The situation has little parallel in the recent past. In the Middle East, the Biden administration agrees to follow in the footsteps of an ally, Israel, launched with military operations on several fronts, in Gaza, Lebanon and even Yemen. Operations that Washington would like to limit for fear of an unpredictable regional escalation, but whose results it praises and whose implementation it facilitates, with a massive American deployment in the eastern Mediterranean, in addition to the continuation of arms shipments. A kind of absolute contradiction in terms – particularly delicate to accept thirty-seven days before the presidential elections – that reached its peak the last week of September.
While in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, American and French diplomats struggled to promote the idea of a truce in Lebanon, the Israeli army prepared a historic attack in Beirut, against the clandestine headquarters of Hezbollah. . An attack in which the head of the organization, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed and which probably required the use of 900 kilo American-made bombs, according to the Washington Post.
The fact that Israel has not warned the Pentagon of the imminence of this operation is not necessarily surprising, because the Jewish State has always preserved its autonomy of action. But the Biden administration was convinced, in light of diplomatic exchanges, that Benjamin Netanyahu and his entourage validated the idea of a twenty-one-day ceasefire. Smokescreen. Therefore, it is difficult to find consistency in the line followed by the White House, as the gap between intentions and reality grows ever larger. The repeated anonymous leaks to the press about Joe Biden’s anger with the Israeli Prime Minister are even more useless.
“A measure of justice”
In a press release, the American president began by emphasizing, on Saturday, September 28, that Nasrallah’s death represented “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of American, Israeli and Lebanese civilians.” However, it is indirectly with Hezbollah that the American mediator Amos Hochstein, advisor to Joe Biden, worked, in the fall of 2022, for the conclusion of a historic agreement between Israel and the Lebanese government – simple validator – on the delimitation of the maritime border between the two neighboring States, essential for the exploitation of gas resources. Shortly before the summer, the United States expected the same result on the land border, differentiating this issue from that of the ceasefire in Gaza, demanded by Hezbollah.
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