A group of 60 national, state, and local organizations sent a letter to President Biden on Monday urging him to “hold Israel accountable to U.S. law [by] ending arms sales to Israel to protect U.S. interests, achieve a ceasefire, protect civilians, increase aid access in Gaza, and work towards a stable future for the region.”
The policy, humanitarian, and faith-based organizations — which include Amnesty International, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and the Quincy Institute, publisher of Responsible Statecraft — expressed disappointment with Biden’s policy of “unconditional support of Israel paired with empty threats,” saying the policy has not yielded any meaningful results and serves to harm America’s global reputation.
Rather than curbing Israel’s actions, the signatories say the Biden administration has enabled it to bomb hospitals, schools, and residential areas, block humanitarian aid, and kill tens of thousands of civilians, journalists, and aid workers, all at the expense of the taxpayer.
The organizations say a letter sent by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant asking Israel to allow humanitarian aid in Gaza “provides an opportunity to course correct U.S. policy” and enforce U.S. law which would require the United States to withhold aid until humanitarian assistance is delivered.
“The longer the U.S. allows its power and global standing to be undermined by this conflict, the more cost the United States will bear in reputation, taxpayer dollars, and possibly servicemember and citizens’ lives,” they write. “In your final months in office, we urge you to do everything in your power to end U.S. military aid to Israel to stop Israel’s assaults on civilians and maintain regional stability.”
Aaron is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft and a contributor to the Mises Institute. He received both his undergraduate and masters degrees in international relations from Liberty University.
REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
photo : U.S. President Joe Biden attends a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023.
Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. secretary of state said this week that he wants the war between Ukraine and Russia to end.
“It is important for everyone to be realistic: there will have to be concessions made by the Russian Federation, but also by Ukrainians,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. “There is no way Russia takes all of Ukraine.”
He added that “there's no way Ukraine is also going to push these people all the way back to where they were on the eve of the invasion.”
He also said sending American aid to Ukraine “for however long it takes” is “not a realistic or prudent position,” sentiment that echoes what Trump has said.
Trump had previously promised to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office, but his incoming Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, later amended that timeline to 100 days.
The establishment consensus in the U.S. and Europe on the Ukraine war has slowly evolved as the conflict moves increasingly toward Russia’s favor.
“We need a cease-fire line, and of course ideally this (the Ukrainian part) should include all areas currently under Russian control. But we see that this may not be realistically achievable in the immediate future,” former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in December. He added, “if the cease-fire line means that Russia continues to control all occupied territories, this does not mean that Ukraine has to give up the territory forever.”
Ukrainian officials have also reportedly been discussing the option of allowing for a ceasefire, with Russia still controlling part of Ukraine, although not officially or legally. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy even admitted, "if we want to stop the hot phase of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That’s what we need to do fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically.”
During his hearing this week, Rubio emphasized this growing emphasis on diplomacy over a complete Ukrainian victory, saying that ending the war will not “be an easy endeavor… but it's going to require bold diplomacy, and my hope is that it can begin with some ceasefire.”
“Rubio's remarks reflect a pragmatic, constructive approach toward ending the Ukraine war — one that, encouragingly, the administration seems intent on institutionalizing throughout the foreign policy/national security bureaucracy,” said Quincy Institute research fellow Mark Episkopos. “The upcoming peace talks will demand an all hands on deck approach across the agencies if they are to succeed, and Rubio, as the nation's chief diplomat, is poised to play a major role in this difficult but necessary process.”
In other Ukraine war news this week:
Moscow accused Washington of assisting in attempting to sabotage the TurkStream pipeline, the only remaining pipeline that brings Russian gas into Europe. Russian Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the attack “energy terrorism”
The attack was thwarted, according to Al Jazeera, as the pipeline only suffered minor damage. Ukraine has thus far rejected claims of its involvement in the attempted attack.
This comes at a time when Ukraine has halted gas transits from Russia to Europe sparking a war of words and potentially an energy crisis this winter, wrote Stavroula Pabst in Responsible Statecraft this week. Despite claims from Zelenskyy that the gas transit halt was “one of Moscow’s greatest defeats,” the rest of Europe seems to be bearing the brunt of the consequences, facing high energy prices and outages in some countries.
The New York Timesreported on Monday that Ukraine launched a large drone barrage deep into Russian territory. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, more than 140 drones were launched from Ukraine, and U.S. and UK-made ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles were included in the attack. The strikes were in three Russian regions, with some hitting over 700 miles into Russian territory. Industrial and military sites were reportedly damaged, with no reported casualties.
Russia responded the next day by launching dozens of missiles at Ukraine’s energy grid. President Zelenskyy responded to the attacks on social media, “It’s the middle of winter, and the target for the Russians remains unchanged: our energy infrastructure. Among their objectives were gas and energy facilities that sustain normal life for our people.”
