Following the war in Gaza, you often feel like you’re going crazy, and not just because of the daily atrocities carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

No, it’s that it feels like you’re stuck in a time loop, a geopolitical Groundhog Day where every week or so the same pattern unfolds: Israel slaughters dozens of Palestinian civilians while escalating things to the brink of regional war, Washington tut-tuts and loudly announces a cease-fire deal it claims is backed by Israel and is oh-so-close to being finalized, at which point Israel rejects the deal and continues bombing and escalating, prompting calls to cut Israel off from US military support entirely — which the White House ignores, letting us repeat the cycle all over again.

This is exactly what’s happened this week. Israel has effectively started a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, launching a massive bombing campaign against the country that killed more than five hundred people in a single day, most of them civilians, including fifty children. Though Hezbollah has not quite responded in kind yet, launching a limited amount of rockets at Israeli military bases and some cities, things are close to tipping over the edge, with Israel threatening a ground invasion and Iran’s president ominously warning that “Hezbollah cannot stand alone” against it.

To prevent the Middle East from erupting into all-out war, President Joe Biden and his administration, together with a handful of allied leaders, has put forward a twenty-one-day-long cease-fire proposal that it says Israel supports, while publicly backing Israel’s actions. The deal would, depending on who you listen to, either be unconnected to a deal between Israel and Hamas or possibly serve as an on-ramp to one, or even see Israel announce an end to its systematic destruction of Gaza, the main condition under which Hezbollah has said it would end the rocket attacks that are ostensibly the reason Israel is now attacking Lebanon.

It would be an ideal solution for Biden and the Democrats, who have been trying to find a way to sputter over the finish line this election without getting embroiled in a major war, but without cutting off US military support for Israel. The only problem? Israel refuses to go along with it.

Just as they have for months and months on Gaza, a parade of Israeli officials have in no uncertain terms rejected the deal Biden said they supported on Lebanon and reiterated they will keep their war going there.

“The news about a ceasefire is incorrect. This is an American-French proposal, to which the prime minister did not even respond,” was the statement from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, adding that he had ordered the IDF “to continue the fighting with full force.”

“We will continue throwing Hezbollah off balance and deepening their loss,” said defense minister Yoav Gallant, who has recently butted heads with Netanyahu.

“There will be no ceasefire in the north,” Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz tweeted.

Numerous right-wing politicians, including from Netanyahu’s own party, have spoken out against the idea. So have the head of one of Israel’s “liberal” opposition parties and the heads of frontline authorities in northern Israel, rocket attacks on which are the public reason for why Israel has started this war. The head of the IDF is rhapsodizing about how it “has been waiting for this opportunity for years,” so Israel must “continue attacking Hezbollah.”

Maybe most important, so have Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners, including national security minister and convicted terrorist supporter Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has threatened he will stop cooperating with and even leave government if Netanyahu agrees to the cease-fire with Hezbollah. This threat is reportedly what led Netanyahu to backtrack on early support for the cease-fire idea, which is quite literally the exact same sequence of events that has happened repeatedly with a Gaza cease-fire deal.

Once again, the Biden administration is confronted with the fundamental contradiction of its deluded Israel-Gaza policy: they want to end the war in Gaza and prevent it from spiraling into a regional war that could draw the United States in, but they also want to do so while maintaining public support for Israel and continuing to feed it endless weapons and military support.

This is an impossible scenario because, as we’re now seeing for the hundredth time, not only is the entire Israeli establishment committed to war, but Netanyahu couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to — because his coalition partners will collapse his government, at which point he will stand trial and possibly face prison.

In other words, the one thing the Biden administration doesn’t want to do to stop a regional war — cut off military aid to Israel, so that it physically cannot keep waging war — is the only thing that can do so. Luckily, the idea has majority support from both Democrats and independents, while a Middle Eastern war breaking out would be electorally toxic a month out from voting. So pulling the trigger on this now is a clear no-brainer for the Biden White House, right?

Apparently not. As Israeli officials clarified their rejection of the president’s cease-fire proposal, they announced they had just secured another $8.7 billion worth of US military aid. War it is.