Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s decision not to visit Israel partly reflects a deadlock in efforts to strike a cease-fire deal in Gaza.
Credit...Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein

Blinken Visits Egypt, but Skips a Stop in Israel

The secretary of state is making his 10th visit to the Middle East since the Oct. 7 attacks. Until now, he has met with officials in Israel each time.

by · NY Times

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Egypt on Wednesday, making his 10th visit to the Middle East since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But he has no plans to visit Israel before he departs on Thursday, even though his official plane could carry him there in about an hour.

It will be the first time since the Hamas attacks that Mr. Blinken has traveled to the region without stopping in Israel to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

U.S. officials gave no indication that the explosion of thousands of Hezbollah pagers across Lebanon on Tuesday, and more devices on Wednesday, would change Mr. Blinken’s plans, despite U.S. concerns that a larger war between Israel and the Lebanon-based group could be near.

Mr. Blinken’s decision not to visit Israel partly reflects a deadlock in efforts to strike a cease-fire deal in Gaza, one of President Biden’s top priorities as his term winds down. U.S. officials are drawing up a new proposal they hope can bridge differences between Israel and Hamas to allow for a halt to the fighting, the release of hostages and an influx of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But officials and analysts also said it was clear that Mr. Blinken’s visits to Israel have had diminishing returns and may even be growing counterproductive.

After several recent meetings, Mr. Netanyahu has undermined or outright contradicted Mr. Blinken’s public positions. That has raised questions in Washington and beyond about whether the Israeli leader is persuadable — or even acting in good faith when he says he wants a cease-fire deal.

“Blinken skipping Israel is a reflection of the Biden administration’s realization that trying to pressure Bibi is pointless,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, referring to the prime minister by his nickname. “Bibi may tell us privately, ‘OK, I want the cease-fire and to get the hostages’ — and then he goes out and says something entirely contradictory.”

Mr. Lowenstein noted that the Hezbollah pagers exploded on Tuesday even as another Biden administration envoy, Amos Hochstein, was in Israel urging the government not to escalate its conflict with Hezbollah.

Mr. Netanyahu “really does not care what we say,” Mr. Lowenstein added. “And it makes us look weak to have him publicly defy us at every opportunity.”

Speaking to reporters in Cairo on Wednesday, Mr. Blinken did not directly respond to a question about why he was not traveling on to Israel, saying that his trip was focused on relations between the United States and Egypt.

Mr. Blinken added that Hamas and Israel had agreed on more than a dozen provisions of a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal, with just a few points outstanding. “The bottom line is this,” he said. “Their resolution is less a question of substance and more a question of political will. And for both parties, it’s important to demonstrate that political will to get this agreement concluded.”

An Israeli official said there was no drama behind Mr. Blinken’s decision not to visit, saying there was no need for meetings on the cease-fire talks given the current impasse, which the official blamed on Hamas. Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, similarly said on Tuesday that it would be “premature” for Mr. Blinken to visit Israel now, given that the revised U.S. proposal “is not ready to present to Israel at this point.”

But the friction between Mr. Netanyahu’s government and the Biden administration is clear.

Emerging from their last meetings in August, Mr. Blinken declared that the prime minister had assured him he supported a U.S.-backed framework to reach a cease-fire in Gaza.

Shortly after Mr. Blinken departed the country, however, the Israeli news media reported that Mr. Netanyahu had privately vowed that he would not comply with one of Hamas’s key demands — a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from a strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt known as the Philadelphi Corridor — “regardless of the pressure to do so,” according to one account.

“I told this to Blinken. Maybe I convinced him,” Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist based in Washington for Axios, quoted Mr. Netanyahu as telling the families of hostages held in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not deny the report, and he recently told reporters something similar. “Gaza must be demilitarized,” he said, “and this can only happen if the Philadelphi Corridor remains under firm control.”

Mr. Miller said on Tuesday that the situation in Gaza, and the Philadelphi Corridor specifically, would be a topic of conversation in Cairo. Egypt has objected to the presence of Israeli troops so close to its border. “We have some discreet business to do with them,” Mr. Miller said.

Even a softening of Egypt’s position on Israel’s presence in the Philadelphi Corridor is not likely to change Hamas’s insistence that Israeli troops withdraw from the area, however.

“I think we’re at a little bit of an inflection point in the whole diplomatic process,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the center-left Israel advocacy group J Street. Mr. Ben-Ami said that the United States and other countries “are taking a step back to reassess strategy, and I think the fact that he’s not going to Israel is an indication that they don’t have something actively to promote.”

But Mr. Lowenstein noted that several of Mr. Blinken’s recent trips had not gone well.

Days after Mr. Blinken visited Israel in June, for instance, Mr. Netanyahu released an English-language video in which he recounted telling his American guest that it was “inconceivable” that the United States had been “withholding weapons and ammunition” from Israel. Mr. Blinken had assured him that he was working to remove “bottlenecks” slowing such aid, Mr. Netanyahu said.

Asked about those comments, Mr. Blinken did not outright deny them — but also implied that he had said no such thing. Mr. Blinken said that the Biden administration had delayed only one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, as it had publicly announced, adding that “everything else is moving as it normally would move.”

Privately, Biden officials were furious with Mr. Netanyahu and called his comments misleading.

In February, Mr. Blinken visited Israel and said that Mr. Netanyahu had “reaffirmed his commitment” to a cease-fire proposal then on the table. Speaking in Qatar a day later, Mr. Blinken told reporters that Hamas’s response, while problematic, offered the basis for further negotiations. But Mr. Netanyahu quickly dismissed the group’s position as “delusional,” before vowing to fight until Israel achieved “absolute victory” over Hamas.

Mr. Lowenstein noted that Mr. Netanyahu had taken several aggressive steps at critical moments that set back U.S. efforts to reach a cease-fire or prevent an escalated conflict in the region. They include the pager explosions and Israel’s July 31 assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The problem for Mr. Blinken and for Mr. Biden, Mr. Lowenstein said, is that the United States has no clear alternative to pushing a cease-fire plan that neither side really wants.

“We’re really out there on the cease-fire,” he said, “and at every turn Netanyahu has not only taken the opportunity to do the exact opposite of what we’ve asked him to do, but to say it very publicly.”

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