There was reported damage but no casualties.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Kier Starmer says that he will deliver new mobile air defense systems and “more support to Ukraine than ever before,” according to The Guardian. This announcement is part of a 100-year partnership agreement between the two nations, meant to secure previously promised aid in addition to further military assistance under the shadow of Trump’s return to the White House. The deal, which also includes health care and agriculture partnerships, must be approved by the British parliament in the coming weeks.
From this week’s State Department briefing on 01/15
A journalist asked spokesperson Matthew Miller if the United States was considering designating Russia as a state sponsor of terror. Miller indicated that the U.S. had determined that the sanctions already in place were more effective. “If you look at the combined regime that we have put into place – sanctions and export controls – we determined that that would have more of an impact than a state sponsor of terrorism designation.”
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Top image credit: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock.com
The ceasefire agreement regarding the Gaza Strip can be welcomed as a modest reprieve from the immense suffering that the residents of that territory have endured for the past 15 months.
The Israeli military assault on the Strip has inflicted deaths that according to the official count has passed more than 46,600. This tally likely undercounts actual deaths by more than 40 percent, with the majority of fatalities being women, children, and the elderly.
The agreement also commits Israel to allowing an increased number of trucks bearing badly needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Other benefits include the release of a number of Israeli hostages that Hamas took in its attack in October 2023. Also to be released are several hundred Palestinians whom Israel has imprisoned. The Palestinians can be considered hostages, too. Although some of those to be released have been given sentences of imprisonment, many of the Palestinians Israel incarcerates are held indefinitely without charge, incommunicado, and without legal representation.
Beyond those positive measures, there is little in the agreement just reached on which to hang much hope for significant progress toward peace and stability in that part of the world. Although a cessation of military operations interrupts some of the immediate suffering, it does not reverse the enormous damage that has turned what was already an open-air prison into a largely uninhabitable wasteland. The agreement reportedly provides for an Israeli withdrawal from major population centers and the Netzarim Corridor, in principle allowing families from the northern portion of the Gaza Strip to return to their homes, but many will be returning only to rubble.
The agreement has the earmarks of only a temporary pause. The ceasefire is for six weeks, with any extension dependent on the success of future negotiations. A second and third phase are envisioned that would see the release of more hostages by each side and further withdrawals by the Israeli military, along with a reconstruction plan, but so far those phases are just outlines of objectives and not a real coming to terms. In short, the negotiators reached a short-term bargain while punting more difficult issues.
There is little reason to be optimistic that follow-on negotiations will succeed and that the bombs will not resume falling. Hamas has been sufficiently battered that its leadership almost certainly sees an indefinite extension of the ceasefire as in its interests, but it will continue to resist giving up all its bargaining chips in the form of the remaining Israeli hostages without gaining more Israeli concessions in return. The biggest impediments to extending the ceasefire are on the side of Israel, where the political and policy trends are in the direction of indefinitely continued warfare.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had personal and political reasons to keep Israel at war. Continued warfare has delayed his having to face fully the consequences of corruption charges against him and the inevitable official inquiry into policy failures that may have contributed to the October 2023 attack by Hamas. His hold on power also depends on maintaining a coalition with extreme right-wingers whose only idea about policy on Gaza is complete elimination of the Palestinian community there.
The most prominent of the hard right, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, has threatened to quit the government because of his opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu probably believes he can finesse the conflicting pressures he is under with a combination of the boost in support he will get from a return of some of the Israeli hostages and the reaching of private understandings with Ben-Gvir and his fellow right-wing extremist, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Part of any such understanding would be the prospect that, after the temporary ceasefire that succeeds in repatriating some of the hostages, the Israeli military assault on Gaza will resume.
Resumption of the assault may come after the six-week ceasefire expires and negotiations over phases two and three fail to reach an agreement. Or, Israel may find excuses to resume the assault sooner. Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on international agreements, dating back to the Wye River Memorandum reached during his first term as prime minister in 1998, which provided for partial withdrawals in the West Bank that Israel never implemented. More recently, Israel has repeatedly and extensively violated the Lebanon ceasefire agreement reached last November.
Although both protagonists in the drawn-out Gaza negotiations will continue to spin the story to their own advantage, the change in position that permitted an agreement to be reached now but not a few months ago has mainly been on the Israeli side. Netanyahu had repeatedly insisted that Hamas must be “destroyed” for the war in Gaza to end. Negotiating with somebody one has vowed to destroy has always been oxymoronic, but now Netanyahu’s government has reached a negotiated agreement with a Hamas that is very much not destroyed.
