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The last time Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu got into a public spat as ugly as this one was 14 years ago. In March 2010, Biden traveled to Jerusalem to push President Barack Obama’s ambitious peace plans on Netanyahu — the prime minister whom the then-vice president, upon landing, called his “close, personal friend of over 33 years.” Obama wanted a freeze on construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to avoid depriving the Palestinians of land for a future state as U.S. special envoy George Mitchell restarted Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But upon Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu’s government suddenly announced the construction of 1,600 new Israeli apartments in the disputed territory. This humiliated and enraged Biden, who retaliated by keeping his close personal friend “Bibi” waiting for an hour and a half at dinner that night.
Biden publicly criticized Netanyahu for the move, but he also insisted that things be smoothed over, pressing Obama not to turn the contretemps into a major incident. The current dispute between the two men is very different.
In recent weeks, after months of Netanyahu openly defying Biden’s calls for restraint in Gaza, the president launched an unprecedented and very public pressure campaign. He slapped sanctions on Israeli settlers and settlements. He invited Netanyahu’s chief rival, Benny Gantz, to the White House to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris. He issued a National Security Council memo suggesting that military aid to Israel should be conditioned on the delivery of humanitarian aid. And he told MSNBC that Netanyahu was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel,” all the while reportedly fuming in private about what an “asshole” Netanyahu had become.
Earlier this month, after his State of the Union speech, Biden said it was finally time to have a “come to Jesus” talk with Netanyahu, and in recent days he praised Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for effectively advocating Netanyahu’s ouster.
What changed? A lot obviously — not least that the post-Oct. 7 crisis is far worse than anything Israel and the U.S. have faced before, especially with 1,200 Israelis and nearly 32,000 Palestinians dead (according to the Gaza health ministry), famine looming, the entire Mideast about to blow up, and Biden’s reelection threatened.
But it is also apparent that Biden and his administration believe that Netanyahu has played the United States for far too long. And while Biden has built up huge credibility with the Israeli public over the decades, the same is not true of the Israeli leader’s stature in Washington — especially within the Biden administration. After months of being ignored and defied, Biden now recognizes that he may have put too much stock in his personal relationship with his old pal Bibi.
“For Biden, as an old school politician, personal relationships are how you get stuff done. Sometimes it is. But at some point, with someone like Netanyahu, you have to take the measure of this guy and realize relationships don’t mean anything to him,” says Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Biden seems to have been taking way too long to figure that out.”
The president is also facing a serious rebellion from his own Democratic Party, led largely by Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who in February sponsored an amendment conditioning any future aid to Israel on opening up humanitarian corridors. The Van Hollen amendment in turn led to the NSC memo. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine this week, Van Hollen said he hasn’t seen enough effort yet by Biden to make that stick, and he believes the administration is internally divided on how tough to get with Netanyahu.
“There are some in the administration that want to ignore the requirement that Israel’s assurances [of permitting humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza] be credible and reliable,” Van Hollen said. “The Biden administration needs to demonstrate it’s serious by assuring there’s some accountability behind the president’s words. Their credibility is really on the line. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the verge of starvation.”
Asked to comment, a senior administration official said the administration needs to see more assistance from the Israelis, but he believes they have been responding to the new U.S. pressure tactics. One sign is that they have opened up new road crossings in the north, raising the average number of aid trucks getting through to Gaza to 197 a day in March, the highest number since the Oct. 7 crisis began. The bigger issue, the official said, is preventing the Israelis from backsliding. “We’ve seen humanitarian aid surge, and then it stops,” he said.
One by one over the decades, American presidents have decided they’ve had enough of Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, whose arrogance is legendary. Obama hated his guts, agreeing with then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy during a hot-mic moment in 2011 that Netanyahu couldn’t be trusted. “I can’t stand him. He’s a liar,” Sarkozy said. Obama replied, “You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.” Bill Clinton felt pretty much the same. “Netanyahu was nearly insufferable, lecturing us and telling us how to deal with the Arabs,” former U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross wrote in his 2004 memoir, The Missing Peace, recalling Netanyahu’s first visit to the White House as prime minister. “After Netanyahu was gone, Clinton observed: ‘He thinks he is the superpower, and we are here to do whatever he requires.’” The one exception was Donald J. Trump, who simply handed Netanyahu pretty much everything he wanted.
