March 14, 2024 • 13 mins
As the U.S. announces plans to build a humanitarian aid port in Gaza, a confrontation now brews between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over Palestinian refugees. Can President Biden forestall an Israeli military offensive into the border city of Rafah? In this episode, Jacob Heilbrunn speaks with Greg Priddy, a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest. Priddy previously served as Director for Global Oil at Eurasia Group. His recent piece “Joe Biden’s Gaza Port Initiative Can’t Hide U.S.-Israel Discord” appears in The National Interest.
Music by Aleksey Chistilin from Pixabay
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi, I'm Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest magazine, and my guest
(00:28):
today is Greg Priddy, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National
Interest.
Greg has a piece that will be featured on our website today about the building of an
emergency port to aid people in Gaza.
Greg, welcome.
Thank you.
Greg, the first question I have is, how effective do you think this port will be?
(00:50):
In the medium term, when you look out a couple months from now, it has the ability to put
a lot of stuff ashore if everything worked perfectly.
But my view of this port project is that it is kind of kicking the can down the road.
The US is asserting itself by doing something without Israel's permission on the aid front,
(01:10):
but it's really a much more immediate problem in terms of the need, which is a lot closer
in than two months.
So they seem to be doing what they wanted to do, to put pressure on Israel to go around
Netanyahu government, but in a way that avoids immediate confrontation with.
How are the relations between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
(01:35):
Netanyahu?
There's speculation that Biden is trying to push Netanyahu out of office.
You see other reports that, in fact, the relationship is not quite as fraught as the press is making
it out to be.
What's your analysis?
I think it's clearly pretty bad, but it all really depends.
(01:57):
I don't think the Biden administration would necessarily even believe that they could cause
the coalition, the current Netanyahu coalition to fall apart.
They don't have elections scheduled there for two years now.
You would have to have somebody from his narrow right-wing coalition pull out of that government
in order to trigger a no confidence vote.
(02:17):
And it's not clear right now who that disgruntled party within the coalition would be.
That of course has pulled Netanyahu to the right.
But I think that the administration, after some press coverage that suggested they were
trying to engineer dissolution of that coalition, they wanted to back off and at least get away
from the optics of that.
I think if there were early elections, the Biden administration would be overjoyed, but
(02:41):
I don't think they expect it to happen or see a way that they could make that happen.
So the Israelis have reversed course after balking it, allowing aid into the Gaza Strip.
They are now flooding it with aid.
What accounts for the reversal?
And do you think that it will render the port less significant?
(03:01):
I'm not sure that they're necessarily flooding it with aid.
There have been a lot of headlines over the last few days about specific convoy, you know,
that there had not been any convoys going into northern Gaza, and there now have been
convoys sent in from Israel.
But the volumes involved in it appear to be modest.
This is nothing like the 500 trucks a day that were going in to Gaza prior to the war.
(03:27):
So at this point, I think some of that is almost doing it for optics.
Just like we're doing with the airdrops, it's not necessarily enough volume to make a big
difference in the hunger crisis that's going on right now.
It may grow.
But, you know, as we also saw with that episode last week, it is difficult for them to handle
(03:51):
the distribution when they're not going through UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, that
has historically handed out aid to the Palestinians.
So they don't really have their own infrastructure set up on the ground to take care of them.
Does the port itself pose security risks for the United States?
Short answer is yes.
So there's been some new reporting on that in the last couple of days, you know, fleshing
(04:15):
out some of the plan that the Biden administration has had on this.
U.S. military personnel are not going to go ashore in Gaza, but we're going to have American
contractors who will.
You know, most of those contractors are people who have military or foreign aid bureaucracy
experience, which is good, but it's not really no Americans are going ashore.
(04:39):
And I think you have to consider this a hostile environment.
Certainly Hamas fighters are going to view the U.S. as the enemy.
And getting even close to the shore, you're at risk of being hit with long range sniper
rifles, mortar fire.
There are certainly things that they can throw at you, even if you're half a mile offshore.
So I think that has to be a concern.
