Rafah is Biden’s red line for Netanyahu – but there’s not much he can do to stop it being crossed
Setting red lines is all very well, as long as you follow through when they are crossed. President Joe Biden knows that all too well.
But he also knows that if he follows through on this big new red line of withholding offensive weapons for Israel it could cost him dearly domestically.
The push-me-pull-you balance of geopolitics and domestic politics is intensely difficult right now for the American president.
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I’ll break this down into two parts. The politics in a moment. First the challenges of red lines.
Western leaders throw them down in interviews, like Mr Biden’s pronouncement on CNN last night, as unequivocal threats. “Cross the line, if you dare!” is the rhetoric.
But too often they turn out to be flawed tools of geo-political diplomacy.
Barack Obama set a chemical weapons red line with Syria’s Bashar al Assad in 2012. He walked right through it.
Vladimir Putin remembered that when he walked through a red line Mr Biden had set on Ukraine in 2021. Mr Putin invaded. The rest is history.
Every red line is distinct, of course, and they vary in terms of the gravity of the event they are seeking to prevent.
But the principle behind laying them is the same, as is the message set when they are crossed.
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Joe Biden with Vladimir Putin during their meeting in Moscow in 2011. Pic: AP
Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu
Over the past six months, as Israel has sought to defeat Hamas in Gaza, President Biden didn’t think he’d need to lay out red lines. After all, Israel is one of America’s closest allies.
Instead, the Biden administration thought gentle diplomacy and frank back-channels with a “close friend of America” would do the trick.
But gradually, as Mr Biden and the Netanyahu government increasingly diverged on protecting civilians and a plan for “the day after” in Gaza, a red line began to appear – Rafah.
This has become Mr Biden’s red line for Israel.
The American president has repeatedly made clear his opposition to Mr Netanyahu’s insistence on a ground invasion of the southern Gazan city (Mr Netanyahu’s own red line) where about 1.4 million people are living, half of them under 18.
Smoke rises from Rafah after an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza city this week. Pic: AP
The Israeli military has not (yet) moved into Rafah city but is instead concentrating its operations to the east of the city and around the crossing to Egypt.
That fact has allowed the Biden administration to claim its red line hasn’t yet been crossed. “They didn’t describe it as a major ground operation,” spokesman John Kirby said this week.
Sometimes, red lines are smashed through. Sometimes, they are gradually chipped away at.
To counter the chipping Mr Netanyahu has been doing for weeks, Mr Biden hardened his red line.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” he told CNN.
A significant admission
That he has personally admitted what was already a fact – that American weapons have killed thousands of civilians – is significant.
But there is important nuance in his red line.
He’s talking about stopping the delivery of offensive weapons for the type of operations that have flattened much of Gaza and could do the same to Rafah.
He is not threatening to cut Israel off from all US weapons, of course not.
Defensive weapons to counter Iranian proxy rockets will keep coming. As will long-range weapons and jets to counter Iran. None of that will stop being delivered.
Still, it’s a big shift for Biden. It’s not been done before and symbolically for Israel, in the middle of its longest and most critical war, it looks terrible.
The domestic political risks
And that brings us to the domestic politics of all this.
For every lever of influence Mr Biden pulls (and he’s seen they have their limited use) there is a domestic political calculus.
Pretty much all Republicans are against every lever; they want nothing less than unequivocal support for Israel.
More than that though – a significant number of his own Democrats will also be uneasy about America limiting weapons for Israel.
But critical voters in key states are very pro-Palestine. President Biden isn’t oblivious to their cry “Genocide Joe!”
It is a perilous political push-me-pull-you and the election is six months away.
National Guard troops went door-to-door on Friday to evacuate a farming city north of Seattle as severe flooding in western Washington state put levees at risk.
Days of torrential rain have swelled rivers to record or near-record levels, as flooding has stranded families on rooftops, washed over bridges and ripped homes from their foundations.
