Nearly a dozen displaced residents of the Galilee returned to Israel on Thursday amid a barrage of heavy Hezbollah fire, after spending several days in Washington, DC meeting with elected and administration officials to share their eight months of experiences living within Israel’s second battlefront.
Facilitated by Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States and founder of the Israel Advocacy Group, the delegation was organized in a matter of days; reflecting the urgency of the unfolding crisis creeping southward and westward.
The delegation met with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY); Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL); Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (D-WA); Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D- NY); Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA); Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ); Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D-FL); Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D -CA); Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Jewish leaders including American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch.
Oren first spoke to The Jerusalem Post over the phone on Wednesday afternoon while he and several of the delegates were en route to the White House for a meeting with Russ Headlee, National Security Council director for Jordan and Lebanon, and Samantha Sutton, the National Security Council’s director for Israel and Palestinian Affairs.
Oren spoke with the Post again on Thursday morning after the meeting, which he called warm and productive. Sutton and Headlee appreciated hearing the first-person accounts of the “intolerable situation in the North,” he said.
Wednesday’s meeting took place at a unique, yet precarious, moment as Hamas had just turned down Israel’s ceasefire proposal, and the National Security Council was forced to reassess the situation both in terms of the failed hostage negotiations and the increasingly escalating situation up north, according to Oren.
Oren said the delegation asked, what’s your advice to us?
Oren pressed Sutton and Headlee for specifics as he said the directors didn’t have solid answers for the delegation.
Fear of a wider conflict
“America is very concerned and does not want to get entangled in a regional conflagration, and there’s certainly possibilities with that,” Oren told the Post. “We have long-standing differences with the United States on this. The United States believes in a country called Lebanon with an army. We believe there’s a country called Hezbollah, with Hezbollah.”
Oren was clear on what he was looking for from the United States and the White House.
“In the past, [Biden] has said: ‘don’t.’ Remember that message?” Oren said of President Joe Biden’s message to Iran in April. “That message should be reinforced now.”
The message includes the United States conveying that it won’t just defend Israel passively, he added.
Oren said the United States needs to give Israel full backing to “do what it needs to do” to neutralize the Hezbollah threat and ease up on the pressure against Israeli forces operating in Gaza.
“We need to finish up major military operations in Gaza as soon as possible so we can focus our energies on the north,” he said.
Oren and others concerned with Hezbollah have asked for hearings on Capitol Hill, as Oren said the situation could easily spin out of control and involve the United States military, which is one of the reasons Oren said the administration is pressing Israel not to respond to Hezbollah in a more robust fashion.
“But the situation is simply intolerable,” Oren said. “What’s happening is that Hezbollah is realizing Israel’s worst nightmare which is a war of creeping attrition, where every day the rocket fires are advancing southward, but Hezbollah is not giving us a clear trigger that we can respond to.”
At what point does it become a full state of war, Oren asked.
“We cannot play by Hezbollah’s rules here, we have to break out of this,” Oren said. “It would be extremely important if we had America’s backing.”