How US-Israel Relationship Actually Works

Oct. 3, 2024

What does the Biden Administration want Netanyahu to do in Lebanon and Gaza?

October 3, 2024

Earlier this week, Israel began a ground invasion of Lebanon. This followed Israel’s significant aerial bombardment of Hezbollah weapons stockpiles, and its assassination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. On Tuesday, Iran, which backs Hezbollah, fired some two hundred missiles at Israel; no Israelis died in the barrage—which was repelled in part with help from the U.S. military—but Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has promised to retaliate. (The strike did kill one Palestinian man in the West Bank.) The prospect of an all-out regional war in the Middle East raises questions about the relationship between the United States and Israel, and how far the Biden Administration will go to continue to protect one of its closest allies. A year after the October 7th attack, in which more than twelve hundred people were killed, Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than forty-one thousand people, including, on Wednesday, scores of people at an orphanage and several schools.

Last week, ProPublica reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau had made clear to the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in April that Israel was intentionally blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Federal law forbids U.S. weapons from being sent to countries that block U.S. aid, but Blinken testified to Congress in May that Israel was not “currently” blocking aid, thus preventing the law from being triggered. The State Department told ProPublica that its “concerns” over aid being blocked after October 7th were ameliorated because Israel “subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.” Meanwhile, human-rights organizations continue to report that sufficient aid is not being allowed into Gaza, where the humanitarian situation remains extremely dire.

To discuss the U.S.-Israel relationship, and the motives behind Israel’s latest military actions, I recently spoke by phone with Andrew Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian affairs until June, 2024. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed why the Biden Administration keeps getting misled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, how the U.S. should approach Israel’s actions in Lebanon, and how the State Department actually dealt with Israel’s blocking of humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

What is Israel trying to accomplish with this invasion of Lebanon?

The explicit purpose is to permit the return of approximately sixty thousand Israelis who live in northern Israel and were displaced after October 7th, when Hezbollah commenced near-daily strikes. The Israelis have indicated that they’re trying to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the southernmost parts of Lebanon, particularly below the Litani River, hoping that they can push Hezbollah back across the river. That doesn’t prevent Hezbollah from being able to strike Israel, but it takes some of Hezbollah’s weapons out of range, and that would make it more difficult for Hezbollah to launch any type of ground operation.

You said the “explicit” purpose. Do you think that that is in fact the purpose, or were you implying something else?

I think that is clearly a purpose. What is unclear is whether they have grander objectives. Netanyahu has talked about pursuing “total victory” against Hamas. Are they going to try to pursue total victory against Hezbollah, which would potentially involve Israeli ground operations in other parts of Lebanon? Israel is saying that that is not their intention at this time. They’re going to limit their operations to areas near the border. But we’ve seen historical examples in which Israel has gone into Lebanon with avowedly limited purposes, and then they move to other places because they found circumstances different than what they expected or because they had planned a bigger campaign all along, but wanted to approach it in a piecemeal fashion in the hope of garnering greater international support.

There had been talk about a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel last week. The White House said it thought that Israel had agreed to some version of one—which has happened a number of times with the ceasefire talks in Gaza—but then Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated, and it all fell apart. You even had John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, who is seen as one of the more hawkish members of the Administration, say that Israel was “fully informed and fully aware of every word” in the proposal, implying that Israel had pulled the rug out at the last minute.

They were discussing a temporary ceasefire of twenty-one days. It’s possible that the Biden Administration misunderstood Netanyahu, but I think it’s much more likely that there was some degree of misdirection on the part of the Israelis. And as you mentioned, we’ve seen this time and again, including in Gaza, where I had more inside knowledge, I know that Netanyahu would indeed accept certain terms and then would come out and say something that was ostensibly inconsistent with that agreement.

The real question is whether Hezbollah was prepared to accept the twenty-one-day ceasefire. The indications that I’ve seen are that they were. The ceasefire would at least have bought an opportunity to explore whether a ceasefire in Gaza could be reached, too. And Hezbollah has long said, since they intervened in the conflict, that they would be willing to discuss ending their firing into Israel only after there’s a ceasefire in Gaza. So the failure of a ceasefire in Gaza effectively precluded a ceasefire in Lebanon, which could have paved the way for a diplomatic solution to conflict in both locations.