(04:59):
The other big question with this is that we are tacitly, we're essentially relying on
Israel to cooperate with it and to provide security for the beachhead around this facility.
And the expectation is that you would recruit local Palestinians to distribute the aid,
to drive the trucks away.
(05:21):
But Israel would have to provide security near the landing of the pier.
And that's a question of, you know, given that they have not wanted to let in a lot
of aid before now, we're still kind of dependent on their cooperation for this to work.
And also whether they could find Palestinians who are going to be willing to cooperate with
them on that.
(05:42):
You know, the track record doesn't look good given what we've seen in recent weeks.
It is interesting that the Biden administration, which wanted to extricate itself from the
Middle East, appears to becoming progressively more enmeshed in the region, isn't it?
It keeps sucking you back in.
Yes.
I personally think, as I said in the piece that I wrote, that it would have been better
(06:02):
for them to simply bring things to a head with Israel and lean harder on them about
the land crossings.
That would have solved the problem faster and it wouldn't have had the risk to U.S.
personnel that you're going to see with this longer term project that they've embarked
on.
So I think it would have been better to solve it another way.
(06:24):
Why didn't they do it that way?
They don't want conflict with Netanyahu at this point or I think at any point going forward.
And when there is a way to avoid that.
It was interesting to see that Jake Sullivan, there was an interview that Biden had given
to MSNBC over the weekend where he was asked about red lines.
(06:44):
And a lot of people took away from that, that he was setting a red line on U.S. opposition
to making an offensive into Ra'afah right now because of the million plus refugees that
are there and the possibility of both major casualties among the refugees and that they
might be somehow forced into Egypt given their geographic location.
(07:05):
But Sullivan actually came out earlier this week and very broadly and forcefully walked
back all of that and said, there's no U.S. red line.
We're not setting red lines.
There was no announcements or pronouncements, as Sullivan put it in that interview.
And so that kind of broad statement that we don't have red lines is very important.
(07:27):
I think they're being careful not to be so someone isn't coming back weeks from now after
the Ra'afah offensive begins and saying they crossed the U.S. red line and we didn't do
anything.
It's pretty clear we don't intend to.
What we're hearing now about Ra'afah is that they're pushing Netanyahu to undertake targeted
commando operations rather than a full scale offensive.
(07:50):
Does that accord with what you think will occur?
That would certainly be the U.S. preference.
But I think that would have been the U.S. preference from the beginning.
There were a number of American observers, like Richard Haass even, who had argued at
the beginning of this that Israel could undertake a more targeted campaign.
(08:11):
But that really is at a variance with what Israel has done everywhere else, where they've
gone in kind of scorched earth almost and destroyed a lot of the infrastructure.
That infrastructure destruction is widespread enough that that seems to be part of the mission,
which is troubling.
But I don't think narrowing this down, it is possible they might narrow it down in Ra'afah
(08:34):
right now, but that wouldn't fit with the pattern of what they've been doing in this
campaign thus far.
In a column yesterday in the New York Times, Tom Friedman suggested that Israel is, quote,
becoming radioactive, unquote, that in pursuing what you just called a scorched earth policy,
it is creating a potential new Iraq, a destabilized area that no one is able to govern and that
(09:01):
simply becomes run by marauding gangs.
Do you see that kind of instability in the future?
Not sure I would agree with all of that column, but I think Friedman is right that there's
not really a plausible path being developed right now to any sort of day after for Gaza.
And if that population stays there, there's not really a credible path to having some
(09:26):
sort of local governance that's going to cooperate with Israel maintaining security there.
So I think it is possible that we end up in that.
The other thing, just to look at how the Israeli right is framing this though, there's a question
of whether all of that population remains there.
Ben Gver and Smotraich have been very open about this idea of emigration from Gaza, voluntary
(09:50):
emigration, but voluntary, of course, forced along by the food crisis.
I'm not sure that's Netanyahu's goal, but his coalition keeps pulling him to the right.
So if Biden doesn't push back on that, we may end up with that population, some of it
at least being pushed toward Egypt eventually.
