"Biden has preserved the leverage": Aaron David Miller on how to wield "influence with the Israelis"

It is true that this new war is another chapter in a many decades-long crisis in the Middle East, however, the events of Oct. 7 — and Israel’s response to them — are very different. On that horrible day, Hamas killed more than 1,400 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians. This is the largest number of Jewish people killed in one twenty-four-hour period since the Holocaust. In response to Hamas’ terror attacks and hostage-taking on Oct. 7, the Israeli military has launched airstrikes and engaged in other kinetic actions in Gaza. Israel said it dropped 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip during the first six days of war with Hamas, that is more bombs than the US-led coalition dropped in any month during the fight against ISIS. Israel has also mobilized 300,000 reserve soldiers in preparation for a ground invasion.

In response to this crisis, President Joe Biden will be visiting Israel on Wednesday with the goal of signaling America’s support, showing concern about protecting the human rights of the people who live in Gaza, and also trying to ensure that the war does not spread into a larger regional conflict that could potentially involve the United States, Iran, and perhaps even Russia.

And never to be overlooked: a prolonged war between Israel and Hamas (especially if it includes the (re)occupation of Gaza) will come at great human cost to both sides. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has already resulted in shortages of fresh water, food, fuel, medical supplies, and other essentials. Hospitals have also been destroyed by Israel’s air attacks. The Palestinian Health Ministry is reporting that at least 3,000 people in Gaza have already been killed by Israel’s air attacks.

In an attempt to better understand what may come next in the Israel – Hamas war, President Biden’s (and America’s) unique relationship with Israel, and why comparing the terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 to those of Sept. 11 may not be that useful, I recently spoke with Aaron David Miller. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. Between 1978 and 2003, Miller served at the State Department as an historian, analyst, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the senior advisor for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He is a recipient of the State Department’s Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Miller is also a global affairs analyst for CNN and is a frequent commentator on NPR, BBC, and Sirius XM radio.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

As a human being and an expert on international relations and the Middle East, how are you managing your emotions of the terror attacks by Hamas on Israel and what is now a war?

I have spent more than 20 years as a Middle East analyst, negotiator, and advisor in a half dozen administrations. In response to a crisis like this, I would have been incredibly active. I've been through my fair share of crises on the Arab Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian side. But over the last 20-some years since leaving government, I vowed to create an analytical lane in our public conversation, a "look in the mirror lane," where I confront what we did right and what we did wrong. In doing that I tried to detach myself, to the degree I could, from selling American policy. I am also a member of the American Jewish community; I spent a lot of time in Israel. I felt myself falling almost immediately into the role of analyst, not advocate. I thought to myself how odd, I mean, look at the suffering. More Jews were killed within that 24-hour period in any day since the end of the Holocaust.

With the Israeli blockade, and the punishing airstrikes in Gaza, what is going to become the future for 3.2 million Palestinians? Half of whom are under the age of 15, literally, with nowhere else to go. I must examine this crisis in terms of the Israeli dimension, the Palestinian dimension, and look for some sort of place where I can continue to separate my role as a human being with all of the emotions tugging me in various directions, from my role as an analyst. If I wasn't able to do all these interviews, I believe that I would be in a much worse place given my commitment to doing everything possible to achieve an equitable and durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The other thing that comes to mind is how I was in Jerusalem on Oct. 6, 1973. There are reminiscences of the sirens wailing, it was a complete blackout. In one of my CNN interviews, I told the host that there was no CNN, there was no social media, there was no internet, there was a complete blackout. It was traumatic: 2,800 Israelis died. But within six years —1979 — the Israelis would sign a treaty of peace with Egypt. So, 20 years later, I'm sitting on the White House lawn, watching Arafat, Rabin, and Clinton sign the Oslo Accords, convinced in what became a galactic misjudgment, that the Israeli-Palestinian issue would now become irreversible. 1973 went from trauma to hope; 1993 from hope to trauma. I'm very cautious and risk-averse in pronouncing and making final judgments because the arc of history bends in very strange and unpredictable ways that we cannot foresee.

What type of work is being done by the narrative frame that these attacks are the equivalent of 9/11 for Israel? When I hear that language, I am deeply concerned because of the strategic miscalculations that the United States made after those attacks and the massive human tragedy those decisions caused.

First of all, it depends on who's saying it.

9/11 was an idiosyncratic American response. What happened here bears some resemblance. Intelligence failure. The savagery and the brutality were taken from the ISIS playbook — which I suspect was inspired by ISIS and Al Qaeda videos. But I think that's where the analogy really ends. 9/11 and what followed was America's effort to guarantee its security based on the premise that the U.S. would now be vulnerable to terror attacks. That was the new story. We do not have a proximity problem with al Qaeda or ISIS.

The Israeli context here is very different. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, the adversaries, Hamas and the government of Israel, the Israeli public, however you want to sort describe this conflict, neither side has anywhere else to go. That poses a different set of challenges for the Israeli government. This is not Algeria under the French where the French could sail away. This is not the North Americans or French in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a place to go and they're not going anywhere. The proximity problem necessitates an entirely different set of responses. If you follow the logic chain of 9/11 in Israel, it will mean a perpetual conflict, literally kilometers away from their border — and that's not sustainable. That hasn't been the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last 40 years. Yes, there has been violence, two Intifadas. But it's been highlighted by periods of accommodation and tension and actual agreements in the Arab-Israeli arena. This has been marked by many kinds of twists and turns. I really don't like that 9/11 comparison.