U.S. politics, Israeli-U.S. relations, and the coming change of administrations in Washington explain the Israeli posture. The scenario that played out is the latest chapter in the political alliance between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, and between the Israeli Right and the Republican Party.
Netanyahu aided Trump — his favored candidate in the U.S. election — by keeping the Gaza war boiling and thereby hurting the chances of the Democratic ticket, and then, with Trump safely elected, taking the boiling pot off the stove shortly before Trump himself takes office. The past incident this scenario most brings to mind is Wiliam Casey’s striking a deal with Iran to keep holding American hostages until after Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
Trump’s declaration a week ago that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release Israeli hostages was unlikely to change any negotiating positions, given that hell is a good description of what everyone in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, was already living in. Notwithstanding this fact and the effort of the outgoing Biden administration to take credit for the ceasefire agreement, Trump will be able to claim that he is the one who made the deal happen.
There remains the possibility that a renewed war in Gaza will, beginning a few weeks from now, become a problem for Trump just as it was for Biden. But two main factors will incline President Trump not to exert any pressure on the Israeli government to turn away from renewing its devastation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. One is Trump’s relationship with his domestic evangelical political base, with its unconditional support for most anything Israel does. The other is that his ally Netanyahu has done him a big favor with his handling of the ceasefire negotiations, and now Trump owes Netanyahu favors in return.
Consistent with this, Trump’s incoming national security adviser is exclaiming an all-in-with-Israel, “Hamas must be destroyed” position.
This prospect for the months ahead underscores how the new ceasefire agreement does nothing to curtail long-term strife in Gaza’s part of the world as long as the residents of the Strip and other Palestinians are denied self-determination.
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Top photo credit: US President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on July 25, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Sipa USA)
It would appear to be based on the text already made available by the Associated Press, which is very much like the deal brokered by the Biden administration in May 2024. That agreement was never ratified by either side and was never implemented.
It fell through then largely because of Israel’s refusal to accept Hamas’s demand that the ceasefire be permanent. A ceasefire of course is by definition impermanent, and Israel was scarcely likely to swear off renewed attacks. It could still collapse today for the same reason.
Hamas’s difficulty here is that it needs to justify its October 7 attacks and seizure of hostages with a significant achievement. An Israeli agreement to not attack Hamas in the future would rise to that level, but naturally, that is another reason Israel would resist agreeing to it in the first place. Netanyahu is not very motivated to help the Hamas leadership maintain credibility at his expense.
Otherwise, this agreement retains a phased structure in which the next 42-day phases do not automatically start when the preceding phase expires. During each period, the parties will still be negotiating the points of the succeeding phase. Thus, there is the possibility of many a slip between cup and lip.
If the parties follow up it will be phase one that is most likely to be carried out. Both sides need a win. Hamas needs to retrieve Palestinians in Israeli jails and that requires the release of some of the Israeli hostages in their possession. Both sides will retain plenty of fodder for future trades. Israel will not be required to withdraw its forces from Gaza right away, but rather to remove them to the perimeter. If fighting restarts, Israel won’t have to explain reentry into the strip; they’ll still be inside the wire.
The second phase, which, as drafted, requires complete withdrawal of IDF units from Gaza, seems unlikely to be implemented on the basis of Netanyahu’s consistently contrary position throughout the war that began on October 7. Hence the judgment of informed commentators back in May 2024 that phases 2 and 3 would not come to pass in the foreseeable future. But something is surely better than nothing.
For the Israelis, the first phase gives the IDF an opportunity to refit, get back to training cycles, restock munitions, spare parts and consumables and rotate and refresh combat personnel. It also provides a breathing space in which to assess options in the North, where a ceasefire still holds with Hezbollah and a new technocratic government has been formed, and in western Syria, where the IDF is positioned inside the country to the east of the Golan Heights. They need to plan for a clash with Turkish forces — Erdogan recently told the Turkish assembly that foreigners should “get their hands off Syria.” Evidently the Turks do not count as foreigners in Syria, at least for this purpose.
For Hamas, it’s a chance for Mohammed Sinwar, the late leader’s brother, to live for another 42 days.
There is the question, to whom should the Gaza ceasefire be attributed? One answer is Netanyahu. This is one version of a classic ceasefire, where the party that had resisted it has temporarily run out of targets and largely achieved its war aims.
If it is truly a ceasefire, that is, a temporary halt to the shooting, which is presumed to renew if and when the ceasefire is violated by the other side or expires, then the stronger party has every incentive to go with the flow. There wasn’t to be a ceasefire until these conditions were obtained.
For the Palestinians, it’s a bittersweet moment — a hoped-for respite from the death and destruction in the strip — and a profound political challenge. For the Israelis, some of whom will be reunited with loved ones, it will be a moment to think through how best to translate victory into lasting security.
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