Blinken’s Israel visit exposes limits of US diplomacy

The US has been Israel’s staunchest ally since Hamas fighters attacked it on October 7. But as US secretary of state Antony Blinken ended his latest visit, it was the two countries’ deepening divisions that were most clearly on display.

After a day of meetings between US and Israeli officials, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Blinken held separate press conferences that laid bare their disagreements on issues ranging from the war’s next phase to how to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

“This trip reflected just how hard this whole [diplomatic] process is going to be,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former US state department official.

“It’s the two combatants that determine the arc of this crisis. And while the US has been, and is, playing a significant role, I think we have to be really pretty sober about assessing the degree to which [Washington] can fundamentally alter the trajectory of this crisis.”

In another sign of the gap between the allies, US President Joe Biden later on Thursday described Israel’s military response in Gaza as “over the top”, one of his sharpest criticisms of the Israeli offensive to date.

“There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s gotta stop,” Biden told reporters at the White House.

Back in Israel, the starkest divergence between Blinken and Netanyahu was in their assessment of the latest conditions offered by Hamas for releasing the roughly 130 hostages still in its hands, not all of whom are alive.

Blinken said that while the proposal — which called for a 135-day pause in hostilities, the withdrawal of Israel’s military from Gaza, and the release of at least 1,500 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails — contained some “non-starters”, it nevertheless offered “space for agreement to be reached”.

Netanyahu, however,…