Biden Stands at the Precipice of a Greater War in the Middle East and His Political Future

The killing of three U.S. soldiers at a remote military outpost in Jordan, claimed by Iraqi militia groups to be retaliation for U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, has set the stage for a response by the Biden administration that has blamed Iran for helping support the attack. After years of attempting to pivot away from the region, the Biden administration now looks set to deepen its military involvement in the Middle East as it fights the Houthis in Yemen and squares off in an escalating proxy war with Iran.

This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain discuss the trajectory of the U.S. long war in the Middle East with Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a longtime writer and commenter on the region. Cole discusses the basis of the ongoing U.S.–Israel security relationship, the perspective of anti-Israel militant groups in the region, and the prospects of the expansion of the war despite the Biden administration’s stated desire to keep it contained.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Maz, there is a lot to discuss this week. We had the initial ruling that came down from the International Court of Justice in the Hague that overwhelmingly ruled in favor of South Africa in its case against Israel for what it alleges is genocide in Gaza, and the Israeli government responded to that… Well, first of all, by declaring victory and — aided by the United States — projected the impression of what took place at the Hague as the judges, telling Israel that it could continue waging its war, and that it just needs to be careful when, in reality, that is not at all what happened.

But, perhaps more important than the spin campaign that Israel and the United States have been engaged in coming out of the Hague ruling is that Israel launched a full-on attack against one of the primary humanitarian initiatives that exists or remains in Gaza, and that is the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East. Now, this organization has been in the sniper scope of Israel for quite a long time, and the Israelis view this as an entity that is going to ultimately aid the establishment of, not just a Palestinian state, but the right of return of Palestinians who were forcibly expelled from their homes.

And the Israelis provided the United States with information that they said they obtained from signals intelligence, and intercepted cell phone communications, as well as the testimony of people that Israel has taken prisoner and interrogated. And they say that they documented at least a dozen employees of this very important U.N. agency that were involved in some way or another with the October 7th attacks. And, again, I emphasize that some of this intel the Israelis say came from the interrogation of people that it snatched during its ground operations in Gaza.

But then, the propaganda campaign and this initiative by Israel intensified this week, when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece with a headline that was “Intelligence Reveals Details of U. N. Agency Staff’s links to October 7th Attack.” And the Wall Street Journal, based on Israeli information, said that 10 percent of the Palestinian aid agency’s 12,000 staff in Gaza have what they described as “links to militants.” And, if you read the article, they’re not explaining what they even mean by links.

In some cases they’re talking about people whose family members are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and they’re banking on this notion that people won’t understand that Hamas is not just the Qassam brigades; Hamas is a governing authority within Gaza. And so, to merely say, these people have connections to Hamas, is hardly the smoking gun that it’s being portrayed as.

But I think it’s also relevant, Maz, to point out that the lead writer of this Wall Street Journal piece is a journalist by the name of Carrie Keller-Lynn, and Carrie Keller-Lynn was a journalist for Israeli media outlets… Okay, that’s fine, but she also was in the IDF, and a person that she says was her best friend, she credits her with singlehandedly creating the IDF’s social media strategy.

This is the lead journalist who wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal which — I’ll just say it bluntly — it read to me like an Israeli government press release filled with unsubstantiated allegations that was passed off, then, as an article in one of the most important newspapers in the United States. And then this went like wildfire, and people used this to try to put more pressure on more governments to cut their funding.

And the United States government and other governments already have said that they’re going to pull their funding from this U.N. agency that is one of the most important humanitarian organizations helping refugees in Palestinian Gaza, educating children, providing health care, providing foodstuffs, and, is one of the frontline responders right now to the dire humanitarian crisis that has been caused by the Israeli siege, invasion, and occupation of Gaza. This is a very, very dire situation.

And the final point I’ll make on this, Maz, is that, in the instructions, the orders, the provisional measures that were issued by the panel of judges at the Hague, one of the main directives to Israel was to immediately allow unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza, and warned other countries that they should not participate in any prevention of aid to the Palestinian people. It’s clear that by defunding this U.N. agency that the United States and other countries that participate in this are ultimately violating in, I would say, a flagrant manner, the orders of the world’s highest court, which were explicit in the instruction to allow humanitarian aid, not cut it off, in Gaza.

Murtaza Hussain: You know, one of the most incredible quotes I heard about this this week from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he said that we have not had the chance to investigate these allegations ourselves yet, but we believe they are highly, highly credible. So, effectively, they’re banking on Israel’s determination of what happened here.

As you said, Israel had a target on UNRWA for many, many years, has gathered information from interrogations where we know they perform torture and other abuses against prisoners. But, also, Israel has a history of making false allegations against Palestinian non-government organizations.

A few years ago, there were a number of organizations in the West Bank accused of terrorism under Yair Lapid’s government, who’s considered to be a more dovish government, relatively. And this was rebutted very thoroughly by European organizations and governments, but it took some time later on to rebut these charges against Palestinian NGOs, the purpose of which was to destroy Palestinian civil society with terrorism accusations.

Now that this conflict is going on, the role of UNRWA is more vital than ever on a day-to-day basis of keeping people alive, and these allegations, to be accepted without investigation or without verification, to take the Israel government’s word for it, it’s really an unbelievable attack on Palestinians at a moment where they’re desperately trying to survive, literally, an Israeli military offensive in Gaza. It’s pretty shocking.

And I’ve been, as you mentioned, these reports, in the news and so forth, the sort of failures of the media and the cynicism we’ve seen from some segments of the media, it really reminds me of the period of the war in Tehran when it began, in 2003 and thereafter, when there was so much effort made on generating consensus for policies of brutality against civilians that we saw the penetration of media by government intelligence agencies to such a degree that we said that we … We look back on it with remorse, for most people.

