Can the US envoy to the Middle East, an Israeli army veteran, end the war?

On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant met US special envoy Amos Hochstein in Washington DC like two old friends, discussing how to address the Gaza war as well as escalating tensions between Tel Aviv and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Hochstein is a very well-known figure in Israel, where he was born and served in the military as a tank crewman in the 1990s. As a businessman, he was also involved as the get-go between Israel and the US, particularly in regard to the energy sector.

Last week, the Israeli military veteran was in Lebanon, where he should not have stepped foot under normal circumstances due to Beirut’s visa regulations on permanent or temporary Israeli residents except with special permissions.

Hochstein did not face deportation from Lebanon thanks to his top American diplomatic status, meeting Lebanese officials, including the country’s acting prime minister and army chief. The US envoy told them that Hezbollah, Israel’s nemesis, is mistaken if the Iran-backed group thinks that Washington would stop the Netanyahu government from invading Lebanon.

Experts say that Hochstein’s Israeli background and his political rhetoric are clear signs that the US has no sincerity to draw the Gaza war to a close as well as de-escalating tensions between Hezbollah and Tel Aviv.

“Appointing Amos Hochstein as a peace envoy reflects the Biden administration's lack of seriousness about ending the conflict between the Lebanese resistance and Israel, as well as the Israeli war on Gaza since both issues are intrinsically linked,” says Ramzy Baroud, an author and a Palestinian political analyst.

Barnett Rubin, an American political scientist who served as a senior advisor to the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past, also finds Hochstein’s appointment as the UN peace envoy an odd choice.

“Of course, it is obviously inappropriate,” Rubin says. When the professor was asked about the merits of his appointment by the Biden administration, “I can’t explain it,” the professor tells TRT World.

Can Hochstein meditate properly?

Over the years, different US administrations - either Democrat or Republican - have adhered to the belief that defending Israel is defending American interests in the Middle East. However, Hochstein’s appointment at a time when pro-Palestine protests have hit major American university campuses might unnecessarily send wrong signals to different capitals in the volatile region.

In 2021, when Hochstein visited Lebanon as the Senior Advisor for Energy Security – appointed by the American Jewish diplomat and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the move had raised eyebrows in Beirut. At the time, Hochstein was tasked with mediating Lebanon-Israel maritime border negotiations.

During the visit, Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib had to emphasise that Beirut deals with Hochstein as “an American envoy responsible to his administration, and not in his Israeli capacity,” indicating odd perceptions of the Israeli-born US diplomat.

“As a former Israeli soldier and a pro-Israeli US official, Hochstein's loyalties are clearly on the side of Israel. Like other US officials, including Blinken, he is beholden to Israeli political priorities, that of security, defeating Arab resistance and restoring the so-called military deterrence,” Baroud tells TRT World.

But political actors in the Middle East, from Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Hamas and others, are not “oblivious to Hochstein's political allegiance” and clearly decipher Washington’s message to them “through appointing an Israeli war veteran as its peace envoy”, according to Baroud.

“The appointment itself represents a subtle threat, that the US sees itself as a party in the war, and that it would go to any length to defend Israel,” the Palestinian analyst adds.

“However, such messaging will not alter the facts on the ground, that the US no longer controls all the cards, and that Israel is trapped in its own arrogance, both in Gaza and Lebanon.”

Who is Hochstein?

Hochstein describes himself as “a modern Orthodox Jew.” His American Jewish parents immigrated to Israel, and he was born there in 1973. From the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, he served as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic Party members on Capitol Hill in various capacities.

During this time, he was also part of US back-channel discussions with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on resettling Palestinian refugees in the country’s central areas in exchange for lifting American sanctions, according to a memoir penned by Graf Hans-Christof Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq in the 1990s.

When he took a sabbatical for some time, he worked as Executive Vice President of International Operations at Cassidy & Associates, a US lobbying firm, until 2011, when he joined the Obama administration as an energy diplomat.

In 2014, he became Obama's Special Envoy and Coordinator of International Energy Affairs. Later, he was appointed as Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. After a brief interval due to the Trump presidency, Hochstein returned to his official clout in Washington under the Biden administration in 2021.

Until he was appointed the American envoy to the Middle East, Hochstein had served as Biden's Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security and, most lately, as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor for Energy and Investment.

During his energy tenures, Hochstein was credited with settling the Israeli–Lebanese maritime border dispute. “On behalf of the State of Israel, I thank American mediator @AmosHochstein for his hard work to bring about this historic agreement,” wrote Yair Lapir, then-Israeli prime minister in 2022, on X.