It is time for a ceasefire in Gaza, after Israeli soldiers killed the Hamas leader Yahia Sinwar. This is what the United States and the main European leaders believe, increasing pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the message that he should take advantage of the moment to seek peace.
Whether they will be able to convince him is not at all clear. Netanyahu has already said that “the mission is not over,” although with the death of Sinwar “evil has suffered a severe blow.”
Some Western leaders talk about “opportunity”; others, “occasion”; or “new perspectives.” But the message — a year after the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, which left some 1,200 dead, and the Israeli response in which more than 42,000 people have died in Gaza — is similar.
“I told the Prime Minister of Israel yesterday (Thursday): ‘Let’s make this moment an opportunity to seek peace, a better future for Gaza without Hamas,’ US President Joe Biden declared in a speech on Friday. appearance in Berlin with the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He agreed: “We now hope to see the concrete perspective of a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement for the release of the Hamas hostages.”
Biden described Sinwar’s death as “a moment of justice.” “He has the blood of Americans, Israelis, Palestinians, Germans and so many others on his hands,” he said. “Joe, we have always supported your efforts in this conflict and we will continue to do so,” Scholz told him. “Our joint objective is a credible political process towards a two-state solution, and we are fully committed to them.”
In Brussels, where he was participating in the European Union summit, French President Emmanuel Macron described Sinwar’s death as “a military success for Israel.” But he added: “This opportunity must be taken advantage of so that all the hostages are freed and the war finally stops.”
Macron will meet this afternoon in Berlin with Scholz, Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The four plan to address, in addition to the situation in the Middle East, he plan for victory that these days the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has begun to reveal.
Biden is in Berlin for his first and probably last official visit to the German capital. The visit should have taken place a week before, but the president of the United States postponed it to be in his country during Hurricane Milton.
Three weeks before the presidential elections in the United States that will elect his successor, the visit has an air of farewell. Farewell to a president and an era, because “with him, the last president for whom the transatlantic alliance was something that was taken for granted says goodbye,” as the newspaper writes. Munich Merkur. Both his vice president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump, rivals in the November presidential elections, have less attachment to Europe, due to biographical history and world view.
In a solemn and emotional ceremony at the Bellevue Palace, seat of the Head of State, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded Biden the Grand Cross of Honor of the Federal Republic. Biden recalled the fall of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago, “one of the great advances in human dignity during (his) lifetime.” “Germany,” he recalled, “taught us that change is possible.” Steinmeier praised his counterpart for having “restored the transatlantic alliance” upon coming to power in 2021, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It was a stroke of fortune to have you at this time.”
But Biden, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungis now “a lame duck”, a president with little influence, and in Berlin, Paris or Brussels everything is calculations about what will happen depending on who succeeds him after the elections. If Democrat Harris wins, according to the aforementioned newspaper, “the broad lines of Biden’s policy will not change,” but a return of Donald Trump to the White House will mean a return to “isolationism” and “skepticism toward alliances.”
Be that as it may, the impression in Berlin, and other European capitals, is that without Joe Bidenwho grew up politically in the Cold War and who saw Europe as the center of his country’s interests, nothing will ever be the same in the relationship with the United States. The Christian Democratic deputy Norbert Röttgen emphasizes that, in the event of Trump’s victory, Europeans will have to adapt to the new situation in an “accelerated time”, while if Harris wins there would also be changes in the transatlantic relationship, but the adaptation could be “a process.”
In some capitals there is a conviction that, without having to face new electoral campaigns and with the sole objective of shaping his legacy, Biden can take steps in the final months of his mandate that at other times would be more complicated. In the appearance without questions at the Berlin Chancellery, Biden and Scholz avoided commenting on the plan for Zelensky’s victory, which calls for, among other points, an immediate invitation for Ukraine to enter NATO.
