. Even when the president says there are red lines and uses that exact language, his advisers rush to clarify that he didn’t mean it. Sullivan was also quick to dismiss reports that the president might be considering conditioning aid, adding that “reports that purport to describe the president’s thinking are uninformed speculation.” The administration is deathly afraid of imposing penalties on Israel no matter what happens. It appears that their cowardice is limitless.

If the U.S. won’t draw any red lines and if it continues sending a flood of weapons to Israel, it shares fully in the legal and moral responsibility for the horrors in Gaza and those that are yet to come. The White House is signaling publicly that there is nothing that the Israeli government can do to jeopardize U.S. backing or the relationship with Washington. They are all but inviting more atrocities. The U.S. is the only one in a position to prevent an even greater catastrophe, but it refuses to use the leverage it has when it might still do some good.

Contra Jake Sullivan, this is not just some “national security parlor game.” This goes to the heart of the Biden administration’s indefensible policy. The U.S. has acted as Israel’s willing accomplice as it indiscriminately bombs and deliberately starves innocent people, and then occasionally U.S. officials have made some mild, toothless criticism about how the war is being fought. Administration officials feign concern for the civilian population while doing absolutely nothing to protect them from the government that they arm and back to the hilt. Biden’s meaningless red line rhetoric was just more of the same.

There are many things in the world that the U.S. can’t change, but the U.S. does have the power to bring this war to an end. The administration could have used that power at any point in the last five months, but the president simply won’t do it. Biden and his officials own this disaster, and no one should let them off the hook for enabling mass starvation and genocide.