Touting ceasefire in Lebanon, Biden shares “vision” for permanent US-Israeli aggression

As Israel and Hezbollah reach a 60-day truce, Biden's commitment to Israeli occupation ensures long-term carnage.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, President Biden announced a 60-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that stands to end more than a year of cross-border fighting. The violence has reached catastrophic levels since October, when Israel intensified its strikes on Lebanese civilian areas and launched a ground invasion that has displaced more than one million people.

In unveiling the truce, which took effect after a last-minute flurry of Israeli carpet bombing in Lebanon, Biden boastfully argued that Hezbollah suffered a crippling blow.

“What is left of Hezbollah,” Biden declared, “...will not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.” Hezbollah undoubtedly suffered significant losses. The group’s longtime senior leadership was wiped out, and it failed to stop the genocide in Gaza – the aim that prompted the late Hassan Nasrallah to intervene against Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7^th.

Despite Biden’s suggestion to the contrary, it was not battlefield defeat that forced Hezbollah to stand down. Even with the military backing of its US sponsor, Israel was unable to stop Hezbollah’s strikes into Israeli territory and suffered considerable casualties when it invaded Lebanon’s. Hezbollah’s ability to remain intact after yet another punishing war – not just the 2006 conflict, but also years of fighting the US and Israel’s insurgent proxies in the Syria dirty war -- defeated Washington and Tel Aviv’s maximalist aim of the group’s destruction.

Along with killing Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, Israel’s main strategic achievement in Lebanon amounts to sufficiently terrorizing the country’s civilian population, which ultimately forced Hezbollah to broker an end to the destruction. Meanwhile, the long-awaited indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court may have helped force Israel’s hand. France says that it will not arrest Netanyahu on its soil, fueling speculation that the Israeli leader traded France’s mediation in Lebanon for a pledge to not enforce the ICC warrant.

Because the US is committed to defending Israel’s “aura of power”, a deterrent to Israel’s monopoly on aggression cannot, as Biden put it Tuesday, be “allowed.” Therefore, Israel will reserve the right to carry out continued violence at the next opportunity – a threat that will only strengthen Hezbollah’s resolve, and its ability to recruit members.

Emboldened by his blind devotion to Israeli aggression, Biden also claimed that the Lebanon ceasefire “brings us closer” to what he described as his signature “vision for the future of the Middle East... at peace and prosperous.” At the center of that effort, Biden said, is “a set of historic deals with Saudi Arabia” in which the Gulf kingdom would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for incentives that include a security pact and “a credible pathway for establishing a Palestinian state.”

Biden’s team is so enthused about his “vision” that it believes, as one senior US official put it, that “the political and geopolitical stars both are aligned” for an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, albeit one that would likely be finalized under the next administration. Toward that end, US envoy Amos Hochstein has briefed the Trump camp and “came away feeling that the incoming team was supportive,” the New York Times reports.

Yet outside of the mutually supportive Biden and Trump circles, the rest of the world only sees one credible pathway to a Palestinian state – and the US and Israel as the sole obstacle. That globally recognized pathway was newly expressed this month at the United Nations General Assembly, when member states carried out the now decades-old custom of voting on “The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” The measure called on Israel to end its now 57-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the establishment of a Palestinian state there – a major compromise for Palestinians, who would be living in just 22% of their stolen ancestral homeland. It passed by a margin of 170 to 6, with the US and Israel casting their traditional votes of opposition.

In rejecting the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, Biden is also in lockstep with his incoming successor Trump, who has appointed a cabinet of hardline Israel Firsters who do not even bother to pretend that they believe in Palestinian nationhood.

Biden’s professed belief in a “pathway” for a Palestinian state is therefore a carbon copy of his approach to a Gaza ceasefire. He has spent more than a year pretending to broker a truce in Gaza all while facilitating Israel’s destruction of the defenseless territory and the slaughter of tens of thousands of besieged Palestinian residents.

That same commitment to duplicity recently led Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to threaten Israel with punitive action unless it allowed more aid into Gaza, only to do nothing when their deadline passed and Israel’s starvation siege continued apace. The same goes for other facets of Israel’s occupation regime. Biden sat idle amid Israel’s largest theft of West Bank land in decades, all while fanatic Israeli settlers and their Israeli military enforcers carried out escalating violence against their encircled Palestinian subjects. Both the Biden and Trump camps have also said nothing about open calls from Netanyahu’s allies to return illegal settlers to the Gaza Strip.

In his remarks Tuesday, Biden vowed to use his remaining weeks to “work tirelessly to advance this vision for an integrated, secure, and prosperous region... all of which strengthens America’s national security.” Biden, so devoted to US-Israeli hegemony that he was willing prioritize a genocide over winning an election, has in fact harmed the cause of regional peace more than any of his predecessors, including the Iraq-invading George W. Bush. Whatever else Biden manages to accomplish in his remaining days, any further steps toward his “vision” for the Middle East will only undermine peace and security for all.