TEL AVIV, Israel—President Joe Biden and his senior aides are hailing a ceasefire they brokered in Lebanon last week as a potential breakthrough for Middle East peace. But Israeli leaders see the truce as a way to get through the final days of Biden's presidency so Israel can finish the war with its genocidal enemies.
In the Rose Garden on Tuesday, Biden announced the 60-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. He said the deal, which went into effect early Wednesday and has so far held, "heralds a new start for Lebanon" and "brings us closer to realizing the affirmative agenda that I’ve been pushing forward during my entire presidency: a vision for the future of the Middle East where it’s at peace and prosperous and integrated across borders."
"I believe this agenda remains possible," Biden continued, vowing to use the final 54 days of his presidency to try to end Israel’s war in Gaza, normalize Israel-Saudi relations, and secure a "credible pathway for a Palestinian state."
According to current and former Israeli officials, however, Israel's government agreed to the ceasefire largely to appease and move on from the Biden administration. President-elect Donald Trump will be back in the White House when the 60-day deadline for troop withdrawals comes around, and they expect he will support a strong response to any violation of the deal as well as Israeli action against Iran and Hamas, a Hezbollah ally and fellow Iran-backed terrorist group.
"It’s not for no reason that we insisted on 60 days," Ohad Tal, a member of Israel’s parliamentary defense committee from the governing Religious Zionism party, told the Washington Free Beacon.
The ceasefire agreement provides "zero" security benefits to Israel in Lebanon, Tal said, noting that the Lebanese Army and international peacekeepers have abjectly failed to enforce Resolution 1701 for the past 18 years. He said pressure from the Biden administration was the "main reason" Israeli leaders nonetheless got behind the deal.
"It’s a bad deal," Tal said. "But it’s a bad deal that we had to sign under the circumstances, and that had everything to do with the current administration in America."
Hours before Biden trumpeted the ceasefire agreement at the White House, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the deal as something like a tactical pause in Israel’s nearly 14-month war with the Iranian axis, which seeks Israel's destruction. He said the deal would allow the military to rest, rearm, and "focus on the Iranian threat" and "our sacred mission" to bring home the 101 hostages still held hostage in Gaza. He emphasized that his government would not hesitate to "renew the war," as it did following the ceasefire with Hamas last November.
"The length of the ceasefire depends on what happens in Lebanon. If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack," Netanyahu said. "Believe in our determination, believe in our path, in our commitment to victory."
Netanyahu also suggested that pressure from the Biden administration had forced Israel’s hand.
"I say it openly, it is no secret that there have been big delays in weapons and munitions deliveries," he said, echoing explicit criticisms he made of the Biden administration in a speech to lawmakers last month. "These delays will be resolved soon. We will receive supplies of advanced weaponry that will keep our soldiers safe and give us more strike force to complete our mission."
In interviews with the Free Beacon, two current and three former Israeli officials confirmed Hebrew media reports that the Biden administration has slowed weapons deliveries to Israel, including the recent hold up of a shipment of 139 armored bulldozers on which soldiers rely to clear explosives and terrorist hideouts in Lebanon and Gaza.
After the start of the ceasefire on Wednesday, the Biden administration leaked that it was advancing a $680 million weapons package to Israel. U.S. officials anonymously said the package was unconnected to the Israeli government's cooperation with the truce. The administration has long denied withholding weapons from Israel, aside from one shipment of 2,000 pound bombs that Biden has publicly suspended since March.
Also a factor in Israeli leaders' approval of the ceasefire agreement were concerns that the Biden administration would otherwise facilitate a U.N. Security Council resolution harmful to Israel. Tal said the Israeli government "knew that the State Department was already working to arrange a resolution against Israel in the Security Council."
Israel’s Channel 14 news reported late last month that Netanyahu privately told critics of the then-emerging ceasefire agreement that it was better to "postpone the end" of the war by two months as part of the deal than to have the Security Council force an end to the fighting, which he warned was a "real danger."
Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military official who has advised Netanyahu on the war, told the Free Beacon that the prime minister fears a repeat of the final weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which the United States abstained from a U.N. National Security Council resolution that rejected any Israeli presence in the "occupied Palestinian territory" of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
"I heard Netanyahu speak many times about how traumatic and complicated it was to deal with Obama’s decision," Avivi said. "I think one of Netanyahu’s top priorities right now is to make sure the current U.S. administration ends without that kind of drama. So Netanyahu negotiated this temporary ceasefire, and if it works, OK, and if not, then there will be a change of administration, and Israel will be in a position to decide what to do."
Senior Israeli and U.S. officials told reporters in separate briefings last week that the Biden administration did not explicitly threaten to sanction Israel in relation to the ceasefire talks. But the officials did not deny that such a threat existed.
A State Department spokeswoman dodged the Free Beacon's questions about the subject by email, saying only: "Our goal was to reach an enduring diplomatic resolution that will enable civilians to safely return to their homes on both sides of the Blue Line. We achieved that with the close (and ongoing) communication of our Israeli and Lebanese counterparts."
The Prime Minister's Office and the White House declined to comment.
Under the ceasefire agreement, Israeli troops have 60 days to withdraw from southern Lebanon, where they have been carrying out operations for two months to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure near the border. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Army, with U.S. and French support, must move into the area to enforce U.N. Resolution 1701, which bars Hezbollah from keeping arms and terrorist infrastructure south of the Litani River. The Biden administration separately guaranteed Israel's right to respond to violations of the deal.
Kobi Michael, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official, told the Free Beacon that Israel's leaders expect they will not be required to complete the withdrawal from Lebanon. He said "the working assumption" in Jerusalem is that Hezbollah will try to rearm, the Lebanese government will fail to prevent the terrorist group from doing so, and Trump will "agree with us that the ceasefire has been violated and we must be free to continue operating in Lebanon."
A senior U.S. official told reporters on Tuesday that Netanyahu initiated the successful final push for a ceasefire in Lebanon as a "gift" to Trump, confirming a report last month by the Washington Post. But the current and former Israeli officials downplayed claims that Netanyahu feels pressure to end the war before Trump takes office on Jan. 20. They agreed that the government’s backing of the truce is better understood as part of an Israeli effort to win Trump's backing for—and ideally participation in—a strike on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
According to Avivi, Israel has mostly disabled Iran's "proxies and air defenses" has lately ramped up domestic weapons production and other preparations to deal a devastating blow to the Islamic Republic.
"Israel’s challenge is to convince President Trump that we are handing him Iran on a silver platter," Avivi said, before directly addressing the incoming Trump administration. "All the hard work is done. Just bring the strategic bombers, and let’s get it over with. It’s one airstrike."