Michael Arria
Mondoweiss / October 4, 2024
Mondoweiss spoke to analyst Mouin Rabbani about U.S. motivations in the Middle East and why the Biden administration fully supports Israel’s escalations against Lebanon and Iran.
Days after Israel began its attacks on Lebanon, Politico reported that White House officials had privately told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that it would support his military push against Hezbollah. That push led to an Iranian missile attack on Israel, which Netanyahu has vowed to avenge. Once again, the region seems to be teetering on the verge of a large-scale war.
Why is Biden administration supporting such actions and what does the U.S. hope to gain? Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a non-resident fellow with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, about U.S. motivations in the region, Biden’s consistent support for Israel, and how the administration’s Iran policy has made things worse.
Mondoweiss: I’m sure you probably saw the recent Politico report on Biden officials quietly backing Israel’s military push in Lebanon. What do you think the U.S. motivation is there? What do they gain from backing these moves?
Mouin Rabbani: I think what we’re seeing here is that Israel, when it initially went into Gaza, it didn’t really have a strategy. It was motivated kind of by bloodlust and revenge.
I think as a crisis it escalated regionally, and there’s a growing belief in Israel, which is supported by the U.S., that this represents a real opportunity to redraw the political map of the Middle East, to change the strategic equation of the Middle East and dismantle the “Axis of Resistance”, which is held together by a common agenda of seeking to confront and reduce Israeli influence in the region.
I think we need to see expansion of the war in this context. Particularly after Israel’s recent successes of hitting Hezbollah hard, the U.S., which initially put forward the position that it is against regional escalation, I think is now on board with it because it believes there are achievable objectives to be had.
Every modern president has backed Israel, but there have been some red lines in rare cases, or public criticisms of the country. You see people citing Ronald Reagan’s harsh words about Israel’s attack on Beirut or George H.W. Bush holding up loans, for example. We even saw Biden move to reel in Netanyahu during Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza.
Why do you believe the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel over the past year and do you think there’s been any real attempt to end the bombings?
I think there’s several factors.
The famous Reagan incident everyone keeps referring to from 1982, when he called [former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and told him,”This is turning into a Holocaust” or something to that effect. What actually preceded that was a call from the Saudi Crown Prince at the time, Prince Fahd, basically telling Reagan that he was putting America’s Arab allies in an increasingly difficult position. That, more than anything else I think, spurred Reagan to act.
Similarly, when Biden called Netanyahu in 2021, and I think the term he used was something like, “You’ve run out of road.” I think it was only a day or two earlier that the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Mark Milley in congressional testimony said that the continuation of this conflict was beginning to impact U.S. interests in the region and that kind of rang alarm bells.
I think an important part of it is that in 2023 and 2024, the U.S. has not seen any impact of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip or its regional escalation, at least until now, on the strength of its relationships with other Arab governments. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and so on. These relationships have remained as solid as they were on October 6. And I think that’s affecting the U.S.
I also think there is, in a sense, a personal factor. I do think that Biden, compared to his predecessors, is uniquely pro-Israeli in several respects.
First of all, he’s a self-proclaimed Zionist and has said so on numerous occasions. Secondly, he has also made it clear on numerous occasions that, at least in public, there can be no daylight between Israel and the United States. I think I’m quoting him verbatim in this respect. This means that any ability of the U.S. to use its enormous influence and leverage over Israel is already drastically reduced.
I think what Israel fears most is not what the U.S. says to it in private, but what it signals in public, because that then also provides guidance, if you will, to other countries, particularly Washington’s European allies and their dealings with Israel. So Israel has had exceptionally broad room from the United States to basically act as it pleases.
That’s if you accept that the U.S. has not necessarily been on board with Israeli policy. In other words, that the U.S. may not like what Israel is doing, but is unprepared to take any measures to force Israel to change course because it doesn’t want to be publicly seen as opposing Israel.
I think that may well have been the case in the early months. But if you’re now talking about late 2024, I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region. And here, again, there’s also, I think, an important geopolitical element that we shouldn’t ignore, which is that the United States is committed to Israel, perhaps for multiple reasons, but an important one is that it sees Israel as a key outpost of U.S. interests in the Middle East.
If you look at it from that perspective, then any Israeli loss weakens the U.S. and any Israeli victory strengthens the U.S. position, not only in the region, but around the world as well.
So, as I’ve been saying, for the U.S., the only serious, real red line is Israeli failure. That is the one thing that the United States will not accept.
I’m wondering how you’d assess the Biden administration’s approach to Iran over the past four years and how that policy has contributed to the current situation?
It’s a very good question because it’s a very important issue.
