Biden asks Israel PM to send team to discuss alternatives to Rafah invasion
“The key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means,” US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said.
President Biden in a call today urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to send a senior interagency team to Washington in the coming days to discuss alternative ways to achieve their goals of defeating Hamas other than an Israeli ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said.
“Our position is that Hamas should not be allowed a safe haven in Rafah or anywhere else, but a major ground operation there would be a mistake,” Sullivan told journalists at the White House briefing today (March 18), following the first Biden/Netanyahu call in a month.
“It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza and further isolate Israel internationally,” Sullivan said. “More importantly, the key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means.”
Strawman
Sullivan dismissed as a “strawman” the Israeli depiction of western pressure not to do a ground invasion of Rafah as being tantamount to supporting leaving Hamas a safe haven in the city bordering Egypt, which serves as the major entry point for the limited amount of humanitarian aid entering the strip.
“The President has rejected, and did again today, the strawman that raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas,” Sullivan said. “That’s just nonsense.”
Sullivan said the U.S. administration has “every expectation that they’re not going to proceed with a major military operation in Rafah until we have that conversation,” which could occur at the end of this week or early next.
More than a million Palestinians have taken refuge in Rafah after Israeli military operations in northern and central Gaza had displaced them, and “they have nowhere else to go,” Sullivan said. “Israel has not presented us or the world with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them.”
Sullivan offered a scathing assessment of the Israeli government’s failure to produce a plan for basic order and humanitarian needs after it has militarily cleared Hamas from much of the strip, leading to a power vacuum in which Hamas is coming back in some areas, and in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are facing famine.
“Now, instead of a pause to reevaluate where things stand…and instead of a focus on stabilizing the areas of Gaza that Israel’s cleared so that Hamas does not regenerate and retake territory…the Israeli government is now talking about launching a major military operation in Rafah,” he said.
Biden and Netanyahu spoke as Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea led the Israeli delegation to a new round of discussions with Qatari and Egyptian counterparts in Doha, Qatar, aimed at trying to forge an Israeli-Hamas deal for a six week ceasefire during which women, elderly and sick Israeli hostages held by Hamas would be released.
Hamas has put a counter-offer to an Israeli proposal on the table, Sullivan said, and now is the time for the parties to try to hammer out the details.
“Today, in Qatar, you have teams from Israel, Qatar and Egypt, sitting down and banging through those details to try to arrive at an outcome over the next few days,” Sullivan said. “And we believe that those discussions are very live, that a deal is possible, and that we should be able to achieve it, and that it is the best way both to get hostages home, and to alleviate the suffering of the civilians in Gaza.”
Schumer: Netanyahu has “lost his way”
The call also came four days after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S. government, delivered a remarkable speech on the Senate floor urging that Israel consider holding new elections, and saying that he believes Netanyahu has lost his way.
“I have known Prime Minister Netanyahu for a very long time,” Schumer said in a major address on the Senate floor on March 14. “I believe in his heart his highest priority is the security of Israel. However, I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel.”
“He has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows,” Schumer said. “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, to preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and to work towards a two-state solution,” Schumer continued.
“He won’t commit to a military operation in Rafah that prioritizes protecting civilian life,” Schumer said. “He won’t engage responsibly in discussions about a ‘day-after’ plan for Gaza, and a longer-term pathway to peace.”
Biden subsequently praised Schumer’s remarks as a “good speech.”
“He made a good speech, and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans," Biden told reporters in the Oval Office on March 15 when asked what he thought of Schumer’s speech.
Asked if Schumer’s call for Israel to hold elections came up in Biden’s call with Netanyahu today, Sullivan suggested obliquely that it had, but declined to go into details.
“The prime minister did raise his concerns about a variety of things that have come out in the American press,” Sullivan said. “I'm not going to talk specifically about any one of them, because I want to…let the Prime Minister speak for himself and also protect the discretion of the call.
“I will just say that from President Biden's perspective, this is not a question of politics,” Sullivan said. “It's not a question of public statements. It's a question of policy and strategy…That's what he was focused on in the call.”
Sullivan also pushed back on complaints from some Israeli officials that Washington was interfering in Israeli domestic politics, noting that Netanyahu regularly discusses his agenda on American television to American viewers, as he did on CNN Sunday, and that American officials do the reverse very rarely.
“Inherent in the question is kind of an interesting irony, which is you have the Prime Minister speaking on American television about his concerns about Americans interfering in Israeli politics,” Sullivan noted. “And then your question is, should Americans be speaking into Israeli politics, which, in fact, we don't do nearly as much as they speak into ours. But that's…just an observation.”
President Biden is “interested in how do we get to the right result,” Sullivan said. “And the right result is the enduring defeat of Hamas, a two state solution that has a secure Israel and a Palestinian state…, and a broader normalization of relations so that Israel also has peace with all of its Arab neighbors. He believes we need to drive to that outcome.”
President Biden, after his State of the Union address March 8, was picked up on a hot mic telling Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennett that he was going to need to have a “come to Jesus” talk with “Bibi” Netanyahu about the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Asked if the call today was that ‘come to Jesus’ conversation, Sullivan declined to say.
“I'm not going to characterize that,” he said. “I will just describe what happened in the conversation as I've done here today and I'll let you all draw your own conclusions.”
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