Washington true obstacle to cease-fire in Gaza: China Daily editorial

One day after the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Palestine conflict on Friday, the Joe Biden administration said it had approved the emergency sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.

It is clearly the US that is the true obstacle to a cease-fire in Gaza. The purchase will bypass the congressional review requirement for foreign arms sales. Although not unprecedented, such determinations in which an administration sees "an urgent need" for weapons to be delivered without waiting for lawmakers' approval are rare.

That indicates Tel Aviv cannot afford to wait for a congressional green light to be given to the assistance, which might only take dozens of hours at the fastest given Israel's special bond with the US. That has exposed that even though it commands an indisputable upper hand in the conflict in Gaza, Israel's dominance cannot be sustained without the US' assistance.

That should also serve to demonstrate the high cost it will take to implement Tel Aviv's plan of turning Gaza into a buffer zone in the future from where it expects to eliminate Hamas, which will necessarily entail the US' continuous inputs as well. It might not have become a problem to the US 20 years back when Middle East oil was central to the US economy and no other geopolitical challenge was in sight except the Taliban in the rugged mountains in Central Asia.

Yet the situation is different now. Even though the US claimed it can handle both the Ukraine crisis and Gaza conflict at the same time shortly after the latter broke out, the increasingly palpable anxiety Kyiv has been expressing over the possibility of the US and its allies reducing or postponing their military and financial aid proves that the US' claim might not be true.

The Republican House speaker has made it unequivocally clear that Israel is the US' priority while blocking US President Joe Biden's request last month for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other "national security" grounds, which is now languishing in Congress.

The US is facing a difficult choice. On the one hand, Washington will have to start weighing its possible loss if Ukraine is weaned off US support. On the other hand, it cannot afford to lose the strategic fulcrum of Israel in the Middle East, not to mention the Jewish people's close connections with US finance and politics. Any setback for Ukraine might deal a heavy blow to the US' post-Cold War European project, and any setback for Israel could markedly accelerate the US' withdrawal from the Middle East, a strategic crossroad of the Eurasian continent, Africa and the "Indo-Pacific" region. Both are undertakings Washington has long painstakingly managed to defend the US' hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

Nobody should doubt the tears being shed in Washington over the loss of life in Gaza are crocodile tears, and US politicians are generally more concerned about the US losing its status as the head of the "civilized world". Before it can reconcile how to handle the two fronts at the same time, the US will continue to shed those hypocritical tears and meanwhile provide weapons to Israel and Ukraine, which will create fresh cause for genuine tears elsewhere.