--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, President Biden spoke from Israel today after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said, among other things, Israel has the right to defend itself and the U.S. will help Israel. My message to any state or any other hostile actor, thinking about attacking Israel remains the same as it was a week ago. Don't. Don't. Don't.
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--:-- Noel King: Biden also said, based on information he's seen, quote, an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group from Gaza caused the devastation at a hospital in Gaza City yesterday. Gaza's health ministry blames Israel for that incident. Biden also urged Israel to be cautious. The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.
--:-- Noel King: We have news of Biden's visit coming up next. Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies. A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, syncs in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data.
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--:-- Noel King: Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company. You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
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--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained. It's been 11 days since Hamas attacked Israel, killing civilians and taking hostages. Israel's retaliation has created a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Can diplomacy work at this point? Today we're going to ask people who are familiar with such negotiations.
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--:-- Noel King: Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations as a Middle East analyst, advisor and negotiator. I asked him, what is President Biden's objective on this trip?
--:-- Aaron David Miller: I think there are three objectives. Number one is to demonstrate to the people of Israel traumatized and lacking, I think, in their own view of their own leadership, to demonstrate a measure of hope and support for the Israelis. I come to Israel with a single message. You're not alone. You are not alone. As long as the United States stands and we will stand forever, we'll not let you ever be alone.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: He's already started by meeting with the families of first responders and hostages. The second objective, complicated by the fact that the Arab summit in Amman was postponed, has sort of been short-circuited because he can crest the Israelis on the need for a stable and predictable humanitarian corridor to surge humanitarian assistance in badly needed communities and displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: But he cannot have an opportunity right now to talk to Abdul Fatah Sisi directly in person in Amman. And I think that's unfortunate. The other reality is because of the attack on the Al-Akhali Arab Hospital in Gaza, there are demonstrations throughout the region. Anger is surging. And the visit, because he cannot see America's Arab partners, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, seems to be an Israel only trip.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: And given the anger generated by the attack, and I must say the president must have received information because he made a statement that basically said that it was his understanding that the Israelis were not responsible. I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday. And based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: But the perception on the Arab street and in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, is that the Israelis were responsible for this. And no denial and no explanation by the United States is going to address that problem. So that creates an optic problem for the administration going forward. And finally, the third and hardest objective was to sit with the prime minister in his war cabinet to press them, to question them on the issue of the ground campaign. What are its objectives? What are the means at Israel's disposal to carry it out?
--:-- Aaron David Miller: What are the complications? And of course, what happens the day after? The president has already added to his preternatural support of Israel over the last week additional points on proportionality, the need to adhere to the rules of war, the need to avoid civilian casualties, and the need to avoid reoccupying Gaza. My own sense now, whether it's been a factor in the delay, Israeli indecision has been a factor in delay, the Biden visit will now almost certainly delay the ground campaign.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: I'm beginning to think that the massive ground campaign that the Israelis have promised, the mobilization and their response, may not be that massive ground campaign. What would take its place? I'm not sure. But there's clearly a degree of indecision. And I suspect the president will seek to try to clarify what the Israelis intend to do in the days and weeks ahead.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: Why is it important for him to clarify what the Israelis intend to do in the days and weeks ahead? Is that part of a plan to de-escalate this war? It's a fascinating question. I think he would like to, but I don't think we've reached the point where the president is going to say to the prime minister, it would be much better for the U.S.-Israeli relationship, our interests, my personal relationship with you and the region if you didn't do this.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: I think the line of questioning will lead to an effort to try to get the Israelis to think through the consequences of what it is they intend to do how complex it is how difficult it is. Because in many respects Joe Biden and Israel now, sandwiched between this savage, brutal Hamas terror surge, the Israeli blockade against Gaza, the punishing airstrikes, and on one hand, possibility of a massive ground campaign against Hamas on the other.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: The president is going to be identified with this operation. I think he understands that. He's put himself firmly in the Israeli camp. I think he is pressing to get them to understand the consequences and the implications of what the Israelis could do. I do not believe, and I could be wrong, that he's exploring alternatives in any detail to such a ground campaign.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: I'm getting the sense, my own sense, untethered from any contacts with the government of Israel or the Biden administration, that there is a growing sense of delay and uncertainty on the part of the Israelis themselves about what it is they're going to do. And then the question becomes, if there is no massive unprecedented ground campaign, what do the Israelis intend to do? And I think this is a question that it's impossible to answer. And I may be wrong.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: But clearly, we're in the week two, I suspect there will be no major ground campaign in the wake of the president's It's departure. I think that would be a mistake and would further tie the president to what the Israelis are going to do. I don't think there's an answer to your question.
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--:-- Noel King: President Biden was, as you know, as we said, he was supposed to meet with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. He was also supposed to meet with the leaders of Jordan and Egypt. Now, after the hospital was hit, as you said, those leaders canceled an in-person meeting. How significant is that and what could it mean here?