Burlington, a city of nearly 10,000 residents near Puget Sound – a large inlet of the Pacific Ocean in northwestern Washington – was placed under a full evacuation order with people told to leave immediately and move to higher ground.
The Skagit River, a major waterway that flows from the Cascade Mountains through the Skagit Valley before emptying into Puget Sound, surged to a record high of nearly 38ft (11.6m) at Mount Vernon, about 10 miles south of Burlington.
“We haven’t seen flooding like this ever,” said Karina Shagren, a spokesperson for the state’s emergency management division, adding that there had been no reports of injuries or missing individuals so far.
Pic: Reuters
Pic: Reuters
National Guard troops and sheriff’s deputies were going door to assist with the evacuations.
Some responders were seen paddling stranded Burlington residents to safety in inflatable river rafts through the muddy floodwaters.
Later on Friday, the evacuation order was lifted for part of the city, Burlington police department spokesperson Michael Lumpkin said.
However, while water levels appeared to ease a little, Mr Lumpkin said “it’s definitely not an all-clear”.
Pic: Reuters
Pic: Reuters
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The intense rainfall was driven by an atmospheric river, a massive stream of moisture drawn from the ocean and carried inland over the Pacific Northwest earlier in the week.
Although rainfall has begun to ease, the National Weather Service has issued a flash-flood warning for the Skagit River basin all the way downstream to its mouth at Puget Sound.
Snohomish, around 40 miles south of Burlington, has also been affected. Pic: Reuters
Pic: Reuters
The swollen waters could put enough strain on levees to cause them to fail, the weather service noted.
“Extensive flooding of streets, homes and farmland will be possible” if levees and dikes give way, it said.
The Burlington-Mount Vernon area in Skagit County continues to be the hardest-hit area, facing extensive flooding from days of heavy rainfall stretching from northern Oregon through western Washington and into British Columbia.
National Guard troops were also dispatched to deliver food and check on stranded residents in a number of communities cut off by flooding in adjacent Snohomish County, south of Skagit County.
The flooding washed out or forced the closure of dozens of roads throughout the region, including most of the Canadian highways leading to the port city of Vancouver in British Columbia.
Parts of northern Idaho and western Montana have also been impacted.
Donald Trump is being sued by a preservation group which wants a federal court to halt the construction of a new ballroom at the White House until it goes through multiple independent reviews and wins approval from Congress.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s lawsuit represents the most concrete effort so far to change or stop plans for the new $300m ballroom that would be nearly double the size of the White House before the East Wing was demolished.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever – not President Trump, not President [Joe] Biden, and not anyone else,” the non-profit organisation’s lawsuit states.
“And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.”
Pic: Reuters
The ballroom project has drawn criticism from preservationists, architects, and President Trump’s political opponents.
It is among several sweeping changes Mr Trump has made to the White House since he returned to office in January. He has installed gold decorations throughout the Oval Office, and paved over the lawn of the Rose Garden to create a patio similar to the setting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Pic: Reuters
Commenting on the lawsuit, White House spokesman David Ingle said that Mr Trump is within his “full legal authority to modernise, renovate and beautify the White House – just like all of his predecessors did”.
Mr Ingle did not specify whether the president was planning to consult Congress at any point.
While nearly every president alters the White House, Mr Trump’s plans are the most extensive since President Harry Truman’s near-total renovation of its oldest section.
Unlike Mr Trump, Mr Truman obtained explicit congressional approval and funding, consulted engineering and arts authorities, and appointed a bipartisan commission to oversee the work.
Mr Trump has stressed that the project is funded with private money, including his own, but that doesn’t change how federal laws and procedures apply to a US government project.
Federal law cites “express authority of Congress” over DC projects.
Pic: Reuters
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Mr Trump has long maintained that a White House ballroom is overdue, noting that large events are held in tents and guests get wet when it rains.
The lawsuit said Mr Trump never gathered public input and ignored statutes requiring consultation with the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts before tearing down the East Wing and starting work on the ballroom.
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