I was contacted at the beginning of Biden’s period in office by a researcher for a prominent think tank who was putting together a paper on recommendations for U.S. policy towards Iran. This researcher asked me what I thought and I said, well, my view is that if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement, which, again, is not a bilateral U.S.-Israeli, Iranian agreement, but an international agreement in which the U.S. was one player, admittedly a key player, but one player. I said, if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally re-enter the agreement and then deal with any differences it has with Iran and negotiates them from within the agreement, this is going to end very badly.
There was a fairly long silence on the other end of the line, because, of course, only a lunatic or an Iranian agent would propose that the U.S. enter the agreement without conditions, but look what’s happened.
Iran is one more issue where the U.S. failed to clearly repudiate Trump’s policy and to a large extent sought to continue it. Instead of re-entering the agreement and even instead of seeking a resolution of only those issues arising from U.S. renouncing the agreement, what the U.S. tried to do was to negotiate an entirely new agreement. It tried to address, for example, Iran’s regional role as part of the price for the U.S. re-entering the agreement.
This was never going to work. The Iranians had been very clear that any agreement is only going to be about two things, the Iranian nuclear program and sanctions on Iran. And they were not prepared to address any other issues until after that initial agreement had been implemented.
The point I’m making is that by refusing to re-enter the agreement and by continuing with Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran, a key factor that could have helped prevent much of the escalation that we’ve seen over the past year was forfeited. We’re now in a position where Israel is actively exploiting this deterioration in U.S.-Iranian relations.
In fact, the lack of any relationship between the U.S. and Iran could engineer a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran. That’s how dangerous the present moment is.
Getting back to an earlier question of yours, this is not just an Israeli agenda. I believe there are senior officials within the Biden administration who are fully on board with this and feel that now more than ever is the time to promote it.
We continually hear that support for Israel is somehow connected to U.S. security. I’m not really sure how many Americans actually buy that claim anymore. I think it probably had traction with the Americans in the years immediately following 9/11, but there’s a lot of recent polling that suggests people no longer make that connection.
I’m wondering if you think there’s any truth to the claim about U.S. security and, if there’s not, why do you believe the vast majority of U.S. lawmakers still support Israel’s actions in the region? Is it as simple as politicians fearing groups like AIPAC or are there larger factors to consider?
I think the premise about security could have been a topic for discussion during the Cold War, when Israel was clearly a U.S. proxy in the Middle East helping to confront regimes that were allied with the Soviet Union.
Once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated, I’m not sure to what extent Israel served U.S. regional interests. I’m not talking about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, but your question about what role the Israel plays in promoting U.S. interests in the region or globally. I think if you make a cost-benefit ratio, it’s a little difficult to sustain.
You mentioned 9/11. In one of his first interviews after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, claimed that the seeds of the attack were planted in his head as he was watching scenes of slaughter in Beirut in 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Now, it’s one of two things that are true. Either that actually was the case, or he was making it up, but felt that trying to tie the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to opposition to Israel was the best way to mobilize support for his actions.
If you look at the current situation a lot of people are saying that in the long run 9/11 is going to be child’s play compared to the impact of not just Israeli conduct, but just as importantly unconditional, uncritical Western endorsement support and complicity in Israeli conduct. I very much hope that will be proven wrong, but if it’s proven wrong, it will be primarily because of the tsunami of voices in the West that have come up against this genocide, whether on campuses or on the streets of European capitals or elsewhere that have made such a clear distinction between Western citizens and Western governments.
I think this is a very clear example of how the U.S. doesn’t need Israel to promote its interest in the region, particularly because the U.S. now also, since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, has a very extensive direct presence in the Middle East. It doesn’t have a need for proxies to the extent that it would have had during the Cold War when it had very few open military bases, even on the territory of its closest allies.
Regarding the final part of your question, why do so many politicians continue to support Israel? Yes, AIPAC is certainly a factor, but I wouldn’t say it’s the only factor. There are certainly cases like Jamaal Bowman, where the resources and money of organizations are able to determine outcomes of particular electoral contests.
But I think that’s only part of the picture. I also think we have to recognize the very deep ideological investment of many elected officials to the Israel project, either because they are evangelical Christians or because support for Israel and Islamophobia have become increasingly important principles to a very large extent.
Islamophobia has replaced the role that antisemitism played in the 19th and 20th century for these types of politicians and they see it as an electoral asset. You said some politicians might fear of AIPAC, but that suggests these people don’t want to support Israel or that it’s an issue that really doesn’t matter to them.
I’m sure there are politicians who fit that bill, but I think that’s only part of the story. I think there’s quite a lot of politicians who do take money and support from AIPAC, but if AIPAC didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be all that different.
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondents
