The assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, presumably by Israel, is the latest deliberate provocation in a series of deliberate provocations to keep the conflict going. Yet every provocation risks wider regional conflagration, and so long as US policy continues to shield Israel from the consequences of its actions, instead of pushing it to the negotiating table, the situation becomes more precarious.
Most crucially, the United States has plenty of existing leverage over the actions of Israel that the Biden administration could pursue, most immediately by adhering to, instead of sidestepping, US legal limits on arms sales to the country.
There’s another way, Matt Duss and Nancy Okail write for The New York Times:
At the time of this writing, a ground war in Lebanon and devastating, sustained missile barrages may still be staved off, but to do so will require deft, immediate diplomacy and actionable changes on the pipeline of arms to Israel. That will necessitate more action than we have seen in the last 10 months, leading us to worry that the conflagration may occur as much as the Americans would like to wish it away.
The time is late, but it is essential now for President Biden to finally apply real pressure to stop this war, by halting the supply of offensive arms, facilitating the return of hostages to Israel and enabling the provision of desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. The United States must state loudly and clearly that the country will no longer support this war. And then show that it means it.
When President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his bid for reelection and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to succeed him to the Presidency, he created the space for Harris to set out a new policy on Gaza. In Foreign Policy, CIP executive vice president Matt Duss writes that Harris can plot a new path, distinct from Biden’s nearly unconditional support for Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza.
Writes Duss:
While no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden, there are steps that she can take to show that she speaks for the Democratic Party of today and not 40 years ago. She can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stalling hostage release and cease-fire efforts in order to cling to power. She can reject the baseless and inflammatory claims that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the largest and most important relief agency in Gaza, is a “Hamas front,” and state that she’ll work to see UNRWA funding resumed as soon as legally possible. In doing so, she would join U.S. partners—such as Britain, France, and Germany—that have already resumed their contributions.
In his first public call since leaving the race, President Joe Biden vowed to end the war in Gaza during his final months in office as he is set to meet with Netanyahu this week.
But much of the attention will be on Vice President Kamala Harris. The presumptive Democratic nominee will reportedly have her own face-to-face chat with Netanyahu.
CIP executive vice president Matt Duss joined Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s RN Breakfast to discuss. Listen here.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington and prepares for a July 24 address to Congress, CIP executive vice president Matt Duss discusses Kamala Harris’s record on Israel-Palestine. The Hill’s Laura Kelly and Rafael Bernal report:
Advocates for a tougher U.S. policy towards Israel point to Harris’s March speech in Selma, Ala., as a promising example of the vice president addressing the plight of Palestinians at a time when Biden was under increasing pressure to hold back weapons deliveries to Israel over the toll of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip amid its war against Hamas.
“The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid [to Palestinians]. No excuses,” Harris said to applause.
“She really lifted up the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in a much more aggressive way, much more critical of the Israeli government’s approach there. I think that was noticed by everyone,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
But it’s unclear if Harris’s speech represented a major policy difference or only a shift in rhetoric. Stepping forward as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, she now has an opportunity to articulate what she wants to do differently, Duss said.
He added it’s an important signal that she will not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday. A number of Democratic lawmakers have announced they will boycott the speech, largely progressives.
“I hope and expect that she and her team will engage with the whole array of voices that make up the Democratic Party, and that includes its growing progressive [wing].”
Following J.D. Vance’s first speech at the Republican Convention as the official vice presidential nominee, CIP Executive Vice President Matt Duss joined Democracy Now! to discuss the competing narratives and records on foreign policy espoused by Vance, Trump and Biden. Below are excerpted transcripts of Matt’s discussion.
On the Iraq War:
“The story he wants to tell America about Trumpism, about the MAGA movement is that he was misled; he was told by Washington elites that this [the Iraq War] was a just war, a necessary war and was lied to, so he did his duty as an American citizen and went to serve in Marines in Iraq but then came to realize that that war was based on a lie. And of course that is a very valid argument. It was based on a series of lies and and and untruths and had enormously disastrous effects of course for the region but also for the United States. And that’s again an area where President Biden is quite vulnerable. He was a strong supporter of the Iraq War and to this day has never fully accounted for his support for the war.”