And for the far right, that seems to be the goal.
(10:13):
But is it really plausible?
The Egyptians have put up barriers.
The Egyptians will not let them in willingly, but would they shoot them if they came across?
I don't think so.
So I definitely want to be clear, I'm not saying that that is the most likely scenario.
But for people on the harder edge, harder Netanyahu coalition, that is their thinking
and they're pulling him in that direction.
(10:35):
Final question.
When we look at the region, one thing has not erupted, which is that Iran has essentially
told its proxies to stand down.
Do you think that augurs well, especially for Lebanon?
For now, at least, yes.
I mean, Iran, it's been clear from the beginning that Iran did not want to get directly involved
(10:56):
in this.
Iran wants to be involved through proxies at a manageable level, but it doesn't want
to get sucked in itself.
It seems that a fully generated US-Iran clash that would spread to the Gulf is not in their
interests.
They definitely also don't want to lose their Hezbollah deterrent in Lebanon.
So that is something that is valuable to them as a deterrent against Israel striking their
(11:19):
nuclear facilities and is something that they don't want to pull the trigger on unless they
had to.
Where the question mark is now though, is that Israel, and not just the right, but pretty
much everyone there, wants to change the status quo, the very negative from an Israeli status
point status quo in Lebanon, where you have had Hezbollah and some of their strike forces,
(11:44):
the Rizwan unit is one that they're worried about right there on the border, and Israel
would like to get UN Security Council Resolution 1701 implemented that says they have to be
well back from the border north of the Latani River.
There have been negotiations back and forth on that with US mediation.
Amos Hochstein from the Biden administration has been spearheading that.
(12:08):
Still remains to be seen where that's going, but I don't think most of the Israeli political
establishment wants to go back to a status quo where they have Hezbollah fighters that
could do a Gaza type lightning strike into northern Israel.
And that's really what the worry is, is that they would have to have a lot more Israeli
(12:29):
military manpower on the border in the north to prevent that if they don't have the Hezbollah
units moved back north of there.
So going back to the status quo is very unattractive from an Israeli standpoint.
Greg, one thing is certain, we will come back to these issues as they never seem to be fully
solved in the Middle East.
(12:50):
Thank you for joining me today for our new podcast of In the National Interest, and thank
you for listening.
Thank you, Greg.
See you next time.
Hi, I'm Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest magazine, and my guest
(00:28):
today is Greg Priddy, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National
Interest.
Greg has a piece that will be featured on our website today about the building of an
emergency port to aid people in Gaza.
Greg, welcome.
Thank you.
Greg, the first question I have is, how effective do you think this port will be?
(00:50):
In the medium term, when you look out a couple months from now, it has the ability to put
a lot of stuff ashore if everything worked perfectly.
But my view of this port project is that it is kind of kicking the can down the road.
The US is asserting itself by doing something without Israel's permission on the aid front,
(01:10):
but it's really a much more immediate problem in terms of the need, which is a lot closer
in than two months.
So they seem to be doing what they wanted to do, to put pressure on Israel to go around
Netanyahu government, but in a way that avoids immediate confrontation with.
How are the relations between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
(01:35):
Netanyahu?
There's speculation that Biden is trying to push Netanyahu out of office.
You see other reports that, in fact, the relationship is not quite as fraught as the press is making
it out to be.
What's your analysis?
I think it's clearly pretty bad, but it all really depends.
(01:57):
I don't think the Biden administration would necessarily even believe that they could cause
the coalition, the current Netanyahu coalition to fall apart.
They don't have elections scheduled there for two years now.
You would have to have somebody from his narrow right-wing coalition pull out of that government
in order to trigger a no confidence vote.
(02:17):
And it's not clear right now who that disgruntled party within the coalition would be.
That of course has pulled Netanyahu to the right.
But I think that the administration, after some press coverage that suggested they were
trying to engineer dissolution of that coalition, they wanted to back off and at least get away
from the optics of that.
I think if there were early elections, the Biden administration would be overjoyed, but
(02:41):
I don't think they expect it to happen or see a way that they could make that happen.