There’s a piece out in Politico this week that essentially reports that though the U.S. isn’t pushing a war between Israel and Lebanon, the Administration is somewhat happy with action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Is the Administration being used, or is it at some level happy with Israeli strategy and maybe just doesn’t want to say so?

I think there are two possibilities, and they’re not mutually exclusive. One could be that this is an attempt to rationalize why our inability to persuade the Israelis not to launch the invasion isn’t so bad after all—so it doesn’t appear as such a slap from Netanyahu. The other possibility is that the individuals in the Administration who were referenced in the Politico article genuinely believe that this is an opportunity for Israel to deal a crippling blow to Hezbollah. I certainly can’t discount that. [The article identifies Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and White House coördinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk as two officials who believe this.]

And, while I think we all should be skeptical of the idea of positive long-term effects of any tactical military action, it is interesting and noteworthy that the response by both Hezbollah and Iran to major blows to Hezbollah has not been at the magnitude we would’ve previously expected. Now, I know there’s reporting that an Iranian missile attack may be imminent, and if that happens then that line of argument falls apart. [The Iranian missile attack occurred during our interview.]

Yeah, it seems like some people in the article actually think that a war between Israel and Hezbollah could be beneficial to the region.

Sometimes you have unintended consequences that are good, and certainly you can’t completely rule that out. But my assessment of the situation in Lebanon would be the same as that in Gaza. Even if Israel is as successful in militarily degrading Hezbollah as it has militarily degraded Hamas, how do you translate those military victories into a political, strategic victory? Ultimately a political, strategic victory rests on who is governing that territory after military action ends. And I’m unaware of what Israel’s plans are for the post-conflict phase in Lebanon. I have some idea of what it is in Gaza, but I haven’t heard at all what they’re thinking in Lebanon.

What do you think the plan is in Gaza?

The plan is, as Netanyahu has said, neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. The ideas that Netanyahu’s government has been considering are akin to putting in place the so-called Village Leagues that Israel tried to install in the West Bank following the peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, which were a colossal failure. Most of the people who took leadership roles in those conflicts were assassinated or run out by the local population. [The idea behind Village Leagues was to empower Palestinians whom Israel considered compliant, but many other Palestinians viewed them as collaborators.] So I don’t have a great deal of confidence that an option without either Hamas or Abbas is going to produce stability. In Lebanon, Israel has said precious little publicly, nor has the Biden Administration said what it hopes will come out of this. If it thinks there’s a real opportunity, if it thinks some good can come out of this, I think there is an onus on the Administration to explain what that would be.

The Biden Administration talks about long-term solutions beyond the military victories, and, whenever I read quotes from them, they imply that Netanyahu is a good-faith actor who just needs to be smart and think strategically about how to reach these goals, rather than someone who has a vision of Israel that is essentially just a one-state reality where Palestinians don’t have a state.

I actually think that is one of the major failures of U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle East over the past fifteen years, since Netanyahu’s return to power, in late 2009. This is true of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, Trump, and President Biden. All of them have a fundamental misunderstanding of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s not that they necessarily thought he was a good-faith actor. They believe that he’s a political animal, and if the U.S. can help to support more virtuous or more aligned political actors within Israel, Netanyahu could be persuaded to do the right thing.

That’s harder to achieve than was initially recognized. I think the idea that he’s just a political animal is wrong. He is a political animal and an incredibly successful politician who does have a vision. The problem is that the vision is not consistent with the vision of the Biden Administration or of any prior Administration.

You were in the Biden Administration when the White House would say, essentially, Israel has agreed to a ceasefire, and then three hours later someone in Netanyahu’s government, or Netanyahu himself, would say, We haven’t agreed. It felt like more than a way of contradicting the Administration—the implication was that there was not a lot of respect from the Netanyahu folks for the Biden Administration. How was that received?