--:-- Aaron David Miller: I think it's unfortunate because he needs to have conversations. Those are three key partners, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. As weak and dysfunctional as the Palestinian Authority is, it is still the address. It is the address for Israel. It's the address for the international community, the Palestinian address, and it's the address for U.S. relations with the Palestinians.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: So the Palestinian dimension of this and the Palestinian Authority's role here right now is marginal. But as the days and weeks proceed, with or without a ground campaign, if the United States is going to be more deeply involved in the Palestinian issue, and I suspect it will be, it has to be now, the Palestinian Authority, for want of any other address or partner, is going to have to play a greater role.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: And Mr. Biden has a stake in further legitimizing it. There has to be Arab state participation. And Mr. Biden's maintaining contacts with these partners is critically important.
--:-- Noel King: What are the risks for President Biden in taking this trip, in being there in Israel? Physical risks, obviously, which Secret Service is concerned about. He's been to Ukraine, which I think is a far more fraught and vulnerable security risk. But I think that'll be fine.
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--:-- Noel King: And frankly, if the president can't figure out a way to deliver on the humanitarian issue, which is complicated, there's only one crossing point now through Rafa in which aid can surge in. And that situation is complicated by Egypt's interests, Hamas's interests, and Israel's interests.
--:-- Noel King: But at a minimum, I think he has to deliver on the humanitarian to create the stable corridor of assistance to Gaza. That's the key objective, frankly. I suspect in terms of the risk category, it's only the optic, the perception that he's visiting the region, but only going to Israel. And that's not Mr. Biden's fault or responsibility.
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--:-- Noel King: He intended, quite correctly, to meet with the Arab partners in Amman. That's not going to happen. That would be the only optic problem.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: [This region has been troubled for generations. You were an advisor to secretaries of state in multiple presidential administrations. You worked at the State Department for years. Does this moment feel different to you at all?]
--:-- Aaron David Miller: You know, I was in Jerusalem in 1973 on October 6th. And the same sense of vulnerability, of trauma, the intelligence failure, the fact that the Middle East would never be the same again. In 73, I was right. Within six years of that trauma, Egypt and Israel would sign a full treaty of peace. So out of trauma came hope.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: 20 years later, September 13, 1993, I'm sitting on the White House lawn watching in amazement as Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo, of course, thinking wrongly in a galactic misjudgment that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had reached a turning point and had become irreversible in its momentum toward a negotiated solution.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: Well, in that case, hope turned to trauma. So I would say two things. The arc of history is long, and it bends in very strange and very unpredictable ways, number one. And number two, every breakthrough in this conflict, whether it was the 1973 war that produced the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, whether it was the Madrid Peace Conference, which I, part of a small team, helped form a secretary of state Baker fashion in October of 1991, was preceded by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in the first Iraq war.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: The Oslo Accords and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty grew out of the first intifada, where the Israelis made a decision, Prime Minister Rabin, that there was no military solution to the Palestinian problem. Every agreement in these conflict zones came out of terror, insurgency, and war.
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--:-- Aaron David Miller: And you could only hope we in a long dark tunnel now you can only hope if past his prolapse that the pain involved on both sides will create the kind of urgency that will lead to some new opening some new point of departure. But it's crucial to make sure that the pain, which is why people act in some respects, creates urgency is accompanied by the prospects of gain.
--:-- Aaron David Miller: It is the pain plus gain that give rise to breakthroughs in the Arab-Israeli conflict. So I never say never. I would only hope somewhere amidst all this, the horror, the violence, and the tragedy of what we're watching, will come a new sort of opening to put Israelis and Palestinians on a different course.
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--:-- Noel King: That was Aaron David Miller. He's a Middle East analyst. Coming up, the view from where President Biden isn't going.
--:-- Noel King: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
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--:-- Noel King: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Noel King: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
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--:-- Noel King: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, replicate modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash today explained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noel King: That's A-T-T-I-O.com slash today explained. Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI. No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority canceled their meetings with President Biden after the El Ahli Hospital in Gaza City was struck yesterday.
--:-- Noel King: We're going to look at what these Arab countries want with Middle East analyst Michael Waheed Hanna. I'm the U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group. Most of my professional life has been spent working on the politics and security dynamics of the region and U.S. foreign policy there.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: Yeah, I mean, during the tail end of the Trump administration, we saw these major normalization agreements. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain will establish embassies, exchange ambassadors, and begin to cooperate and work together so strongly to cooperate as partners across...
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: In more recent months, the big discussion has been about extending that normalization to Saudi Arabia. And of course, at the heart of this question as well was this issue of Palestine. Saudi Arabia had offered something called the Arab Peace Initiative, which was effectively an idea that if Israel and Palestinians came to a two-state solution, that then recognition and normalization would happen in the region by all the Arab states.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And so there's been a lot of discussion of late about what it would take for Saudi Arabia now to normalize relations with Israel. To hear Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speak in recent months, he has really assured everybody in public that Saudi Arabia really would only require symbolic steps.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: We are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough, an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a peace will go a long way to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. And of course, events of the past days have blown asunder a lot of the assumptions that undergirded this diplomatic effort.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: The idea that the region had kind of leapfrogged ahead of the issue of Palestine and not be held hostage to the lack of a resolution of this conflict to push forward other interests. Where do things stand today after 11 days of war?