But now it’s being replayed again in this circumstance. It’s very depressing, and it kind of shows that these institutions have not learned as much as they claim to have from that period.

JS: Well, it also comes as Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, went on national television in the United States this past weekend and basically accused some activists who have been calling for a ceasefire and demanding an end to the war against Gaza, implied that they may be on the payroll of Russia, and said explicitly that they’re doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

You know, I also have to say, with all the discussion, the Democrats are hyper-focused on the demonstrations that became violent at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and you have members of Congress that were deeply involved with those demonstrations that the Democrats have alleged are tantamount to treason against the United States. What the U.S. is doing right now to the UNRWA in Gaza, you could apply that, then, and say, well, the whole U.S. Congress needs to be defunded.

If some members of Congress were involved with this, and it is insurrection, and it is treason, then wouldn’t the consistent principle that should be applied here, that the entire U.S. Congress becomes defunded? I mean, this is how insane this is: we have officials in the United States government that were involved with torture programs, that were involved with kidnapping people, that were involved with CIA black sites, who, not only are their entities and agencies not defunded, not only are their public careers not ended, but they often are promoted.

I mean, for god’s sake, Henry Kissinger just died, the man was involved with mass murder after mass murder, and he was embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike until the day that they put him in the ground. So, this all is clearly an attempt by Israel and its sponsors — the United States, Germany, other countries — to try to distract from Israel’s war crimes, and Israel clearly is trying to use this as part of its starvation campaign against the people of Gaza.

MH: Yeah, absolutely. You make a really good point, that if we’re defunding institutions, or shutting them down, or criminalizing them based on the actions of some number of their members, the Israeli military has committed many more crimes, incredibly, in the last three, four months, and maintains consistent U.S. political, diplomatic, and economic support despite that.

So, this whole concept of using some allegations of some members of an organization to criminalize them or make them verboten entirely, it’s applied so inconsistently, it’s almost laughable. The politicization of the accusations is so brazen. And the fact that it’s coming now, when there’s so much distraction and there’s so much chaos in the region, and so much suffering from the people who benefit from UNRWA, it’s really quite cynical. And the people who are going to suffer in Gaza, it’s going to be very, very stark, and very, very grotesque what we see coming as a result of this, unless the decision’s walked back which, so far, the government seems to show no indication of doing.

JS: Yeah. And I would point people to our colleague, Ryan Grim, who did a really good write up on all of this week; it’s in his newsletter, and it’s also at theintercept.com.

Well, Maz, there’s not just the news that’s coming out of Gaza, there’s also this broadening series of lower-intensity conflicts that are intensifying throughout the Middle East, where you have the United States conducting a number of military operations against what is loosely being called the Axis of Resistance, or Alliance of Resistance. You had three American service members that were killed in a kamikaze drone strike inside of Jordan. You have the blockade in the Red Sea still going strong, and the United States regularly striking Yemen. You had Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, making some pretty explicit promises about attacks that would be conducted against Israel if Israel doesn’t back away from its own military operations inside of Lebanon.

And, to discuss all of this, we invited this week the renowned Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan. He is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. And, since the early days of the so-called War on Terror after 9/11, he’s written a blog on his website, it’s called, Informed Comment.

You can find his writings at juancole.com, and we are very honored to have Professor Cole with us now. Juan, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

Juan Cole: Thanks for having me.

JS: So, let’s begin with the very big picture. You’ve been writing a lot of articles recently that not only deal with Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, the war against Gaza, and various aspects of the Israeli policy and the U.S. role, but, also, you’ve been writing about the blockade that Ansar Allah has implemented in the Red Sea, you’ve been writing about the dynamics of the prospects for a wider war, United States actions in Iraq, the rise of a sort of coalition that is vowing to confront U.S. Hegemony in the region, and to potentially directly fight Israel.

Let’s start from the very broad perspective of your analysis of why the Biden administration is doing what it’s doing right now in the broader Middle East.

JC: The Biden administration is deeply committed to the security of Israel in large part, I think, because the foreign policy establishment in Washington sees Israel as America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East. I think they saw what happened on October 7th not as a terrorist attack, but as an attempt to push Israel out of the region, and the fragility of Israel in the region is often not appreciated by casual observers, but a third of Israelis say they want to leave and, if they actually did, then Israel would become much weaker demographically.

About a million Israelis are out of the country at any one time. A lot of times people will go off in their 30s and make a career. They always used to come back after a few years, but the statistics from the Israeli Census Bureau suggest that, in the past year or so, returnees are fewer, than had been usually the case.

So, I think that the Biden administration believes that in order to keep Israel flourishing and as an asset to U.S. security in the region, it really has bought into the line of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas must be destroyed, that it crossed a red line, and went from being a an annoyance to being an actual existential threat to Israel.

So, that’s my reading of the mood in Washington.

JS: One follow-up to that, specific to President Biden’s approach to support for Israel in the Aftermath of October 7th, and stretching all the way now to almost four months.

The administration has spent a lot of effort trying to plant stories in the media. And, in fact, it also occurs overtly/openly/publicly where administration officials express their concerns about Netanyahu’s declarations about this being an open-ended war, that Biden is losing patience with Netanyahu, that the administration is concerned about the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinians and the mounting death toll. And yet, we still have no-restriction military aid flowing to Israel and, crucially, political and diplomatic support, including preemptively dismissing the validity of South Africa’s charges at the International Court of Justice.

I’m wondering [about] your sense of why Biden seems so committed to continuing to offer that level of support, even as his administration tries to plant these stories saying that the patience is wearing thin.

JC: Well, Biden, like any politician, has multiple constituencies, and there is a progressive caucus in the Democratic Party. You’ve probably got 40 or so representatives in the House of Representatives that want a ceasefire, and are upset at Biden’s wholehearted embrace of Netanyahu’s ongoing war. And so, Biden knows that there’s a significant split in the Democratic Party.

Opinion polling suggests that half of Democrats want a ceasefire, or maybe as much as 70 percent, it depends on the poll. Youth, anybody under 30 hates this war and doesn’t believe that it’s necessary. And the youth vote really has been the difference between having a Republican president and a Democratic president for the past decade and a half, since 2008.

So, I think Biden’s team puts out these signals that he’s unsatisfied with Netanyahu, and he may be. There’s some reason to think he’s frustrated, but he does also want to support the war effort to the hilt, as you say. I mean, the Israeli officials have admitted that they ran out of ammunition a long time ago. It’s only the U.S. resupply on a virtually real-time basis, a daily basis, that allows the war to go on.

So, if Biden actually wanted to stop the war, he could. I think he doesn’t want to stop it, because he believes that the war could actually destroy Hamas. This is, in my view, an unlikely outcome, but if that was your premise, that what the Israelis are doing will reshape the region, will destroy a major actor like Hamas, then you could understand why somebody might back this war a hundred percent.

But then, he has to deal with this wing of the Democratic party, which seems to be growing, which is deeply dissatisfied with this knee-jerk support for anything that Netanyahu does.

MH: Juan, you mentioned that it’s commonly perceived and described in U.S. politics that Israel is an asset to U.S. strategic interests in the region, but it’s very interesting … At the moment, it seems like, given the widespread regional anger about the war in Gaza and its consequences, the U.S. is having to intervene very extensively in the conflict, not just to resupply Israel with munitions, and give the targeting information, and defend it diplomatically at international fora but, also, the U.S. is now directly fighting the Houthis in Yemen on behalf of Israel, who have said themselves they’re acting in response to the war in Gaza.

This past weekend, several U.S. service members were killed in the drone strike in Jordan carried out by Iraqi militias, who also said they were acting in response to U.S. support in the war in Gaza. And, finally, the U.S. actually has aircraft carriers and troops in the eastern Mediterranean specifically to deter Hezbollah, which may intervene more forcefully in the conflict without that deterrence from the U.S. provided there.

So, it seems like the U.S. is doing a tremendous amount to help Israel at the moment but, to the argument that Israel is beneficial to the U.S., it doesn’t seem very clear what the U.S. is getting out of this. It seems a very lopsided exchange, in a way.

Can you speak a bit about what you think continues to hold and drive this relationship on these terms, given the fact that the strategic utility is not clearly obvious at the moment?

JC: Well, I think the strategic utility goes beyond a moment. And, again, I’m trying to understand the mindset in the foreign policy establishment in Washington, I’m not trying to allocute as to the truth. But they perceive Israel to be a long-term strategic asset in the Middle East of some importance.

For one thing, the Israelis have very good intelligence in the region. Trump, when he was president, met with Sergey Lavrov and some other Russian officials, and actually let it slip that the Israelis had placed someone high in the ISIL councils, and that they were getting direct intelligence from ISIL planning through this Israeli agent. Apparently, the CIA was not able to do this, but the Israelis were.

And, since ISIL during the Obama period was the major foreign policy threat and dictated a lot of Obama policy in the Middle East — the response to it and the attempt to destroy it — having the Israelis penetrate it like that was gold. And I think behind the scenes and in ways that we don’t hear about, there are lots of those kinds of things that the Israelis do for the United States.

And so, I perceive the Biden administration to feel that it can hold the status quo with regard to what the Americans call the Axis of Resistance — I prefer the Alliance of Resistance, because we always use “Axis” for pejorative purposes — but the Iranians have over time established allies in Lebanon, and Iraq, and Yemen, as you say, although these are very loose alliances. It’s not a command-and-control kind of situation; the Houthis don’t take orders from Tehran. But they are aligned on the basis of a common perception of Israel and the United States, as a threat to their interests.

And the Biden administration came into office hoping. to do a deal with the Alliance of Resistance, to bring them in from the cold. And I think there was a genuine hope that that could be done for various reasons, and it may have to do with Biden’s acquiescence in the views of some of the hawks around him.

That didn’t go forward, in a big way. And, in fact, local regional actors became tired of waiting for Biden to make this move. And so, the Saudis reached out to the Iranians themselves, through China, and the Biden administration has been trying to work to extend — or had been trying to work to extend — the ceasefire between the Saudis and the Houthis in Yemen, and that struggle may start back up. We don’t know. But the U.S. has now taken the Saudi role of bombing Sana’a, I think, to very little effect.

So, I think what the Biden administration is trying to do is to hold the status quo against the Alliance of Resistance through surgical interventions. Bombing a base of one of these Shiite militias here and there, time to time, while they believe the Israelis are rolling up Hamas. And I think they must understand that this can’t go on for a very long time, or the status quo simply will not hold. But that’s what they’re trying to do in the meantime.

And so, even though the Iraqi militias have killed American troops at a base in Jordan near Syria, the response of Biden on Sunday was remarkably restrained. He said, we’ll reply at a time and a place of our choosing. That’s usually the way you would reply to a stray mortar hitting a base and not doing — killing three American soldiers, that’s not something that you would put off the response to a time and a place of your choosing; you would want to go to war over it. And it’s very clear that the Biden administration does not want to go to war over it, and that they’re attempting to find a way to muddle through this crisis.

JS: You also had two U.S. Navy SEALs that, according to the official reporting on it, went missing as part of the U.S military presence deployed in an effort to stop the Yemeni blockade of the Red Sea. And now, they’ve officially been declared dead by the United States. So, in addition to those two, now you have the three confirmed deaths of American service members in Jordan from this drone strike.

But I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned about Iran, and your characterization of the Alliance of Resistance as you’re putting it, and how the Houthis, Ansar Allah, is much more autonomous than is often portrayed in the broader media, and by American and other politicians. And we hear this phrase nonstop: Iranian backed, Iranian-controlled groups. And that’s not just applied to the Houthis; it’s also applied to Hezbollah and, at times, to Hamas as well.

I wanted to ask you, given your knowledge of the region and politics, how you see Iran’s perspective on all of this? You know, the Israelis have, under Netanyahu in particular, for many years, quite transparently tried to pull the United States into a much more overt military conflict with Iran. And it seems like Netanyahu in part believes that this would be his best, if not last, shot at doing that.

We hear a lot about what the U.S. and Israeli perspective is on Iran’s motivations, but I’m wondering if you could share thoughts on what you’re reading, what you’re hearing about how the Iranian government and its power structure view this current moment.

JC: Well, I think the war against Gaza and the very high civilian death toll puts the Iranians in an enormously difficult position, because they’ve talked a very good game about opposing Israel and standing up for the Palestinians, and they’ve made a lot of political capital at least among the publics in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. And even, I would say, among some leftist movements, by taking this hardline stand for the Palestinians against Israel. And they haven’t done anything. They’ve sat by passively as the Israelis have killed … The numbers keep changing every day, but well over 20,000 people.

That’s a problem for the Iranians. They don’t want to respond, they don’t want to get involved. And it’s at least reported that they told Hezbollah in southern Lebanon not to get involved in any significant way, that they’re trying to restrain their allies. It’s not the image that you have of Iran in Washington, but if you look at the situation on the ground, that seems to be the case.

So, I think the Allies themselves are impatient. And so, my guess is that the Houthis decided to start hitting container ship traffic in the Red Sea all on their own, and I’m not sure that the Iranians even want this. They depend on covert oil shipments, basically, to various countries, including, especially, China. But there are a lot of differently-flagged ships that probably are carrying Iranian goods, and they wouldn’t want the insurance and the cost of carriage to go way up.

So, the Houthis are a land-based group. They don’t depend on sea commerce, and it doesn’t hurt them. So, I suspect this is coming from Sana’a. But it does benefit the Iranians in the sense that, if everybody attributes it to them — and I’ve seen in the newspaper Iranian officials sometimes being pleasantly surprised that major events are attributed to them, when they hadn’t known that they were going to happen, and so forth — to the extent that it’s attributed to them, then it makes it look like the Alliance of Resistance really is doing something for the Palestinians, and it’s not doing very much. But it’s doing something, and that helps Iran’s popularity among the Middle Eastern publics.

So, I think Iran is probably satisfied with the situation as it is now, in the sense that it’s getting a reputational boost without having to take very much in the way of risk. And, were the hawks in the United States like Senator Tom Cotton to prevail, and were Iran actually to be struck by the United States in response to some of these activities of Iran’s allies, that would change the equation.

But the Biden administration clearly, in my view, does not want to go in that direction. And so, I think the Iranians are frustrated about the war, but they don’t want to take the kind of risks that would allow them to intervene directly, and they don’t want even their allies to do very much.

And Hezbollah has sent some rockets into northern Israel. The Israelis complain bitterly that northern Israel up near the Lebanon border is essentially depopulated, people have had to leave those hamlets. But the main military installation that Hezbollah struck was abandoned. It was an Israeli base, but there was nobody there.

So, these are symbolic strikes, for the most part, and I think the tragedy that struck American servicemen on Sunday was that what might have been meant as a symbolic strike actually fell on residential territory, and so, actually killed people, and wounded a large number.

MH: Juan, you mentioned that the Houthis are taking these strikes in the Red Sea, and they’re generating a tremendous amount of attention to themselves negatively, obviously, from the U.S., and the U.K., and so forth, in various ways. But also, in the region where they were not very popular before, they’ve become relatively popular in recent weeks and months.

You see the Houthi spokespeople going on television, becoming fixtures in social media and on regular media in the region because of a sense that they’re standing up for the Palestinians, but also, by extension, a perception that they’re standing up to the U.S. And there seems to be a very pronounced view in the region that this is not just an Israeli war, but it’s a U.S. war, specifically, and we saw that in the statements of some of these Iraqi militia groups that claimed responsibility for the attack on the base in Jordan as well, too.

They view the U.S. very intimately involved in the war, a direct participant in the war in Gaza, even. Whereas, in the U.S., it’s often depicted as more of an arms-length relationship, and people are sometimes surprised to see a retaliation against the U.S. directly for actions which are taken by Israel.

Can you speak a bit about this sort of disconnect, and how the U.S.-Israel relationship is viewed by people in the region as very hand-in-hand?

JC: Oh, well, people in the region don’t make a distinction. When the United States invaded Iraq, U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq were often referred to by the Iraqis as Israelis, and the notorious incident in Fallujah where four contractors were attacked and strung up was carried out by people in Fallujah who called themselves “Iraqi Hamas.” And part of the reason that they attacked those U.S. contractors was because the Israelis were at the time conducting an assassination campaign against Hamas leaders.

And so, the American public has never viewed these events synoptically, has not been able to see them in the same frame. But, in the Middle East, the United States and Israel are basically seen as one thing.

And so, when you hear in the United States that the Israelis have killed so many thousands of people, the American public might say, well, is that really necessary? Maybe the Israelis shouldn’t be doing that. But, in the Middle East, the comment would be, why are the Americans doing this?

And people are furious in the Middle East — I mean, their blood is boiling all through the region — against the United States. This is not a completely new phenomenon, of course, and we’ve seen moments in the past when there has been a lot of anger towards the U.S., in part because of its unqualified support for Israeli impunity. But it is quite remarkable, the amount of anger.

And so, it puts American allies in the region in a difficult position, because the Saudi government, the government of the United Arab Emirates, the Jordanian government, they all hate Hamas, and nothing would please them better than for Netanyahu to succeed in destroying it. And so, none of those governments has done more than criticize the war and, de facto, they agree with the war aim. But their publics are not on the same page.

And so, the Saudis and the Jordanians, who have a real population … You know, the United Arab Emirates is a postage-stamp country, with a million citizens and eight million guest workers. It’s in a different demographic situation. The Saudis and the Jordanians, the governments really have to negotiate with their publics, and their publics are furious.

So, you see people in Saudi Arabia, for instance, their government has demanded a ceasefire, even though the U.S. is opposed, and they have criticized the conduct of the war. And they’ve said openly that you can forget about this Abraham Accords business until the Palestinians are treated properly. That’s for Saudi public consumption. I mean, they’re trying to reassure their own public that they are not villains in the piece.

So, not only [do] people in the region see the United States as more or less behind this war as a hundred-percent backer of it and the reason for which it can go on, but the publics and the governments are deeply split. And so, that’s why something like The Alliance of Resistance, by sending out some drones, and sort of committing some pinpricks against Western security, gives them a great deal of cachet. And, in a place like Iraq, it could be consequential.

They have elections. The militias are all also civil political parties. And they have, last I knew, some 60 seats in Parliament. The current Prime Minister Al Sudani is beholden to the Shiite militias and their civil bloc in Parliament. So, there’s likely a fair storm coming in relations between the United States and Iraq over all this.

And, of course, what the Shiite militias want is not only to punish the U.S. for its involvement in Gaza, but also to push the remaining U.S. troops out of the region. So, with their 2,500 troops in Iraq mainly doing training and logistics for the Iraqi army and its continued mop-up operations against ISIL, there’s some 900 U.S. troops in Syria liaising with the YPG, the Kurdish leftist militia. And, again, to make sure that ISIL doesn’t come back, to give some support to the Syrian Kurds, and also, maybe to block Iranian and Shiite militia activity in southeast Syria.

So, the Shiite militias in Iraq are trying to push the Americans out, and may be hoping that the U.S. response to something like the attack on the base in Jordan will provoke such a large rift between Baghdad and Washington that the troops will have to leave.

JS: I wanted to ask you, Juan, about the notion of endgame here. This is something that’s a conversation that’s being pushed in Washington, and in European and Arab capitals, particularly of countries that are dealing directly on negotiations or diplomatically with Israel. And there’s some indication from U.S. officials that they’re nearing some form of another deal to release some of the captives that are being held in Gaza, as well as Palestinians who are being held in Israeli jails and military prisons.

But I’m wondering about what Netanyahu might be seeing as the endgame, what the American government might be seeing as the end game. What you’ve read — I know you don’t have inside sources, necessarily, on any of this stuff — but I’m bringing it up in the context of what, even in the Israeli media now, is being described as an emerging quagmire in Gaza for the Israeli military on a tactical level.

There’s been much made about the tunnels of Hamas; only a small fraction of them have even been penetrated by the Israelis. Israel is a relatively small country, and the death toll of Israeli soldiers is climbing. The families of Israelis who are being held hostage are becoming completely emphatic in their impatience and demands for some sort of a deal to be made. But even among seasoned defense correspondents in the Israeli media, you get a sense that they understand that this is not actually going well on a tactical level for the Israeli military, and I’m wondering what you see as Netanyahu’s endgame here.

Does he believe he’s going to be able to sort of redraw the map of Gaza? Is the plan to actually annihilate the Palestinians as a population in Gaza? Would Biden permit such a sort of endgame from Netanyahu’s perspective?

I’m throwing a lot at you here, but we hear a lot of conflicting messages from different parties involved, but it does seem like Netanyahu recognizes this may be his last shot at implementing lifelong agendas that he’s embraced.

JC: The thing with Netanyahu is that he’s an opportunist and doesn’t actually seem to have many principles. There are some things that he’s stood by for many years. Of course, opposition to a Palestinian state, and torpedoing any sign of a peace process has been characteristic of his position, but those are negatives.

As for a positive vision, I’ve never seen him adumbrate one, and I think my reading — and, as you say, it’s only from reading the newspapers — but there was a great diplomatic historian who once said, I think correctly, that there are no secrets if you know where to look. And I think we can know quite a lot about what policy is being proposed and made.

The Netanyahu cabinet is deeply divided over its vision of the future of Gaza. So, Netanyahu brought these fascists in to make his government, and the Jewish power bloc and the religious Zionism bloc, they would very much like to ethnically cleanse Gaza and, indeed, to bring back Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land in Gaza.

And it’s not so much that the Biden administration wouldn’t permit that — I think Washington will roll over whatever the Israelis do and accept it — but the Egyptians won’t accept it. I mean, where would the people in Gaza go? Likely, it would be into the Sinai. Well, the Egyptian government has spent all the time since 2013 engaged in a counterrevolution against the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam in Egypt. And the officer corps in Egypt, the raison d’etre is, A, to run the country, B, to make sure there’s no populist or Muslim fundamentalist opposition.

So, the idea that the Egyptians would allow two million Palestinians — many of them members of the Hamas civilian political party — into Sinai, which is already a mess, security-wise, is just completely implausible. And, in 2018, there was an incident in which some Palestinians tried to flee to Egypt through the Rafah crossing in Gaza, and the Egyptian military shot down a few of them, so the Egyptians have made it very clear exactly what would happen if anyone tried that.

And it’s one of the reasons that the Palestinians, a million of them, are gathered there in Rafah as we speak, having been pushed down there by the Israelis in tents and in terrible living conditions, is that there’s no place for them to go. They can’t get out. And so, the idea of ethnically cleansing them is, I think, not on the table.  They’ve talked about getting other countries to take them. Again, what stable government would want to take in very large numbers of traumatized Palestinians from Gaza?

And for me, as a historian, it’s striking that the Nazi leadership once talked about how they had taken citizenship away from their Jews. And they said, people keep criticizing us for how we have treated the Jews, but now that they’re without citizenship, now that they’re kind of a geopolitical flotsam, who will take them? How are you better than we are? They knew — the United States, Britain, even Brazil — nobody would take them. And that’s why they ended up being dumped on the poor Palestinians in a colonial transfer.

But it’s the same thing now, the Palestinians are stateless. They have no state, they have no citizenship, they have no rights. Hannah Arendt said that citizenship is the right to have rights. And so, nobody is going to take them. So, this is just … The ethnic cleansing scenario seems unlikely in the extreme. It’s not that it’s impossible.

Then Yoav Galant, the defense minister of Israel, wants to permanently make northern Gaza uninhabitable, and to have it be a buffer zone, kind of like the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas. And it appears that some of the Mass destruction of the physical infrastructure of northern Gaza — and the destruction of buildings and entire apartment blocks, and so forth — was not part of any war aim against Hamas. It was looking forward to the endgame in which northern Gaza… There would visibly be no place there for anybody to live, no facilities that allow them to live there.

And Gallant’s vision of it seems to be different from Netanyahu’s. The two have difficulty sharing a podium when they have a press conference about the Gaza war. It is quite remarkable that the prime minister can’t be on the same platform as the defense minister, because they don’t see eye to eye about how the war is going or what the endgame would be.

So, Netanyahu seems to just agree with the last person that he talked to on his cabinet. If he’s meeting with them and a fascist figure like Ben Gvir says, well, we must find a way to have them leave, Netanyahu says, yes, we’re working on it. But is he, or how serious is that?

So, I think the evidences from his public statements to the extent that he’s been consistent and he hasn’t is that he might like to turn Gaza into the West Bank and have it be occupied by Israeli security forces. Biden wanted to bring in the PLO and the Palestine Authority from the West Bank and have them run Gaza, even though the people in Gaza wouldn’t find that acceptable, and Netanyahu said, absolutely not. Because, of course, that’s a step towards a two-state solution, which Netanyahu opposes, and a step towards a Palestinian state, which will happen over his dead body.

So, he doesn’t want the PLO to take over. There have been suggestions that a multinational force go in. That was done in Beirut after the 1982 war, which didn’t go well. And, of course, the Marines got blown up as a result. I wouldn’t advise that multinational task force approach. But Netanyahu seems to think the same tactics that have worked for the Israeli army as an occupation army in the West Bank could now be applied to postwar Gaza, and the Israelis could find a new set of Gaza leadership that would acquiesce in this military occupation.

But again, I don’t think that we should think about Netanyahu as a man with a policy. You have to think about him as a man who’s hanging off a cliff by his fingertips. And if he can just keep the pinky from slipping, he’s won that day. His government is deeply unpopular, 17 percent of Israelis think it should remain in power. It could fall at any moment. In fact, if he did agree with Biden to make a pause, Ben Gvir and others on the far right could pull out, and it could go to new elections. He could go to jail.

The evidence from opinion polling are that, were elections held today, the Likud party, the right-wing party and its far-right allies, would all be crushed in the polls, and that Benny Gantz, a centrist liberal Zionist would come to power. And Netanyahu is actually being tried as we speak, and he’s tried to find ways to put off a verdict, but his trials could finally come to fruition were his government to fall.

And so, he could just be a few steps away from going to jail, so he’s hanging on for dear life and I think one of the reasons this war keeps going on is not so much that it’s plausible that it will end up destroying Hamas — which is a set of clans, and you can’t destroy a set of clans — but that, as long as it goes on, his government remains in power and he remains out of jail. So, he just has to keep the fingers from slipping off the cliff.

MH: Juan, we just experienced in the U.S. a very long generational military involvement in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and various other parts of the region, which ended quite unhappily, for the most part, and there’s still tens of thousands of U.S. troops based in the region.

But it seems like there’s been a political shift in the U.S. that the call for greater military involvement in the Middle East is seen as a very unpopular position. I can’t even really think of many politicians on either side of the spectrum in the upcoming election who call for greater military involvement for its own sake; maybe Nikki Haley is a major exception.

But the Trump movement was very much, you could say, an isolationist movement, even though he governed a bit differently in practice. And, certainly on the left, there are these tendencies very strongly now as well, too, much of it drawing on the failures and the dissatisfactions of the Iraq war, and so forth.

And yet, despite this growing public tendency, not only are there still many, many U.S. troops in the region, but the U.S. is still very openly and publicly involved in facilitating this war in Gaza, which is breeding more anti-Americanism and anger in the region against any U.S. presence at all.

Can you talk a bit about how public opinion may or may not constrain U.S. policymakers in the future, if they were to try to expand the war in the region on Israel’s behalf to fight Hezbollah or Iran or other parties?

JC: Oh, I don’t think that the Biden administration wants to get involved in a wider war, and I think they’ve been taking more or less symbolic actions in response to provocations, just bombing. Of course, bombing guerrilla groups is useless. You could do that from here to eternity and never have any effect, unless you put troops on the ground or find somebody to fight for you. So, no, I don’t think the Biden administration wants that, and I think they’ll do anything they can to avoid it.

One thing that has to be remembered is that the United States is already at war with Russia in Ukraine. And, although U.S. troops are not committed, a very great deal of money and materiel are committed. We don’t have infinite bombs in the United States, we don’t have infinite ammunition, and things were already chancy for resupplying the Ukrainians before the Israeli war on Gaza, and the Biden administration has been trying to resupply Israel without detracting from the Ukraine war effort.

It had prepositioned a lot of weaponry and ammunition in Israel for possible use in the region. And here, again, Israel is a warehouse for the U.S. military, it’s a strategic asset, because they can do that there. I’m not sure any other country in the region would allow the U.S. to preposition large amounts of weaponry for use in the region in their country.

But that now has been diverted twice by the Biden administration to the Israelis. The reason they have to do that is they can’t send things out from California or Seattle. They don’t have it.

