On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was confronted during a press conference over whether the United States was using leverage to rein in Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Gaza.
BBC News reporter Tom Bateman cited a diary entry from Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982, where Reagan phoned Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and told him to stop Israel’s shelling of Beirut. Bateman asked Miller if U.S. officials were similarly doing everything they could for a cease-fire.
Miller claimed in his reply that during the current conflict, U.S. intervention had led Israel “to take steps that they were not previously doing” regarding humanitarian access and “the shape of their military operations.”
“I do think it is often simplistic to reduce the … understanding of what’s happening to the bilateral relationship between two countries,” Miller added.
Bateman followed up, noting that Begin stopped bombing Lebanon 20 minutes after Reagan’s phone call. Miller deflected.
“I think we have made clear on a number of occasions with the government of Israel what we believe, and there have been times when our intervention has led to direct action by the government of Israel. There are times when they have disagreements with us,” Miller said . “And by the way, that was true in the Reagan administration too.”
Miller’s comments seem to show an unwillingness by President Biden and his administration to use any kind of leverage—such as the billions of dollars in weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid to Israel—to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Lebanon or Gaza.
In 1982, Reagan’s administration halted cluster-bomb shipments to Israel over their use on civilian areas in Lebanon. Reagan then followed with a phone call to Begin where he used language that would seem unfathomable by any American politician today.
“Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war, and it is a holocaust,” Reagan told the Israeli prime minister, warning that it was endangering the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It had an immediate effect, with the bombing not only stopping but with Begin pleading with Reagan not to harm ties between the two countries.
Biden initially spurned months of calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, and still continues to back Israel in its brutal war that has claimed at least 41.000 Palestinian lives . Now Israel, thanks to a green light from the Biden administration, has expanded the war to Lebanon and killed hundreds of lives just in the past week . Biden can call for an arms embargo against Israel at any time, but as Miller’s comments illustrate, he won’t even touch the idea.
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