So the Israelis have reversed course after balking it, allowing aid into the Gaza Strip.
They are now flooding it with aid.
What accounts for the reversal?
And do you think that it will render the port less significant?
(03:01):
I'm not sure that they're necessarily flooding it with aid.
There have been a lot of headlines over the last few days about specific convoy, you know,
that there had not been any convoys going into northern Gaza, and there now have been
convoys sent in from Israel.
But the volumes involved in it appear to be modest.
This is nothing like the 500 trucks a day that were going in to Gaza prior to the war.
(03:27):
So at this point, I think some of that is almost doing it for optics.
Just like we're doing with the airdrops, it's not necessarily enough volume to make a big
difference in the hunger crisis that's going on right now.
It may grow.
But, you know, as we also saw with that episode last week, it is difficult for them to handle
(03:51):
the distribution when they're not going through UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, that
has historically handed out aid to the Palestinians.
So they don't really have their own infrastructure set up on the ground to take care of them.
Does the port itself pose security risks for the United States?
Short answer is yes.
So there's been some new reporting on that in the last couple of days, you know, fleshing
(04:15):
out some of the plan that the Biden administration has had on this.
U.S. military personnel are not going to go ashore in Gaza, but we're going to have American
contractors who will.
You know, most of those contractors are people who have military or foreign aid bureaucracy
experience, which is good, but it's not really no Americans are going ashore.
(04:39):
And I think you have to consider this a hostile environment.
Certainly Hamas fighters are going to view the U.S. as the enemy.
And getting even close to the shore, you're at risk of being hit with long range sniper
rifles, mortar fire.
There are certainly things that they can throw at you, even if you're half a mile offshore.
So I think that has to be a concern.
(04:59):
The other big question with this is that we are tacitly, we're essentially relying on
Israel to cooperate with it and to provide security for the beachhead around this facility.
And the expectation is that you would recruit local Palestinians to distribute the aid,
to drive the trucks away.
(05:21):
But Israel would have to provide security near the landing of the pier.
And that's a question of, you know, given that they have not wanted to let in a lot
of aid before now, we're still kind of dependent on their cooperation for this to work.
And also whether they could find Palestinians who are going to be willing to cooperate with
them on that.
(05:42):
You know, the track record doesn't look good given what we've seen in recent weeks.
It is interesting that the Biden administration, which wanted to extricate itself from the
Middle East, appears to becoming progressively more enmeshed in the region, isn't it?
It keeps sucking you back in.
Yes.
I personally think, as I said in the piece that I wrote, that it would have been better
(06:02):
for them to simply bring things to a head with Israel and lean harder on them about
the land crossings.
That would have solved the problem faster and it wouldn't have had the risk to U.S.
personnel that you're going to see with this longer term project that they've embarked
on.
So I think it would have been better to solve it another way.
(06:24):
Why didn't they do it that way?
They don't want conflict with Netanyahu at this point or I think at any point going forward.
And when there is a way to avoid that.
It was interesting to see that Jake Sullivan, there was an interview that Biden had given
to MSNBC over the weekend where he was asked about red lines.
(06:44):
And a lot of people took away from that, that he was setting a red line on U.S. opposition
to making an offensive into Ra'afah right now because of the million plus refugees that
are there and the possibility of both major casualties among the refugees and that they
might be somehow forced into Egypt given their geographic location.
(07:05):
But Sullivan actually came out earlier this week and very broadly and forcefully walked
back all of that and said, there's no U.S. red line.
We're not setting red lines.
There was no announcements or pronouncements, as Sullivan put it in that interview.
And so that kind of broad statement that we don't have red lines is very important.
(07:27):
I think they're being careful not to be so someone isn't coming back weeks from now after
the Ra'afah offensive begins and saying they crossed the U.S. red line and we didn't do
anything.
It's pretty clear we don't intend to.
What we're hearing now about Ra'afah is that they're pushing Netanyahu to undertake targeted
commando operations rather than a full scale offensive.
(07:50):
Does that accord with what you think will occur?