I think the mood of the U.S. public is not in favor of a more robust engagement militarily with the Middle East. It’s not even, practically speaking, plausible, given the geopolitical situation. For the U.S. to get involved in the Middle East at this point in a big way would be a tremendous boost for the Russian war effort, and nobody in Europe or Washington wants to see that.

With regard to your feelings of isolationism, I think you’re right. Trump had an opportunity to strike Iran, and John Bolton, his national security advisor, had spent 20 years trying to get into a position where he could bomb Iran. And he finally was there, and the Iranians shot down an unmanned drone over the Persian Gulf, a U.S. drone, and Bolton had managed to convince Trump that he had to respond. And so, Trump was going to hit an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps base.

But then, it was announced early on a Thursday that they were going to do this, and then, late in the afternoon, Trump is said to have turned around and asked one of his aides, well, how many people would die from this strike? And they said, well, about 130. And Trump said, well, you know, they didn’t kill any Americans when they shot down our drone, that wouldn’t really be proportionate.

And so, he pulled out of the strike at the last moment, and it’s one of the reasons that Bolton turned against Trump and campaigns against him, and so forth, is … Trump did not do very many reasonable things, but this was one of them. And I think he thinks that his base, kind of disgruntled factory workers and white people in the countryside who feel that they’re being taken advantage of by foreigners and Washington don’t want to spend more treasure and blood on the Middle East. Which, after all, it’s hard to see in what way they benefited from Afghanistan or Iraq.

And so, in other circumstances, I think the killing of U.S. troops in Jordan on Sunday would have been a real crisis for the Biden administration, because the Republicans would have forced them to strike back at Iran — as some of the more extreme Republicans are calling for — but Trump is not going to run with that. It’s very unlikely that he’ll be calling for war with Iran, that’s not what he thinks his base wants to hear. And so, the Biden administration has a little bit of a cushion to respond in more, as I said, symbolic ways.

So, I think that this is a terrible crisis, it’s a horrible thing, if you follow the news closely, to live with it every day. But, so far, we’re not in 2002. This is not the Bush administration planning to have a big set of wars in the region.

JS: Also, when Donald Trump is the voice of restraint, that’s a stark reality about the clique that John Bolton represents, and there is certainly an enormous amount of opportunism going on with people that served in the Trump administration.

And let’s remember, too, that Trump did sign off on the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. It’s not that Trump was, uh, was some kind of a dove. I mean, Trump was quite militaristic. He ratcheted up the drone strikes that had widely expanded under Obama, he did a ground raid in Yemen, was bombing Somalia at record pace, was striking in Syria and elsewhere. But Biden, who’s much more of an empire politician, you can follow a much longer arc of Biden’s career…

But, speaking of arcs, I wanted to ask you about German policy. And I’m glad you also brought up Ukraine, because Germany has been the major voice in the European Union, in terms of more powerful countries pushing that war. And Germany actually started to increase the amount of GDP that it’s willing to spend on defense, exporting of weaponry, which was unusual for Germany.

And, mind you, this is not the CDU in power anymore under Angela Merkel — this is supposedly the liberals that are in power now, under Olaf Scholz, and the Green Party, in fact, occupies the position of foreign ministry in the German government — but Germany has been a major proponent of Israel’s war in Gaza, it has sent a record level of assistance to Israel. But, at the beginning, it was overwhelmingly in the form of what Germany categorized as defensive materiel — armored vehicles, body armor for troops — and now there are reports in the German media that Germany is considering a variety of requests from Israel to actually start sending munitions to Israel as well.

Germany signed on to be, effectively, a defense council in support of Israel’s defense at the International Court of Justice, where they’re being accused by South Africa of committing genocide and genocidal acts in Gaza. And many Palestinians have a perception that Germany’s involvement in what they believe clearly is a genocide or an attempted genocide in Gaza is linked to the fact that Germany committed genocide against the Jews in World War II.

And you had Germany announcing that it was going to sign on to support Israel at the International Court of Justice on the very day that, in Namibia, Namibians were marking the German genocide that began a century earlier, and issued a scathing attack against the German government, linking those two events together: the genocide in Namibia with Germany signing on to defend Israel against genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.

And just one last point on this: it’s not just that Germany is full-on supporting Israel politically, diplomatically — now, it seems, militarily — in a very aggressive way, it’s also that, domestically, in Germany, there are speech laws now that are supposedly aimed at halting or cracking down on antisemitic speech that have been weaponized now to criminalize — although it’s in misdemeanor form —criminalize several specific acts of speech that are perceived to be anti-Israel.

You’ve written recently about some of the historical connections to Germany’s full support right now of the Israelis, and I’d like to hear your analysis of this transformation of Germany’s posture in the world, which really ratcheted up during Ukraine, but is in full force now with the Israeli war against Gaza.

JC: This generation of Germans are still traumatized by World War II, and the Nazi era, and the Holocaust, and I think they decided that the way you work out your national guilt about the Holocaust is knee-jerk support for Israel. And remember that there are ways in which there are limits to liberalism in Germany that come out of the Nazi experience, because the one flaw in liberal philosophy is a belief in everybody being able to have a voice. Giving Hitler and his gangs voices didn’t work out very well for the Weimar Republic.

And so, there are laws in Germany and Austria that limit speech of a Nazi sort, so it bleeds over, then, into the Palestine issue, because to what extent is supporting Palestine, hate speech against Israel? And these become very difficult political negotiations.

I think the Germans have just decided that the Palestinians are a source of disturbance, they produce terrorism, their claims against Israel are outrageous, and that they’ve kind of put them in that limbo of speech that they put the far right in, as upsetting the apple cart of liberal society. That the only way to have liberal society in Germany is in fact to be illiberal with regard to certain kinds of speech and actions.