On Trump’s foreign policy record:
“If you look at the actual record of Trump’s presidency, it was in fact quite militarist. It was not isolationist, it was certainly not dovish in any respect. It was just unilateralist. And that I think is consistent with what we saw [in Vance’s speech] last night. It’s not that the United States will be pulling back from the world necessarily. It’s that we will be much more aggressive in advancing our own perceived interests. And if you look at some of the steps Trump took with North Korea, we came closer than ever before to a war in North Korea in 2017. We were on the brink of war with Iran in the wake of the assassination of Qasem Solemaini in January 2020. There was of course the attempt at regime change in Venezuela. So again, I think it’s important to understand all of these in the background even while we recognize the validity of the critique of the foreign policy establishment that we’ve seen from Trump and now from Vance.”
On support for Israel:
“What [Vance] said at the beginning about the kind of political support from many Americans, particularly Christian Americans –I myself grew up in the evangelical church so I can relate to what he’s talking about– there is a deep understanding, a deep sympathy culturally, religiously and politically for the state of Israel for a whole bunch of reasons. I think that is valid, it’s important to understand that. But I think there is a separate conversation about what is the correct policy if people care about Israel. What actually leads to security, not just for Israelis, but to Palestinians, for Palestinians, and for people across the region. And I think that is where we’re going to have real disagreement.”
On the Abraham Accords and plans for a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia:
“You heard […] Vance praising the Abraham Accords, and unfortunately the Abraham Accords are not a formula for genuine security. It’s important to understand what the countries in the region –Israel, the United Arab Emirates, some of these other undemocratic and repressive countries– see the purpose of the Abraham Accords as, and that is sustaining their own undemocratic rule. I think that ultimately is not going to be formula either for security of Israel in the long term, certainly not for the Palestinians. I don’t want to blame the Abraham Accords for October 7th attacks, but I will note that the logic behind the Abraham Accords, which is that the Palestinians can just be pushed to the side and kind of just managed in perpetuity. That is the logic and environment in which the October 7th attacks happened.
“Unfortunately this is not an area where the Biden administration is able to offer a counterargument because President Biden himself has adopted the Abraham Accords and now pretends that they can be a basis for regional peace and security, which they cannot.”
Today, Matt Duss of CIP and Daniel Levy of the U.S. / Middle East Project have an article in The New Republic arguing that a Gaza voting block helped the left in France and cost Labour votes in the U.K., and will likely play a pivotal role in the 2024 Presidential election in the United States.
Describing the UK experience, they write:
Among Muslim voters and a slew of progressive and younger voters, positions on Gaza had translated into electoral choices. That had never happened before in U.K. politics. While some of it may have been a luxury vote, assuming an inevitable Labour win, Britain’s governing party is well aware of the consequences for maintaining its rule if this trend cannot be reversed. In sum, the evidence suggests that the narrative that Labour’s aggressively distancing itself from Corbyn-era criticism of Israel by aligning with the Sunak government on Gaza was an essential element of its success was not only wrong but precisely wrong, with that shift acting as a drag on the party in the current circumstances.
On July 11, US officials announced that the pier it funded and built to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza would be dismantled. CIP executive vice president Matt Duss discussed this announcement and what it says about the Biden administration’s Israel/Palestine policy with Mother Jones’ Sophie Hurwitz:
The pier was more of “a way for the Biden Administration to try to look busy,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), than an actual solution.
“I don’t ever want to diminish efforts to get more humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it,” Duss continued. “But there were other things the administration should have been doing to facilitate the delivery of aid that they…continue to refuse to do. [The pier] is essentially a physical symbol of this administration’s ineffectiveness around this war.”
[…]
The pier’s months of shutdowns and breakdowns made food aid delivery haphazard at best. And, as Duss explained, the deliveries that do make it into Gaza are difficult to distribute due to the sheer scale of infrastructure demolition, as well as the ongoing bombings. Smaller amounts of food aid are still being delivered through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, but news reports say that aid is piling up on the Gaza side of the border without making it to those who need it.
“The problem wasn’t just that people weren’t getting enough aid…it’s that the amount of actual physical destruction in Gaza, which is enormous, just makes it nearly impossible to deliver that aid,” Duss said. “This is done with the complete support of the United States.”
As NATO Allies meet in Washington to celebrate the Alliance’s 75th anniversary, war rages in Europe. When it comes to denouncing Russian aggression and voicing support for Ukraine, NATO unity is the strongest it has been in years. But allies are not entirely aligned on how to prioritize threats or respond to them and continue to disagree on prospects for enlarging the alliance, including Ukraine.