That would certainly be the U.S. preference.
But I think that would have been the U.S. preference from the beginning.
There were a number of American observers, like Richard Haass even, who had argued at
the beginning of this that Israel could undertake a more targeted campaign.
(08:11):
But that really is at a variance with what Israel has done everywhere else, where they've
gone in kind of scorched earth almost and destroyed a lot of the infrastructure.
That infrastructure destruction is widespread enough that that seems to be part of the mission,
which is troubling.
But I don't think narrowing this down, it is possible they might narrow it down in Ra'afah
(08:34):
right now, but that wouldn't fit with the pattern of what they've been doing in this
campaign thus far.
In a column yesterday in the New York Times, Tom Friedman suggested that Israel is, quote,
becoming radioactive, unquote, that in pursuing what you just called a scorched earth policy,
it is creating a potential new Iraq, a destabilized area that no one is able to govern and that
(09:01):
simply becomes run by marauding gangs.
Do you see that kind of instability in the future?
Not sure I would agree with all of that column, but I think Friedman is right that there's
not really a plausible path being developed right now to any sort of day after for Gaza.
And if that population stays there, there's not really a credible path to having some
(09:26):
sort of local governance that's going to cooperate with Israel maintaining security there.
So I think it is possible that we end up in that.
The other thing, just to look at how the Israeli right is framing this though, there's a question
of whether all of that population remains there.
Ben Gver and Smotraich have been very open about this idea of emigration from Gaza, voluntary
(09:50):
emigration, but voluntary, of course, forced along by the food crisis.
I'm not sure that's Netanyahu's goal, but his coalition keeps pulling him to the right.
So if Biden doesn't push back on that, we may end up with that population, some of it
at least being pushed toward Egypt eventually.
And for the far right, that seems to be the goal.
(10:13):
But is it really plausible?
The Egyptians have put up barriers.
The Egyptians will not let them in willingly, but would they shoot them if they came across?
I don't think so.
So I definitely want to be clear, I'm not saying that that is the most likely scenario.
But for people on the harder edge, harder Netanyahu coalition, that is their thinking
and they're pulling him in that direction.
(10:35):
Final question.
When we look at the region, one thing has not erupted, which is that Iran has essentially
told its proxies to stand down.
Do you think that augurs well, especially for Lebanon?
For now, at least, yes.
I mean, Iran, it's been clear from the beginning that Iran did not want to get directly involved
(10:56):
in this.
Iran wants to be involved through proxies at a manageable level, but it doesn't want
to get sucked in itself.
It seems that a fully generated US-Iran clash that would spread to the Gulf is not in their
interests.
They definitely also don't want to lose their Hezbollah deterrent in Lebanon.
So that is something that is valuable to them as a deterrent against Israel striking their
(11:19):
nuclear facilities and is something that they don't want to pull the trigger on unless they
had to.
Where the question mark is now though, is that Israel, and not just the right, but pretty
much everyone there, wants to change the status quo, the very negative from an Israeli status
point status quo in Lebanon, where you have had Hezbollah and some of their strike forces,
(11:44):
the Rizwan unit is one that they're worried about right there on the border, and Israel
would like to get UN Security Council Resolution 1701 implemented that says they have to be
well back from the border north of the Latani River.
There have been negotiations back and forth on that with US mediation.
Amos Hochstein from the Biden administration has been spearheading that.
(12:08):
Still remains to be seen where that's going, but I don't think most of the Israeli political
establishment wants to go back to a status quo where they have Hezbollah fighters that
could do a Gaza type lightning strike into northern Israel.
And that's really what the worry is, is that they would have to have a lot more Israeli
(12:29):
military manpower on the border in the north to prevent that if they don't have the Hezbollah
units moved back north of there.
So going back to the status quo is very unattractive from an Israeli standpoint.
Greg, one thing is certain, we will come back to these issues as they never seem to be fully
solved in the Middle East.
(12:50):
Thank you for joining me today for our new podcast of In the National Interest, and thank
you for listening.
Thank you, Greg.
See you next time.
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