WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the Gaza Strip should be unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority once the war is over, offering a strong signal about what the United States sees as its preferred endgame in the fight between Israel and Hamas.
The message, delivered during a meeting of foreign ministers in Tokyo, came as President Joe Biden feels growing pressure to use his leverage to push for sustainable, long-term goals in the region and minimize civilian casualties. But increasingly, the United States and Israel are showing signs that their interests are diverging.
The remarks by Blinken on Wednesday reflect a deep anxiety on the part of Biden and his aides inside the White House as the conflict enters its second month. What started in the days after Oct. 7 as an unambiguous rush to the defense of an ally has become a much more complicated diplomatic challenge for the president to help define an alternative to open-ended war in the Middle East.
Biden wields key leverage as a world leader strongly allied with Israel, and his administration has sought to rally Arab nations and others behind a vision that looks beyond the fighting and the deep emotions that have divided the region for years.
On Wednesday, Blinken said there must be “affirmative elements to get to a sustained peace.”
“These must include the Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” he said. “It must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
Blinken offered no details about how such an arrangement might be implemented; it would not be a solution in the near term as the violence continues. But restoring the Palestinian Authority — which administers parts of the West Bank — to power in Gaza would not be easy even if Israel managed to end Hamas’ rule. Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is deeply unpopular. Many Palestinians view him as corrupt and say his attempts to win independence through peace talks have failed.
“We don’t have it all figured out right now,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said Wednesday on CNN. “And I don’t know that it would be reasonable for us to think that we could, at this particular point, one month into the conflict. But we know that it has to be something different than what it was under Hamas.”
In the immediate hours and days after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and killed more than 1,400 people, Biden fully embraced Israel’s right to respond, a position that White House officials still repeat frequently.
But as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens, Biden has tried to balance his support for Israel with calls for the protection of Palestinian noncombatants and for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting.
Another potential split emerged this week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel suggested that his country could hold a security role in Gaza “for an indefinite period” after the war is over. Kirby responded by saying that any re-occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces is “not the right thing to do.”
In his comments Wednesday, Blinken made no reference to the presence of Israeli forces remaining inside Gaza, home to about 2 million Palestinians.
Biden has also come under pressure from some in the Democratic Party, which is deeply split on the conflict. On Wednesday, the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus signed a letter asking Biden to ensure that Israel has a viable plan for defeating Hamas and will use U.S. military assistance in keeping with international law.
Veterans of the often contentious diplomacy between the leaders of Israel and the United States said the willingness of the president and the secretary of state to be critical of Israel in public is a response to that dissatisfaction with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
“The U.S. is increasingly unhappy and frustrated, perhaps even annoyed,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Middle East peace negotiator.
But Miller said that there are few indications that the disagreements between the two governments, or the pressures from pro-Palestinian voices, are powerful enough to cause Biden to abandon his decadeslong support for Israel.
“We don’t have the capacity to wield our leverage on Israel because we simply don’t have the sorts of compelling alternatives that are attractive enough to overcome the eternal confusion and anger and resentment that is driving Israel’s campaign in the wake of what happened on Oct. 7,” he said. “That’s not going to change.”
Hamas took charge of the Gaza Strip in 2007 following a bout of factional fighting. But in the wake of its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Netanyahu vowed to crush the group. Israel has since launched thousands of airstrikes at Gaza. The Israeli military says it is now driving deep into Gaza City, the territory’s main urban settlement.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza estimates that Israeli strikes had killed about 10,000 Palestinian civilians, including roughly 4,000 children and teenagers.
Biden, Blinken and other top U.S. officials have become far more vocal in recent days about their concerns about the impact of Israel’s military response on the civilian population in Gaza.
Netanyahu has largely rejected calls for sustained pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to get in and for civilians to get out, although the Israeli military has allowed civilians several hours to travel south out of Gaza City in the past few days.
The leaders of several United Nations agencies have issued a call for a cease-fire, which the White House has consistently argued would only benefit Hamas.
“Usually when you get into a cease-fire, it’s when you think you’re at the end and it’s time to negotiate,” Kirby said. “At this time, a cease-fire right now benefits Hamas. It certainly also legitimizes what Hamas started on Oct. 7.”
Wednesday’s comments by Blinken about the longer-term fate of Gaza were the most recent evidence of what Miller called an evolution in the Biden administration’s thinking over the past four weeks.
But that evolution would go only so far, Miller predicted.
He said that Biden was unlikely to have the United States abstain on an anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations or withhold military aid to the country in the coming weeks, in part because of the president’s decadeslong, personal connection to Israel.
“He is alone among modern American presidents who believe that he is and has been a part of the Israel story for decades,” he said, noting that Biden’s views are shared by many in his administration. “That love of the idea of Israel, the Israeli public, is imprinted on their emotional and political DNA.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.