With his hands clasped, Israeli President Isaac Herzog detailed “ongoing terror attacks by Palestinian terrorists” in the prior 24 hours, during a Tel Aviv press conference alongside U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday. Those included the murder of Gideon Perry, 38, “simply because he’s a Jew and an Israeli,” and a suicide bomber’s attempt to carry out a major attack in Tel Aviv, Herzog said.
Blinken, who was visiting the Jewish state for the ninth time since Oct. 7, stood by solemnly, shifting his weight, with one hand over the other. “This is the way we are living these days,” Herzog said. “We are surrounded by terror from the four corners of the Earth, and we are fighting back as a resilient and strong nation.”
When it was time for the U.S. envoy to speak, Blinken said it was a “decisive moment,” during which he was part of “an intensive diplomatic effort” on U.S. President Joe Biden’s “instructions to try to get this agreement to the line and, ultimately, over the line.”
But though Blinken acknowledged the “fraught moment,” during which there is “deep concern” about an Iranian attack, the U.S. diplomat appeared to suggest that the attempted attack on Tel Aviv and the other provocations that Herzog had cited minutes earlier did not amount to “escalation.”
“It’s also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process, and so we’re working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way could move us away from getting this deal over the line or, for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity,” Blinken said.
JNS sought comment from the U.S. State Department about what Foggy Bottom would see as an escalation, if not a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and whether Blinken’s view is that the attacks that Herzog detailed didn’t amount to escalations.
A State Department spokesperson told JNS, “we’re not going to parse the secretary’s words.”
“As we have stated, provocative actions only exacerbate tensions at a pivotal moment when all focus should be on the ongoing diplomatic efforts to achieve a ceasefire agreement and secure the release of all hostages and create the conditions for broader regional stability,” the spokesperson said.
“Since the beginning of this conflict, we have worked to make sure Israel has what it needs to defend itself, to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and to manage risk in the region,” the spokesperson added. “We continue to be intensely focused on these priorities, including in conversations with our partners in the region over the next few days.”
Eytan Gilboa, director of the Center for International Communication and a senior research associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told JNS that the Biden administration “desperately wishes to end the war in Gaza.”
“They believe it is the key to stabilizing the entire region,” Gilboa said. “They also believe the absence of an agreement would lead to an escalation into a regional war.”
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, thinks that when the Biden administration refers to seeking “enduring peace” in the Middle East, it instead means a “temporary calm.”
“Their current efforts to get a deal, any deal, between Israel and Hamas is a two-fold effort to calm the region,” Misztal told JNS. “First, to get a ceasefire in Gaza. But second, they believe that such a deal would also prevent Iran and Hezbollah from retaliating against Israel and thus perhaps kicking off a bigger, regional war.”
The connection that Washington has made, and that Blinken made in Tel Aviv, between an agreement and an escalation “is problematic,” according to Gilboa.
“If an agreement is not achieved, it could give Iran and Hezbollah a free pass to attack Israel,” he said.
Gilboa told JNS that Blinken came to Israel for two reasons—to demonstrate U.S. determination to achieve a deal that would see hostages released and a ceasefire, and to pressure the Jewish state about issues of concern to the White House.
“The idea is to deter Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.
Several obstacles and pitfalls threaten U.S. diplomacy in this regard, according to Gilboa, who sees Biden administration efforts to achieve an agreement as an “overly optimistic view.”
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “believes his survival is dependent on a larger war—not a smaller war,” Gilboa told JNS. “From the beginning of the war, Sinwar’s intention had always been to bring in Iran and much more intensive attacks on Israel on many fronts.”
But other than Iran’s April 15 drone and rocket attack on Israel, “this has not yet happened,” Gilboa said.
Although Sinwar hasn’t gotten the broader regional war he seeks, the conflict is not over, from Israel’s perspective until the Hamas leader is killed.
“As long as Sinwar survives, he wins,” Gilboa said.
Gilboa told JNS that he thinks Blinken timed his visit to Israel, which was reportedly rescheduled once, deliberately so it “no doubt purposely coincided” with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, Gilboa thinks, the Biden administration may “seek to announce major progress, true or not, in the negotiations with Hamas.”
He won’t be surprised if by the end of the week, the Biden administration “would create the image of there being just a few steps remaining to the finalizing of an agreement.”
“The Biden administration not only wants to reach an agreement for a ceasefire, it also wants to reach a deal with Iran,” he said. “They see an opportunity here.”
Giloba added that Biden, whose White House tenure lasts another five months, “is eager to buttress his legacy.”
Misztal told JNS that the Biden administration may believe sincerely that “a short pause in fighting can actually serve as a building block of a longer-lasting peace, rather than merely being politically convenient for them, but this is not how the Middle East works.”
“Time and again, Iran and its proxies have shown that they only back down when confronted with force and only advance when they sense any hesitation,” he said.
Misztal warned against the Biden administration’s frequent focus on a ceasefire. “Repeated U.S. calls for peace and demands to avoid escalation will only embolden Tehran, putting peace ever further out of reach,” he said.