Much hinges on the United States’ future role. Long the security guarantor for the alliance, the U.S. has for just as long been frustrated at allies’ perceived free-riding. Some U.S. political leaders question the sustainability of Washington’s long-standing commitment to Europe given other global priorities. On the other side of the water, when Europeans talk about taking on a greater share of the load, they often pair this with a desire for more policy independence from Washington. Some also wonder what would spur European member countries to engage in the kind of planning, coordination, and reimagination of national interests that would be required to transition away from reliance on the United States.
This conversation features Matt Duss, Executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, Dr. Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director and Fritz Stern Chair, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution, Alexander Velez-Green, Senior Policy Advisor, The Heritage Foundation, and former National Security Advisor to U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Stephen Pomper (moderator), Chief of Policy at the International Crisis Group.
Tuesday, July 9 9 – 10:30am EDT National Press Club (Lisagor Room), Washington DC
“The way that we’ve been pressing this choice on our European allies to align with us against China[…], I can really easily see how China would respond to that by getting more deeply engaged on Russia’s behalf.” https://t.co/262Y2YhabF
— Center for International Policy (@CIPolicy) July 17, 2024
The October 7 attack and the war on Gaza has broken open a debate within the Democratic Party that has been a long time in the making, as progressive voices press for an approach that supports the safety, rights, and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians alike. What has been driving this shift, what are the key areas of tension within the party, and how can Democrats address these differences in a constructive way?
Faiz Shakir served as National Political Director of the ACLU from January 2017 to March 2019, overseeing the organization’s National Political Advocacy Department and developing strategies to advance its priorities at federal and state levels. Prior to his tenure at the ACLU, Shakir held senior advisory roles for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, focusing on policy, communications, and advocacy for LGBT and Muslim American communities. A Harvard and Georgetown Law graduate, he also spent seven years at the Center for American Progress, where he served as Vice President for Communications and editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress.org.
Hadar Susskind
Hadar Susskind, President and CEO, is a prominent progressive voice in the Jewish community with over twenty years of policy experience in Washington, DC. Hadar has served as Senior VP of Government Relations for the Council on Foundations, Director of Bend the Arc Jewish Action and PAC, VP of the Tides Foundation, and held leadership roles at J Street and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. He has also worked with COEJL, HIAS, and the Israel Policy Forum. Hadar serves on the boards of Ameinu and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center. He graduated from the University of Maryland and holds the rank of Sergeant First Class in the Israel Defense Forces.
Matt Duss
Matthew Duss is Executive Vice-President at the Center for International Policy. Before joining CIP, Duss was a visiting scholar in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2017-22, Duss was foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). From 2014-17, Duss was the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. From 2008-14 Duss was a National Security and International Policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.
Duss’s work has been widely published, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The American Prospect, and Foreign Policy.
Rebecca Abou Chedid
Rebecca Abou-Chedid is Partner at Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP. Rebecca previously served as a law clerk in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review; as Director of Outreach for the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force; and as National Policy Director of the Arab American Institute. Rebecca was also co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Just Vision. Rebecca is a graduate of Georgetown Law School and received her BA at Cornell University.
Today, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviewed Executive Vice President Matt Duss about the Biden Administration’s Israel policy, and what other options are available.
CHOTINER: Do you think the sense within the Administration is that Israeli behavior would actually change if the United States started imposing consequences? Because you can come up with examples through history of people saying, “Well, there’s nothing we can really do to change the course of events, so we’re just going to stick by and do the best we can.”
DUSS: I think there is and has been a genuine debate within the Administration about the efficacy of some of these tools for leverage. My own view is that we should find out, because even if you are not effective in changing Israeli behavior, the upside is that the United States would no longer be arming a mass atrocity. I think that’s a pretty big upside. I also think the serious analysis is that Israel simply could not sustain this war for a long time if the United States withdrew its military support.
There’s also just a basic sense that—and I say this as a former staffer myself—once the boss has laid down where he or she will not go, what approaches he or she is or is not willing to consider, then you try and find solutions within those bounds. And I think that’s what we’ve been seeing here.
![[Audio] The U.S. and NATO in a Changing World](https://b3485540.smushcdn.com/3485540/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/https___cdn.evbuc_.com_images_796190269_244704319072_1_original.jpeg?lossy=2&strip=1&webp=1)
![[Video] Israel-Palestine: The Changing Discussion in the Democratic Party](https://b3485540.smushcdn.com/3485540/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IMG_7115.jpeg?lossy=2&strip=1&webp=1)