So, it’s an enormous psychological and emotional wound that the Germans are dealing with, and I think they’ve come down on the wrong side of how you deal with this. I mean, yes, they should never forget what their ancestors did because, remember, there are hardly anybody left alive from the era where the Holocaust occurred. But they should never forget what their ancestors did, and they should be determined to maintain the kind of liberal freedoms that would forestall any return of the far right.

And, of course, the return of the far right is, all of a sudden, in Germany, an actual prospect; the AFD seems to be growing in strength. And there’s genuine conversations, as you know, at the higher heights of the German government about whether to bite the bullet and put the AFD under the anti-Nazi laws, and sort of ban the party, ban that kind of speech, because it does skate very close to what’s illegal in Germany. So, if these things are seriously being considered against 20 percent of the German population, imagine how expendable the Palestinians and their cause is in this regard.

I think the only way forward for Germany, ultimately, is to have a different view of the significance of the Holocaust. Not as something that they did to Jews, for which their unstinting support for everything that the Israelis do is the only penance, but to see it as a global event against an ethnic group. And, of course, the Germans also committed a Holocaust against Poles, and the siege of Leningrad was intended to be a Holocaust against Slavs, and they were going to move people out of Russia and Ukraine and replace them with Germans.

So, if you saw these events as of universal significance, and then you were determined that they never happen again, then they have to never happen again to Namibians and Palestinians, as well as never happening again to Jews. And that’s a universalism of an earlier period of German liberalism, I think something maybe that Immanuel Kant might have sympathized with, that this generation of Germans has lost, and they need to recover it.

MH: Juan, it’s been so good to get your perspective on all this, and having you weigh in — as someone who’s written about the region for so many years, and seen so many changes — it’s been very invaluable.

I wanted to ask you, just to conclude … You know, this October 7th attack and the subsequent war between Israel and Gaza over the past few months really does seem like a very big inflection point in the Middle East, and the history of the U.S. role in the Middle East. And where it may go, it’s impossible to say.

But, as someone who has seen different iterations of U.S. policy in the region, and different configurations of politics in the region, I’m curious what you foresee as a possible day after. How may the region look, how may the U.S. posture towards the region look, and what could be the future between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but also the Israelis in the broader region? Are we moving towards an era of greater conflict? Is there a possibility for these events to spur a diplomatic solution out of urgency?

I’m kind of curious what you see, generally, with the caveat that we don’t know. But what do you foresee is possible with the way the world will look when this conflict finally ends?

JC: I fear that things will just go on the way they have been going on. I don’t foresee a big change. Of course, one seldom does. But I don’t see the vision in the Biden administration that would allow them to play a positive role in reshaping the region.

Ironically enough, I think Bill Clinton was the last one who had that kind of vision, the last president who did, and even he didn’t follow through on it in a thoroughgoing way, and kind of put his thumb on the scale for the Israelis. But, I think, for all of its flaws, the Oslo process was the last time that this struggle, this conflict, had a realistic chance of being resolved and going to a situation where it could just be managed.

There are only three possibilities for the future of the Palestinians. Either they are ethnically cleansed, as the Israeli far right wants, or they continue to be ruled under a kind of apartheid, as all the major human rights organizations have decided to characterize the situation. Or there is an evolving situation towards some sort of one-state solution. I don’t think a two-state solution is any longer plausible. Where would you put it? I mean, the West Bank looks like Swiss cheese if you take the Israeli squatter settlements into account, and half of Gaza has been destroyed, so that’s not a state. So, does Israel-Palestine end up a Lebanon, for instance?

But those are the only three possibilities. And, of the three, given the geopolitical realities and the military realities, it seems to me that another hundred years of apartheid is actually the more likely of the three scenarios. And there isn’t any counterbalancing factor that would forestall that development.

The Egyptians are the only major military power in the region, and they’ve taken themselves out of the fray. Syria is a basket case, it never really did much for the Palestinians anyway. And Iran talks a good game, but it’s distant, and it seems, actually, just to play a kind of symbolic politics with the issue.

And then the Americans are feckless and, for their own reasons — because of the way they see Israel as an element in their own security — are not going to force the Israelis to do anything. I used to think that the Israelis themselves would finally come to their senses and decide that trying to keep the Palestinians as chattel in the long run was not good for them, or for the Palestinians, or for anybody.

But I’ve despaired of that. I mean, the Israeli public opinion has moved to the far right, and 80 percent of Israelis are fine with what’s going on with Gaza after the admittedly horrific and soul wrenching attack of October 7th that the Hamas terrorists undertook. So, this is not something that’s going to happen voluntarily, a solution to this problem. It would have to be forced by somebody, and there’s nobody to force it. So it will just go on like this.

And it’s very bad for the region. You take a country like Lebanon, which could be very prosperous, but who’s going to invest in Lebanon if it’s sitting on the edge of an active volcano? And it’s got Hezbollah-armed militants running around the south. So, then, billions of dollars are lost in opportunity costs for the entire Eastern Mediterranean because of this ongoing situation, and it affects the whole region.

And the bright idea that Jared Kushner had, that you could do an end run around the Palestinians, and just have the Israelis recognized by wealthy and or desperate states in the region, I mean, that whole theory, I think, was refuted by October 7th. Unless you deal with the Palestine problem, you’re just not going to have peace.

But then, I think the other conclusion we may draw is, we’re not going to have peace.

JS: Well, that is the opposite of an uplifting note to end on. I hope you’re wrong, but I unfortunately think that a lot of what you just said there does constitute some of the more likely scenarios to see, not just in the coming months, but in the years ahead.

Juan Cole, thank you so much for all of your work. Not just on these subjects, but also over the years. A real honor to have you on the program.

JC: Thank you so much. And likewise.

MH: That was Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan. You can read his writings at juancole.com.

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show. Legal Review was done by David Bralow, Sean Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

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Thanks so much for joining us. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.