Could Joe Biden save the Middle East and haul Israel back from the brink of disaster?

If there’s one person in the world that the famously stubborn prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, will listen to, it’s the president of the United States. The American secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was there to listen on his “shuttle diplomacy” tour of the region. Duly briefed on the hopes and fears of Israel and its neighbours, his chief, Mr Biden, now arrives in Jerusalem to offer some feedback to Mr Netanyahu and his colleagues – and ask some difficult questions. Mr Netanyahu would do well to heed Mr Biden’s words and offer some cogent answers.

Mr Biden has already publicly stated that an Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a “mistake”. That seems obvious, and such an exercise would in any case be beyond even the Israel Defence Forces at its most determined. An “open-air prison” with 2 million inmates, half with no shelter, and all short of water, food and medicines is not a viable outcome.

On the other hand, the president has also, tacitly, accepted that some form of invasion of Gaza will take place in the coming days, and has shown sensitivity as to why that is inevitable: “Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust… Israel has to respond.”