And then of course, the fear and desire for retribution took the United States into the two longest wars in American history where the standard for winning was not could we win, but when and how can we extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in Iraq? It cost the United States, the Afghan people, and the Iraqi people enormous sacrifice. For what? I hope that's not the logic chain that people are creating for this particular and horrific round of events in Israel and Gaza and the region .... because there will be other rounds.

What were the types of conversations that were taking place in Israel at the highest levels as these attacks took place and in the immediate aftermath?

There is a national unity government in Israel, which is frankly the only piece of good news over the last week or so. Of note, the national unity government has brought in former Defense Minister Benny Gantz. These are hardened veterans. They're rational thinkers. They're not going to be pushed into anything by the extremists in Netanyahu's government. They're also not going to be pushed into anything with respect to the Prime Minister's peculiar political problem that he has. This will be as logical and rational a set of decisions made because the Israeli Defense Forces has for decades avoided what is about to happen in Gaza. They avoided it for several reasons. This operation will be Fallujah on steroids and there is “the day after” problem.

There is also a type of symbiosis here, which I wrote about in Foreign Affairs in 2014. For the Netanyahu government, three states were the ideal solution. Hamas is staying in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority controls 40% of the West Bank. The state of Israel. That is a good status quo for Netanyahu. Because if you had a unified Palestinian national movement, one gun, one authority, and one negotiating position. they might have had some leverage in serious negotiations with Israel. That's not what Netanyahu wants; He doesn't want to become the midwife of the Palestinian state; he wants to become the midwife of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement.

What makes this attack by Hamas so different is the intelligence and operational failure and how this is the largest terror attack in the history of the state of Israel. Hamas engaged in vicious, barbaric, savage, ISIS-style indiscriminate killings, and took hostages. The Israelis are not going to repeat the US and the invasion of Iraq with insufficient forces and a willful misunderstanding of the terrain. If the Israelis fail, they will withdraw. They're not going to permanently reoccupy Gaza. It is not clear what the day after entails.

If you believe their rhetoric, it's not just a question of destroying Hamas's military capacity, it is a question of destroying their sovereignty and ability to govern Gaza. Hamas is not a membership organization with cards and meetings and social occasions. It's a movement. It was formed in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has deep roots in that community. It represents an idea. “I'm struggling against Israel!” I asked a Palestinian decades ago, "why do you support Arafat?" He said Arafat is a stone that I throw at the Israelis every day. An American version of this is that Donald Trump is a stone various constituencies throw at the elites or their own anger or whatever. Hamas is a stone that Gazans throw at the Israelis — even though Hamas brings misery down on their heads. What happens now is that they are going to experience the most misery of them all after these attacks on Oct. 7.

What were the types of conversations in the Biden administration like? What are the calculations there?

Washington's calculations are different. The presidential model here for Biden is Bill Clinton. Biden is in love with the concept of Israel, the idea of Israel, which was probably fashioned during the late 60s, early 70s. He's an American president who has more experience with Israeli prime ministers and more experience with Israel than any other president in the history of the country. He feels himself part of the Israeli story. He has no love for Benjamin Netanyahu. But he has a tremendous sensibility toward the protection of Israeli security interests. During Biden's speech about the Hamas attacks on Israel, he talked about "the black hole of loss." That's a specific reference to his own losses in life. So, his persona impels him to the default position which is that the United States is going to support Israel. The politics are heavily in that direction too, because the Republican Party has emerged as the go-to party on Israel, "The Israel, right or wrong party." Biden cannot afford nor does he want to be painted as an adversary of Israel, and he does not want to show weakness.

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My read on this is that President Biden has clearly communicated that he's prepared to give the Israelis the time, the space, and the support, $2 billion, and probably a supplemental, to do what they think they need to do. But in being so supportive of Israel now, Biden has preserved the leverage that he's going to have to use to have some very tough conversations with Netanyahu about how the war is going. When is the time to stop? What about proportionality? What are you doing about all the civilian casualties and deaths? Will the U.S. be involved intimately in trying to pick up the pieces? It depends on how it ends. But the humanitarian impact as a result of Israeli airstrikes and blockades is turning out to be a catastrophe – more than 2,600 Palestinians killed and 9,000 wounded according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.  Biden is ramping up the pressure on Israel to ameliorate this dimension of the crisis.

How do we balance Israel's security concerns and inherent right to self-defense with protecting the human rights of the people in Gaza and the Occupied territories? It is regular people on both sides who are going to be made to suffer because of the decisions of their leaders.

You're asking for a balance that the United States has never struck. It's never struck a balance because of our country's special relationship with Israel. It's not that we're heartless or cruel. It's that we have this special relationship with the Israelis. My concern is the margin of dehumanization. But I don't think that's the problem for the administration. If Biden said to the Israelis, listen, I feel your pain, but you're not going to do this. What do you mean we're not going to do it? Biden tells the Israelis that we're going to sanction you. Unless you adopt our view of what you should do in response to these Hamas attacks this is going to have a very negative impact on the US-Israeli relationship. That conversation might take place in a galaxy far, far away. But it's not going to take place on planet Earth, that's for sure. There's no justice in this conflict on this side of heaven. There just isn't. Think about 9/11 again. Where you stand is where you sit. Israel has been through three 9/11s proportionally. What did the US do in the wake of 9/11? We're gonna get them! We're gonna kill them! There was bipartisan and public support for that. Let's be honest. There's no point dancing around this. The United States is preternaturally supportive of Israel. We will have influence with the Israelis at some point as this conflict evolves — and probably just to de-escalate it. But not now.

What is your assessment of the concern that the war between Israel and Hamas could expand into a larger regional conflict?

It's possible. But I don't see Iranian or Hezbollah calculations now trending in the direction of wanting to escalate. But it's a war, and it takes twists and turns and people make mistakes.