Does the Biden Administration Plan a January Surprise?

The “surprise” has to do with Israel, and it isn’t pleasant. More on what Michael Doran, the director of peace and security studies at the Hudson Institute, claims is in the works can be found here: “‘Well-developed’ Biden admin anti-Israel ‘January surprise’ planned at UN, former US official says,” JNS, January 3, 2025:

The Biden administration is planning a “January surprise” that is “modeled directly on the January surprise of the Obama administration in 2016—that is U.N. Resolution 2334, which basically, to put it a little bit crudely, recognized the Green Line that is the June 5, 1967, ceasefire lines that separated Israel from Jordan as an international boundary,” Michael Doran, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of its center for peace and security in the Middle East, said on his podcast on Dec. 31.

Speaking with his co-host Gadi Taub, an Israeli historian and writer, Doran said that the Obama administration’s surprise meant that “any development that Israel has made to the east of the Green Line since the 1967 War is recognized by the U.N. as an illegal settlement.”

“This means including the Western Wall uh is ‘occupied territory,’” the former senior director in the U.S. National Security Council said on the “Israel Update” podcast.

“Lots of neighborhoods that any Israeli today regards as Israel proper are regarded by 2334 as Israeli illegal Israeli settlements,” Doran said. “That’s what Barack Obama did for the Israelis—kicked the Netanyahu government in the groin as it was leaving office in 2016, but it did it in a very devious way.”

The Obama administration had it “both ways” by having others put the resolution forward, and then Washington abstained and said it couldn’t go against what the international community wants.

“The Biden administration is planning something similar right now,” Doran said.

The administration will latch onto section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which says, “that any country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian aid will have its military assistance cut off,” Doran said. He noted that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent Israel a letter to that effect. “That’s based on 620(i),” Doran said.

“The January surprise is that there will be an official finding by the State Department that Israel is in violation of 620(i). It’s blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, and then what will happen is that the president will waive the penalties for blocking of the humanitarian aid, but there will have been an official American finding,” Doran said. “There will be an official American finding, but there will be no penalties to Israel, so again the administration gets to have it both ways. Finds Israel guilty but then says, ‘Well we’re not going to do anything about it.”

“But there’s the official finding and then the ball moves to the Security Council, where Algeria or Slovenia will take it and get a U.N. resolution that will punish Israel in some way,” he added. “The United States again will either support the resolution or abstain depending upon the wording of it.”…

The administration will latch onto section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which says, “that any country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian aid will have its military assistance cut off,” Doran said. He noted that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent Israel a letter to that effect. “That’s based on 620(i),” Doran said.

Israel, of course, is not “blocking humanitarian aid.” Blinken and Austin months ago sent a letter to Israel, warning that if it blocked such aid, then the administration would have no choice, according to section 620(i) of the Foreign Assistance Act, to cut off military assistance to the Jewish state. But neither then, nor since, has the Biden administration dared to conclude — falsely — that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid. The IDF has facilitated the delivery of 1.1 tons of humanitarian aid — food and medicine to Gaza. The problem is not one of a failure to deliver, but a failure of distribution. Once those trucks are inside Gaza, Hamas operatives seize the aid, put it in their own warehouses, and then distribute some of it to Hamas members and their extended families. Another portion is kept by Hamas for sale, at exorbitant prices, to the Gazan civilians for whom the aid was intended to be given for free. Whatever is left is then distributed to the people of Gaza. The humanitarian aid “crisis” has to do not with lack of equitable delivery by Israel but with lack of distribution by Hamas.

Doran thinks that the current administration in the waning days of Biden’s presidency will claim, wrongly, that Israel is blocking humanitarian aid, but then waive the requisite penalty — a cutoff of military assistance. But that won’t be the end of the matter. Such a finding by the Americans that the IDF has been deliberately “blocking aid” to Gaza will immediately be taken up by the anti-Israel brigade — including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres — at the UN. It will be raised in the General Assembly, and a resolution will be passed, in the usual lopsided fashion that all anti-Israel resolutions are passed, but UNGA resolutions are purely symbolic; there is no enforcement mechanism. The Security Council, however, does have the power to enforce its resolutions by, for example, binding states to stop delivering military aid to an offender. At the Security Council, one may foresee a resolution condemning Israel for “blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza as has been determined by the government of the United States.” How can the American ambassador not vote for a resolution that rests on a finding of the American government? Will it be a rerun of UNSC 2334, that declared the “settlements” illegal, and the US abstained instead of casting a veto, thereby letting it be adopted ? Think of the anti-Israel mischief that Senators Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, and Chris Murphy, and Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will be able to make should the Biden administration’s State Department conclude that Israel has been “blocking humanitarian aid” to Gaza?

In two weeks, Trump takes over. January 20 can’t come soon enough.