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: I think it's worth pausing and thinking about the regional reaction, particularly after the outrage in the region seen after the bombing of the hospital in Gaza. The whole region is at the brink of falling into the abyss that this new cycle of death and destruction is pushing us towards.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: The threat of this war expanding is real. The cost this will bring on all of us is too much to bear. Regional mood has shifted. I think it's, you know, regardless of attribution, and this would be a point of very serious contestation, but in a sense, the region has made a judgment about the war, about its trajectory, about what it is hoping to see.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And so the reason I say that is because we saw sort of unanimity in approach. You had very condemnatory statements coming from Egypt Jordan but also the UAE and Saudi. That is a judgment about the war itself and about their fears about its direction perhaps more so than attribution, because obviously there's deep skepticism in the region about the Israeli account for what happened.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: But the fact that the statements came out, the fact that the statements looked like they did, I think is reflective of this shift in regional mood. And that shift might actually create real constraints on Israel's freedom of operation and perhaps the kind of scope of military offensive that it might be able to launch now.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: President Biden is in Israel today. He was supposed to, on this trip, meet with the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. That meeting was canceled yesterday after the hospital in Gaza City was bombed. and we hear instead they may speak on the phone.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: What does Biden want from Egypt? Yeah, he was slated to meet with King Abdullah, King of Jordan, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the president of Egypt, and Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority. They were to meet in Amman.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And of course, it's not surprising that after yesterday's incident and what looks to be a pretty horrific civilian toll, and Mahmoud Abbas at first and the others later pulled the plug on this meeting. It's reflective of the strain on relations with the United States, seen as the sort of key backer of Israel, and how volatile the moment is.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And I'm sure there will be multiple communications in the coming days with these leaders, including President Sisi, because humanitarian access is dependent at this point because of the Israeli stance. on coming to an agreement on the Rafah border crossing.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: So, you know, there has been a lot of talk about opening up. The Egyptians contest that it's closed, but they say that it is non-functional because of Israeli airstrikes and the lack of full agreement on how the crossing would operate.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: But clearly there is a big gap between what the United States has announced on humanitarian access and assistance and what we see on the ground. There is not a functioning border crossing now.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And it will be key in the coming days, because the situation really is quite dire inside Gaza, and the Israelis are not going to let up on their siege, that there is a way to create a somewhat normalized functioning of Rafah to allow humanitarian supplies into Gaza, to let American citizens and other foreign nationals out of Gaza, and at some point to bring out injured for medical treatment.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: And potentially, this could be a conduit for hostage diplomacy around the Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. So I think that's going to be the main focus at the moment.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: But as I mentioned, I think the other thing that has shifted now after the hospital bombing is the regional attitude toward the war, regional patience with where it is going. It seems very clear to me that, you know, this kind of coordinated regional response moving in lockstep in condemnatory fashion, you know, is meant to send a signal to Israel and the United States about their fears of where this is going and maybe expectations about attempts to try to tame this violence and eventually bring it to a close.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: There is a lot of anger in the region. There is a lot of blame placed not just on Israel, but the United States as the kind of prime external backer. And so there is risk here, very serious risk for the United States in being associated with whatever comes next.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: Could diplomacy still work here, Michael? Is de-escalation, which seems far away, is de-escalation still a possibility?
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: It's a question for uh u.s leaders and european leaders uh i don't think the israeli political class is in any mood for de-escalation based on the kind of nature of the attacks and their sense of vulnerability and humiliation but in a sense it falls the united states and others to counsel wisdom at a time of high emotion.
--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: Justice must be done. But I caution this while you feel that rage, don't be consumed by it. So that's the big question for the United States now. It's a question for President Biden, particularly with the regional visit that so tightly links links him personally in the United States more generally with this Israeli military operation.
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--:-- Michael Waheed Hanna: What sets us apart from the terrorists is we believe in the fundamental dignity of every human life. Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian, everyone. And clearly we see the horrific kinds of violence that are almost certainly going to multiply if this war continues on its current trajectory and if the Israelis launch what could be a very prolonged, protracted and bloody ground invasion.
--:-- Noel King: That was Michael Wahid Hanna of the International Crisis Group. We're going to continue to cover this war as it unfolds. And if you have something that you want explained, we'd love to hear from you.
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--:-- Noel King: You can call us at 202-643-0314. And just know that if you leave us a message, we may play your message on the air.
--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Amanda Lewellyn with help from Jon Ehrens, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Tien Nguyen and Avishay Artsy, engineered by David Herman and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King.
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--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