I think it’s fair to say that there has been a large degree of frustration within the Administration throughout this period with Netanyahu. And to be clear, this is not just a Netanyahu problem. It’s important to underscore that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, is a psychopath. There are members of Hamas who have been willing to negotiate a ceasefire, and Sinwar has been an obstructionist. That doesn’t justify Netanyahu’s conduct or give him a pass. But I think it’s important.

I think that’s important, too. Absolutely. But the Administration’s not going out of its way to say that Sinwar is a good-faith actor.

Right. No. I think there are two reasons that the private frustration has not been aggressively expressed publicly. One is that despite the disappointment in Netanyahu’s conduct, there was a belief that discretion was the better part of valor in trying to reach a ceasefire—that Netanyahu was simply posturing for political purposes, and, when the rubber hit the road, he would go the right way. Again, I think that’s a miscalculation of Netanyahu and his motivations. But I think people in the Administration hoped that would be the case.

The second dimension is that President Biden is uncomfortable with criticizing Israel publicly, and it’s both because he thinks that it is ineffective and because it is a reflection of his deep, deep support for Israel. I have a different attitude toward partners and friends and family, which is that, even if you do love somebody, even if you are committed to someone’s success, that doesn’t preclude criticizing them when it’s warranted. In fact, it’s necessary to tell them when they’re on the wrong course. But there’s another school of thought, which is that you need to support your partner. You need to support your ally no matter what they do, because that’s what a good friend does. With Israel, there’s often a question about whether Israel is held to the same standard as everyone else. And I think Israel should be held to the same standard.

Do you think it is?

I think there are cases in which Israel gets the benefit of the doubt and other allies would not, even our treaty-bound allies.

Why is that? Because of Biden and his appointees? Because of the way the foreign-policy community just runs on inertia?

I think they’re all at play. Never underestimate bureaucratic inertia. Bureaucrats are programmed to do what they last did. So, absent a very clear indication that they should take a different course of action, they’re going to do what they’ve always done, and have a tendency not to be introspective about whether it worked.

Did you feel that people at the highest levels of policymaking in the Administration, such as Secretary Blinken, or the national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whom you worked for, were in a different place on Israel than Biden was? Or do you feel like everyone was fairly united?

I think everyone recognizes that the President and the Vice-President are the only elected members of the executive branch, and there is deference. I do think that there probably were tactical disagreements at times. Or, at least tactically, there were different opinions, and it wasn’t necessarily a single senior official who was always on a particular side of the debate throughout the conflict. Occasionally, you would see different opinions emerge from different parts of the system, but it was quite clear that our policy was predicated, among other things, on Israel’s security.

There was a story in ProPublica last week that Blinken had overruled a State Department bureau and U.S.A.I.D., which both reported that Israel was deliberately blocking aid to Gaza. Were you part of the process where that determination was made?

My bureau, the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, was, along with others, involved in that process. The Secretary received inputs from multiple places, both within and from outside the State Department. He received information from the Department of Defense. He received information from U.S.A.I.D. And they weren’t in complete alignment. There were different interpretations.

I think everyone agreed that the humanitarian situation was unsatisfactory, that there was much more that Israel could and should do in order to improve the situation. But there were genuine differences of opinion on the letter of the law, which is called 620I [a section of the Foreign Assistance Act], and whether that criteria had been triggered. We received guidance from State Department lawyers about what would constitute a violation, and there were differences of opinion within the building and within the interagency discussions about whether it met that standard or not. And as lawyers tend to do, they want to preserve flexibility and decision-making space for policymakers. So they tend to adopt a rather conservative interpretation.

What was your take on whether Israel intentionally denied aid?

There were moments where a credible legal argument could be made that Israel had violated 620I—had crossed the threshold. The challenge at that time when the memo was submitted is that it took place in the aftermath of the World Central Kitchen tragedy, and Israel was doing more than it had up until that point to deliver aid. So it was difficult to argue legally that Israel was at that time in violation of 620I. I can’t speak for Secretary Blinken and what went through his mind when he was making this decision, but I think that was part of the context in which the decision was made.

