Lack of ambassador to Israel fuels perception Biden isn’t interested in seeking a peace deal, experts say

As President Joe Biden weighed how far to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in public for a ceasefire last week, he was missing an authoritative voice in the country, someone with a direct line to the White House who could advance Washington’s interests and spur a response from the boss.

Instead, Biden spent 11 days under fire from congressional allies urging him to demand a halt to the fighting while remaining largely silent.

Brett Bruen, a former foreign service officer and a member of the Obama administration’s National Security Council, told the Washington Examiner that having an ambassador in place “would have made an enormous difference” to the speed of Biden’s response.

“They have the relationships with top Israeli leaders and can extract better insights, as well as enjoy far more influence when delivering hard messages,” Bruen said. “We also don’t have someone who can do major interviews and get the United States’s policy prominently out in the press. Our engagements on the ground get stuck at a working level, which isn’t where the decisions are being made.”

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Nearly a week went by before a U.S. official arrived in Israel to meet with leaders in the region, with Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr landing in Tel Aviv from Washington on May 14. It would be several more days before Biden urged a halt to the fighting, when, on May 17, he “expressed support for a ceasefire” in a phone call with Netanyahu, according to a carefully worded readout, after an Israeli strike destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza that housed the offices of several international news organizations, drawing widespread condemnation. His first extended remarks on the conflict came Thursday, as a truce was announced.

And while Biden has passed trillions of dollars in coronavirus legislation, and is negotiating several trillion more, he is five months into his first year in office and still without an ambassador to Israel, the United States’s most important regional ally.

Ofer Zalzberg, the Jerusalem-based director of the Middle East Program at the Herbert Kelman Institute, said that due to the confirmation process, he didn’t think the ambassador would necessarily have been in place.

“The delay, therefore mostly nourished the perception that the Biden administration excessively downplayed the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Zalzberg said.

He said that, looking ahead, current tensions in Jerusalem “strongly suggest that in the coming years, cooperative U.S.-Israel relations will involve delicate identity-related Israeli-Palestinian dynamics, notably in the Holy City.” Violence broke out inside Israel between both groups ahead of the war and has persisted, a concern Biden officials have noted.

In Washington, meanwhile, a lobbying campaign has been playing out by allies of prominent contenders for the ambassador role.

Following a report that Biden has settled on Thomas Nides, a Morgan Stanley executive and former State Department official, for the position, backers of Robert Wexler, a former Florida lawmaker steeped in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, made public what had been a private campaign.

Somewhat improbably, Wexler drew support from across the political spectrum and has been widely commended for his work on issues in the region.

“He is the only person that both [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and members of the Palestinian community wanted to be ambassador. He is the only person I know that both Ted Deutch and Bernie Sanders were supportive of,” said Rabbi Kenneth Brander, president of the Ohr Torah Stone network of institutions, pointing to centrist Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and progressive rival to Biden during the 2020 presidential primary race.

Asked how Wexler had succeeded in earning the trust of members positioned on all sides of this notoriously thorny subject, Brander said he was a pro-Israel voice deeply committed to peace and with a formidable command of the policy nuances.

“He’s not a Johnny-come-lately to this issue. He’s invested his whole career on this,” Brander said, citing Wexler’s time on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and relevant subcommittees for the Middle East and Human Rights and Oversight. “Secondly, he has, since then, served as an ombudsman to various administrations, to both the Palestinian Authority and to the Israeli government.”

Wexler leads the Washington, D.C.,-based S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace and has ties to Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm founded by Florida Republican Brian Ballard, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump. A former Ballard executive, Susie Wiles, was recruited by Trump to lead his political operations earlier this year.

According to Brander, Wexler’s credibility is rooted in the relationships he has built inside Israel, among Palestinians, as well as with interested parties in the U.S.

“Everybody that I’ve met on both sides, both Jewish and in the Palestinian community, the only thing they may have in common is the fact that they have trust in Robert Wexler,” he said.

Since taking office, Biden has focused his domestic agenda on the coronavirus recovery, his principal target, and Pacific Asia as his foremost interest overseas.

Choosing Nides, former President Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, and a longtime political operative, would cement the perception that Biden is not looking to delve into the Middle East, some say.

“The Biden folks aren’t interested in pursuing a peace agreement, so Wexler wouldn’t be selected for that reason,” said one former Obama administration official. “Wexler’s got a lot of allies who are pushing for him, but the White House isn’t going to spend political capital either way.”

One Democratic analyst suggested that Nides’s lack of specific regional expertise was not a detriment and could bolster the relationship with Israel, indicating that the U.S. is not looking to coerce Netanyahu into an unwanted peace agreement.

As the ceasefire came into effect on Friday, Egypt sent a delegation to Israel in an effort to solidify the agreement and has taken a lead role in mediating the truce between Israel and Hamas.

Under these circumstances, having an ambassador in place may have done little to shift the timing of the outcome.

“The one thing that is clear is that all the big decisions on how to manage the conflict came from the White House,” said Richard Gowan, a former United Nations consultant who directs the International Crisis Group’s United Nations work. “An ambassador might have influenced that a bit, but I am not sure it would have made a fundamental difference.”

Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice president with a broad foreign policy portfolio, continued to work the phones into this week, speaking with President Abdel Fattah al Sisi of Egypt about “the urgent need to deliver humanitarian assistance to those in need in Gaza and to support rebuilding efforts in a manner that benefits the people there and not Hamas.” It was the two leaders’ second phone call in a matter of days.

The White House did not respond to questions about the timing of an announcement for Biden’s ambassador pick nor the prospective candidates, but told Politico last week that “We’re not commenting on anyone, and no one is final until they’re announced.”

Nides’s appointment appeared to be confirmed late Monday, with the Times of Israel citing a source who said that he had accepted the post.

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“Nides is someone who just needs a senior position somewhere in the Administration,” the former official said. “So, this seemed to him and the Presidential Personnel Office like a place that would work. But, he could pretty easily be sent elsewhere.”