WASHINGTON—The White House still appears to be a bit tongue-tied when it comes to Israel’s recent deadly confrontation with a Gaza-bound flotilla .
Israel Defense Forces Navy killed nine pro-Palestinian activists last Monday after commandos stopped nine ships trying to run Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The group, which said it sought to deliver aid to the Hamas-controlled region, had publically declared it would steam through the Israel’s three-year blockade. The sanctions, meant to keep weapons out of Gaza, have also blocked food and building materials.
But, as American and Israel officials predicted, things went awry. When the IDFN boarded The Mavi Marmara in a late-night siege, firefights broke out. One week later, the U.S. is left in the awkward position of sticking up for an ally, while many in the international community now condemn the incident as an Israeli attack. (Israel says it was attacked enforcing a lawful blockade; Gaza sympathizers say it was an unprovoked assault.)
For proof, look no further than the public record. Transcripts of press briefings, gaggles and official statements all reveal an administration that appears to condemn what happened, but is too wary to get involved. It’s typical of America’s increasingly fraught relationship with its biggest ally in the Middle East, according to some observers, who said that at some point things need to change.
As Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, told The New York Times this week:
“America has three choices. Either say, it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehavior.”
It’s still unclear which direction the U.S. is headed.
After the May 31 attack, the UN Security Council spent 10 hours drafting a painstakingly carefully worded statement. “The council, in this context, condemns those acts ,” the statement reads. “The security council stresses that the situation in Gaza is not sustainable.”
For the next several days, this became the only comment the White House would offer on the matter. When pressed with follow up questions , White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told the Associated Press’s Ben Feller, “well, Ben, let me simply restate what the international community and the United States supported early this morning at the U.N. Security Council through a presidential statement.”
That would seem to suggest that the U.S. is not on Israel’s side on this issue. But as Vice President Joseph Biden stressed June 2, two days after the incident, this is not the case.
“Reports of fissures between the United States and Israel are ‘vastly exaggerated.’”, Biden said, according to a pool report from The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y. “No administration has been more supportive of Israeli security than this administration.”
Granted, the vice president is known to veer from the White House script. Yet he’s not the only example of administration doublespeak on the matter.
One of the administration’s main talking points is that until an impartial investigation is completed, as demanded by the UN, it’ll withhold judgment. In a June 1 phone conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a vocal critic of the Jewish state, President Barack Obama “affirmed the United States position in support of a credible, impartial, and transparent investigation of the facts surrounding this tragedy,” according to White House press release.
Three days later, when journalists on Air Force One cited rumors that Israel would go it alone in the upcoming investigation, Gibbs evaded a response.
“We’ve had some discussions with them,” he said, according to White House transcripts. “I think, let me make sure, because I have not checked my email on the flight. I think there may have been some movement on that. Let me check on that.”
The one consistent message thorough the whole affair has been that the current situation in Gaza is a humanitarian nightmare. “Unsustainable,” has become the administration’s descriptor of choice, and a National Security Council Statement dated June 4 says the U.S. is working with Israel and the Palestinian Authority to solve the matter.
More recently. Israel defense officials formally announced that they would conduct their own investigation of the incident, just one day after Defense Minister Ehud Barak said his government will not allow foreign investigators to scrutinize Israeli soldiers,according to a Voice of America report.
The White House had no immediate comment.