It certainly seemed like Israel was preventing sufficient humanitarian aid, not just in the initial phase but well after Secretary Blinken made his decision. And we’ve seen the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza go up and down based on U.S. pressure. And we know from news reports that there was insufficient aid being allowed in, largely because Israel refused to allow it in. It seems like we are quibbling here.

It is also important to note that there is a waiver in 620I. The prohibition on providing certain offensive weapons can be waived by the Secretary of State. So you could make a determination that Israel is in violation of the provision, but due to the existing security circumstances, the United States is not going to withhold aid. And I raise that because, in my experience in government, the best course of action is almost always to play things straight, particularly when you have the policy flexibility. If the concern was that cutting off military assistance to Israel would be detrimental to Israel’s security and to U.S. interests, there was a mechanism to continue providing that. And I think to a certain degree, we contorted ourselves into absurd legal arguments to justify our position.

It’s not unlike what happened in 2013 when then General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi overthrew the Egyptian President, and a decision was made not to make a determination as to whether it was a military coup. I still believe that in that case it would’ve just been better to call a spade a spade and then adjust the policy however was required to preserve other interests. But other countries are very interested in what the United States has to say and are concerned when we’re critical of them. And that was part of the concern here.

Ultimately, I think we have to consistently apply the same standard to all countries. It is not only right legally; it’s right as a matter of policy, because then people understand what our standards are and understand that we’re going to enforce them.

But when you say our “standards,” in this case you mean our standards are that we will waive American law?

I think that’s a defensible position to take, and it’s an authority that Congress explicitly provided.

Defensible legally or morally in this case?

Well, it’s certainly defensible legally, and you can make a defensible moral argument that Israel’s security would be jeopardized and that would be harmful to the Israeli people and harmful to the United States. I think it’s more nuanced than that. If we completely cut off all assistance to Israel, yes, that would put Israel in jeopardy, and I think that would be morally indefensible. But, if you’re talking about withholding one or two weapons systems, that’s not going to make the difference in terms of whether Israel is secure or not. So, there’s a tendency to reduce these arguments to extremes.

Right, making this determination and telling Israel that we could no longer, according to U.S. law, give them weapons shipments while they were essentially starving people—that doesn’t seem like something that’s going to put American security at risk.

The counter-argument would be that our shared adversaries—Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other actors—would see the U.S. not supporting Israel as an opportunity to target Israel, that we’re not going to support them as completely as we were, and therefore Israel is more vulnerable. I know that’s a concern in the Administration, and it is a legitimate concern. However, there are other ways of mitigating that. So, there’s more flexibility in the decision-making space than I think was allowed.

The idea that we can’t tell an ally that we send tons of weapons to that they’re not allowed to starve people—that beggars belief a little bit.

Yeah, and I think the critical point is that you can argue that it is Israel’s actions that put Israel’s security at greater risk, not the shipment of certain weapons systems. And I do genuinely believe that.

We lecture a lot of countries around the world about their behavior in terms of human rights, and for us to say we are just going to waive this when it’s inconvenient . . .

There’s also an incoherence in the position. If the primary concern is Israel’s security and Israel taking actions that undermine that security, if we are not using all of the tools that are available to us to try to persuade Israel to take a different course, then I think in a certain way we’re not only failing morally but we’re failing our Israeli allies. We’re failing the Israeli people because we are becoming complicit in actions that ultimately hurt them.

Why did you leave the Administration?

I know it’s hard to believe, but it was family. I had a young child at home and I barely saw my child not only for the eight months I was in the Administration during the war but in the entire year and a half I was working in the position.

When you left, the Washington Post reported that you had some disagreements with the Administration. You were concerned about how favorable toward Israel the Administration’s policy had been. I assume you’re not disputing that, but it’s not why you left?

Like almost everyone in the Administration, I disagreed with some of the policy outcomes.

Sure. But you know what I mean.

Yeah. But, no, that is not the reason I left. As I told folks as I was leaving, if all else were equal and my circumstances at home were different, I would’ve stayed.

So you never thought about leaving for political reasons?

No, I never did. I never did.

[Top photo: Israeli military vehicles in the northern part of the country, on September 30th.Photograph by Leo Correa / AP]