If Harris Will Be Different from Biden on Israel, This Is Her Chance to Show It

It's a regional war. Now that Israel has killed Hamas' leader on Iranian soil, it's set to get much worse. Deescalation is the only option. Will the VP choose it? 

Edited by Sam Thielman 

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I'VE BEEN NAUSEOUS EVER SINCE WAKING UP to the news that Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. Not because Haniyeh is someone worth mourning. But because this is a fateful step that escalates the regional war that Israel's collective punishment of Gaza has yielded, and one that forces Iran’s hand.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken this morning denied the U.S. was "aware of or involved in" killing Haniyeh. But since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left Washington last week, following the lethal rocket attack on Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel has bombed targets in Beirut and now in Tehran itself. We'll learn more from subsequent reporting about messages conveyed or not conveyed by President Biden—and, indeed, Vice President Harris, who met with Netanyahu on Thursday. But clearly Netanyahu did not feel meaningfully constrained from conducting two assassination attempts on foreign soil in as many days, all while not letting up on Israel's military devastation of Gaza. 

Harris has to decide if she's cool with this. She has to convey her decision as soon as today. Consider that by the time she steps into her nominating convention next month, a tidal wave of bloodshed – perhaps even the full-fledged conflagration across the entire Middle East that many have feared since Oct. 7 –– could be her backdrop. Only U.S. intervention can stop it. Within the administration, and out in the public, that intervention now falls to her. 

Ever since late October 2023, FOREVER WARS has been writing, against the grain of mainstream coverage, that this is not a "coming" regional war. A regional war has been here. The question for U.S. diplomacy—not only for U.S. diplomacy, but that's what we're concerned with today—is whether the U.S. will actively deescalate it. Active deescalation means compelling Israel to get out of Gaza. No other measure can substitute for that, since the genocide in Gaza is what prompted the Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel, the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and now Tel Aviv, and Iranian-proxy militia attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq—which are starting back up again, after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ordered an operational pause that represented Iranian restraint against the United States. 

Here is what that pause got the Iranians: an Israeli strike on its embassy in Damascus that killed a senior general, an assassination attempt against senior proxy Fuad Shakr in Beirut,  and now an assassination of a Hamas potentate in Tehran where he was attending the inauguration of the new reform-bloc Iranian president. Remember that following the Israeli strike on the embassy, Iran in April fired a drone-and-missile barrage on Israel and said it would consider the matter "concluded." I warned at the time that without a ceasefire, the next Iranian strike will be worse, and we're about to see it. The Iranians are promising "a harsh punishment," and they say Washington bears responsibility for the assassination as well. Late on Tuesday, U.S. Central Command announced its first airstrike on militias in Iraq since February. 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says escalation is not "inevitable," although he maintains that regional war is not yet here. But Austin and the rest of the Biden administration are willfully avoiding what it takes to stop the escalation, let alone roll it back. If they truly do not seek to escalate, then what they are doing has failed, decisively. It has failed for ten entire agonizing months, all while the battlefield has expanded to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen (and, nebulously, maybe Egypt), the Red Sea and Iran itself. Anyone paying attention knows the missing piece for deescalation is an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. Well, Haniyeh was a key figure negotiating that ceasefire, and now it's about to be as much of a mirage as a two-state solution. Austin is already talking about helping the Israelis defend themselves against Iranian reprisal. 

Many people here in the United States who do not want Donald Trump to be president again and also do not want to be complicit in a combination genocide and regional war are looking to Kamala Harris to differentiate herself from Joe Biden. This is a matter not only of her political future but the lives of millions of Palestinians, Israelis, Druze, Lebanese, Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians and perhaps others in the Middle East. Harris is not a passive observer. She is the second most-senior elected official in the United States, and this is the situation she is looking to inherit. We know that Trump wants to let the Israelis "finish the job." Is that also Harris' position, with a sprinkling of rhetorical compassion for Palestinians acting as cover for policy continuity? Or will she demonstrate the leadership necessary to stop a coalescing, escalating regional war that the United States possesses the material leverage on Israel to end? 

What is Harris asking us to vote for? U.S.-backed genocide and regional war? Or active deescalation? The choice is hers and hers alone. 

ON TUESDAY, SHORTLY AFTER THE ISRAELI ATTACK IN BEIRUT, I spoke with Harrison Mann, the Army major and Mideast analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who resigned in protest of U.S. support for the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Harrison did an enlightening Q&A with FOREVER WARS about escalation in June. Now it seemed like his predictions were fearfully coming to pass. He shared with me some thoughts he posted on his LinkedIn and gave me permission to share it with you, the FOREVER WARS reader.  

Since the day I left active duty, I have been warning that one underappreciated consequence of the Biden administration’s refusal to pressure Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire deal is the risk of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. That war would be a disaster for Israel and Lebanon alike, likely engulfing the region and dragging in the United States.

We are one step closer—one leap, really—to that war today now that Israel has bombed Hezbollah in Beirut for the first time since 2006 (Israel killed a Hamas deputy in Beirut with a drone strike earlier this year).

Hezbollah still seeks to avoid larger war, but it cannot ignore a strike in the heart of its territory in Lebanon’s capital and will inevitably respond with an attack deeper into Israel, possibly deliberately inflicting civilian casualties.

After that, to avoid a spiral into full-scale war, the Biden administration will need to show an unprecedented level of will to restrain Israel.

The administration is already attempting to persuade Israel to deescalate while simultaneously reiterating its promise to unconditionally support Israel against Hezbollah. This is an inherently contradictory position that has already failed in Gaza. We can back Israel for endless war, or demand peace, but not both.

The timing of the strike also worries me. Israel’s casus belli was allegedly a Hezbollah rocket that killed twelve Druze children in the occupied Golan Heights. I am skeptical that Netanyahu and his far-right coalition (whose MPs just broke into the base housing Israel’s infamous Sde Tieman prison to protest the arrest of soldiers who sexually assaulted Palestinian prisoners) is shedding tears for dead Syrian children. Hezbollah has been firing into Israel since October 8 and has killed actual Israeli civilians in the past.

What’s new this week is that Netanyahu has just returned from his visit to Congress, the White House, and Mar-a-Lago.

I warned in the Washington Post last month that Israel “will not launch the offensive [into Lebanon] until they are fully confident of America’s support. So I think the final trigger for a war of annihilation, in the form of a ground offensive, will be when Netanyahu perceives he has the green light from the U.S.”

I doubt anyone gave Netanyahu an explicit “green light” last week. But it also appears that he flew back to Tel Aviv with full confidence that nothing—not a genocide in Gaza, not reckless escalation—would shake Washington’s commitment to fueling his wars of choice.

WILLIAM CALLEY, the butcher of My Lai, died earlier this year. May his victims and their surviving kin know peace, since they will not know justice.

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