'A feeling of a lost opportunity': Did Europe’s passivity cost lives in Hamas war? - opinion

During these waning weeks of the US Biden administration’s term, the outgoing White House team and incoming Trump officials are working to ensure a smooth transition.

Aides to President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are holding contacts on the dramatic events in the Middle East, meeting with central figures independently but also as the two presidential staffs consult with one another.

The Biden and Trump teams have different approaches. This is nothing new. When the current president took office in January 2021, he did so on the basis of a worldview that the US had to work together with the international community to resolve global issues.

During the first Trump presidency, on the other hand, the approach was to challenge members of NATO and participants in other organizational settings and to act in a way that was specifically deemed as best in the eyes of the US administration, even if it meant confrontations with other countries.

Now, just shy of four years since taking office and over a year since October 7, 2023, Biden administration officials are reflecting on how their vision of mobilizing international alliances to troubleshoot world crises blew up in their faces after Hamas carried out massacres in southern Israel, launching the war in Gaza.

In my previous article, “Down the homestretch” (The Jerusalem Post, November 11), I quoted a Biden aide as charging that “a number of European countries and some other allies” had refused to cooperate with the US in the early days of the war.

American plan

The American plan, he said, was to set up a unified front on the part of key players in the international community to impose various pressures on Hamas and Qatar in order to end the war, free the hostages, and force the Hamas leadership out of Gaza.

The response from these countries, which the Biden administration had viewed as partners, was timid at best, and in other cases, the proposal was “laughed off,” according to the White House aide. One of the reasons given by European officials for their reluctance to get involved, he said, was a concern that the allied countries would get “dragged into Netanyahu’s war, from which there would be no escape.”

The Biden aide told me privately who the countries were, but asked that it not be made public in the name of preserving US-European ties. He leveled the charges in two subsequent conversations that he and I conducted on the day of last month’s US presidential election before the winner was known, and the following day, after it became clear that Trump had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.

I subsequently contacted officials from the countries he had referenced in our discussions, and all of them confirmed the American proposal, though they denied that they had laughed it off. There was no “real serious” plan, they insisted, and therefore nothing to talk about.

The White House aide has expressed resentment over the reactions I received from European officials and says that he has been living with “a feeling of a lost opportunity” as the quagmire has extended over such a long period of time. Yet, he asserts, he has continued to look forward as a member of the US team handling the ongoing war, and has tried to refrain from thinking about what could have been.

ICC arrest warrants 

Late last month, however, he says, he felt a “gut punch.” It happened after the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided to issue warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. In response to the court’s decision, Josep Borrell, who was leaving the position of European Union foreign policy chief soon thereafter at the end of November, affirmed that EU states had to honor the court’s ruling.

Borrell defended the court: “They’re not political. It’s a legal body formed by respected people who are the best among the profession of judges.”

The Biden aide was livid. The normally composed White House official said of Borrell’s reaction: “Who’s he kidding? Not political?”

Still wishing me to keep private the names of countries who had been approached with the US proposal last year, but permitting me to publicly name the now-former EU foreign policy chief, the Biden aide said: “This is an esteemed leading diplomat who knew of our efforts to nip this whole thing in the bud. Lives could have been saved: the Gazans, the hostages.”

He continued: “As an international community, we could have forced Hamas out and started working already on a future for the Gaza Strip. Instead, Gazans have been killed, hostages have been murdered, and after he [Borrell] didn’t want to get involved in ‘Netanyahu’s war’ back then, he now wants Netanyahu and Gallant arrested?”

The aide conceded that “it’s all water under the bridge,” though he is hopeful that the latest developments in the region can “finally put an end to this nightmare.”

Trump is vowing that there will be “hell to pay” if the hostages are not released by the time he takes office on January 20. Washington observers have already started making comparisons between the current situation and Iran’s release of US hostages immediately after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as US president in January 1981.

Biden administration officials are hopeful that the 100 hostages currently held in Gaza will be freed before the Trump inauguration. Trump transition officials insist that whatever happens, a United States led by their boss will be considered a “more formidable world player.”

In preparing this article, I spoke to a Trump transition aide about the European refusal to work with the Biden administration last year after the war in Gaza had begun. “They would never laugh at us,” he replied.

The writer is the op-ed editor of The Jerusalem Post.