Day after day, the US continues to suffer one humiliation after another in the Middle East. On Friday, March 22, a draft resolution evoking "the need for an immediate ceasefire" in Gaza was vetoed by China and Russia at the United Nations Security Council. Joined by Algiers, Beijing and Moscow, who are publicly calling for a halt to the fighting, deemed the text "hypocritical" because it did not contain an explicit call for the guns to be silenced.
In so doing, they denied any leverage to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was visiting Israel the same day. Blinken clashed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who dismissed out of hand the US's reservations about a possible Israeli military assault on Rafah, the last town in the Gaza Strip not to have been the target of the Israeli army's destructive operations. More than a million Palestinians are concentrated there in precarious conditions, while the spectre of famine hangs over the strip.
There can be little doubt that, in blocking the American draft resolution, China and Russia were thinking less of the Palestinians than of the opportunity to inflict a diplomatic setback on the US. This calculation is all the more cynical given that the Palestinian question is one of the few on which there is consensus between the major powers on the long-term objective of creating a Palestinian state.
Washington, however, can hardly be indignant. Since the beginning of the crisis triggered by the Hamas massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, followed by Israel's murderous and devastating attempts to destroy the Islamist militia and free the hostages captured in the process, the US has vetoed three draft resolutions at the United Nations, two of them close to the one it presented on Friday. It has also stepped up its deliveries of munitions to the Israeli army, fuelling repeated carnage in which Palestinian civilians are the main victims.
Hardening stance
President Joe Biden paid a heavy price for his unreserved alignment with Israeli positions at the start of the conflict, failing to appreciate the scale of Israel's current ruling coalition, the most extremist in the country's history. He also seriously underestimated Netanyahu's ability to hold on to power at all costs, despite the rejection he has received as a result of the security fiasco surrounding the October 7 massacres.
The gradual hardening of his stance towards Israel since February has so far had no effect. As a welcome message to Blinken, on March 22 the Israeli government announced the seizure of 800 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank, the largest seizure since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, according to the Israeli peace organization Shalom Akhshav.
These humiliations suffered by the US do not only affect its image. They also compromise any medium-term diplomatic prospects in the region. And they expose the Democratic president to the risk of a sanctioned abstention from the November presidential elections by segments of his electorate, notably young people and African Americans, outraged by this diplomacy of impotence.