Biden, however, was different from his predecessors in one important way. He and Netanyahu were genuine friends — Biden was “part of our mishpucha,” Netanyahu once said, using the Yiddish word for “family” — having first shared a meal more than 40 years ago when Biden was a junior senator from Delaware and Netanyahu was a deputy chief of mission in Washington. And while Netanyahu, with his sonorous perfect English, built his reputation in Israeli politics by contending he was the only one who could handle the Americans, Biden also long thought he had an edge in handling Netanyahu. Biden loved to joke about their cantankerous, complicated relationship. Even as Obama fumed over Netanyahu’s behavior, Biden declared, in a 2014 speech before the Jewish Federations of North America, that he and Netanyahu were “still buddies,” and he recalled that he had once inscribed a photo for Netanyahu with the words: “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you.” Over and over, Biden declared himself a passionate “Zionist” — “This place, it gets in your blood, it never really lets you go,” he said during that visit to Israel in 2010 — and he was vocal in advocating for Israel’s right to defend itself as it saw fit. Indeed, in 1992, after years in which then-Secretary of State James Baker publicly criticized Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, for his resistance to negotiations, Biden delivered a speech to AIPAC that might be called the anti-Schumer address: “The absurd notion that publicly vilifying Israel will somehow change its policy — who in the hell do we think we’re dealing with?” Biden said then.
All of which helps explain why, 10 days after Israel’s Oct. 7 catastrophe, Biden flew to Jerusalem and gave Netanyahu a big bear hug, declaring his unconditional support while urging Netanyahu not to overreact and turn Oct. 7 into Israel’s Iraq war. For a while that measured approach seemed to be working, especially in restraining Netanyahu from attacking Hezbollah in the north. In an interview with me in early February, a senior administration official calmly insisted that the Israelis “have recognized the need to shift from a high intensity operation to lower intensity in Gaza. We also concur with them that this is the logical next step.”
But the shift never really happened, and images of the bodies of Palestinian children being lined up on the ground, and the desperate search for food, began to take over the narrative — especially as voters in several Democratic primaries registered huge protest votes against Biden. Widespread famine in Gaza could occur by the end of May as “1.1 million people, half of Gaza, experience catastrophic food insecurity,” according to an assessment just released by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global partnership that studies food shortages. Biden desperately needs Israeli cooperation as he sets up a promised shipping pier and pushes for new food supply corridors by land. Above all, Biden and his top officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, have grown increasingly frustrated that Netanyahu and his war cabinet seem to have no future vision for Gaza other than to slaughter a lot more Palestinians. While Blinken flew repeatedly around the region rounding up Saudi and other Arab support for some kind of two-state solution or, at the very least, a revived Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu refused to consider any of it.
“Biden has always prided himself on being someone who can work with people. He is able to swallow a lot of insults that most people can’t,” says his former Senate aide Jonah Blank, a foreign policy expert. “That helps explain why he’s taken more from Netanyahu than most people would be willing to do. Every politician has always seen Netanyahu as a colossal jerk. He was always known to be untrustworthy. But in the past five months he’s gone from being a jerk you can’t rely on to being someone you can’t work with.”
It’s not yet clear that Biden’s new tack is working, but there are some encouraging signs that the ever-defiant Netanyahu may be wavering, at least slightly. The week after Schumer’s stunning Senate address saying Netanyahu had “lost his way” and was an obstacle to peace and calling for new Israeli elections, Biden and Bibi finally had their “come to Jesus” talk. Despite Biden’s previous statement that a major ground incursion into Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold, is a “red line” for him, Netanyahu defiantly told the Knesset the day after the phone call — their first in a month — that he was still planning to do so. But he later said it will “take some time” before the Rafah operation can be launched, and “out of respect” for Biden he was considering new humanitarian corridors for aid because “we of course share this desire to allow an orderly exit of the population and provide aid to the civilian population.” Netanyahu also agreed to send a team of Israeli officials to Washington to lay out in detail, apparently for the first time, what the Americans hope will be a more surgical move into Rafah “that would target key Hamas elements in Rafah and secure the Egypt-Gaza border without a major ground invasion,” as Sullivan put it earlier this week.
Such a scaled-down operation should be possible, according to the Biden administration, because of the huge amount of intelligence Israelis have gathered on Hamas positions since their forces went into Gaza City and Khan Yunis, having penetrated Hamas’s tunnel network. But U.S. officials say the Israelis have not yet presented any military plan whatever to Washington — though they speak at least several times a day — and the administration remains worried the Netanyahu government will continue its scorched-earth approach, creating a whole new crisis between Israel, its U.S. ally, and the rest of the world.
Officials worry that because of Rafah’s dense civilian population of some 1.3 million and the border with Egypt — which has warned Israel against hostilities that might cross into its territory — ridding the city of Hamas poses a much greater military challenge than Gaza City or Khan Yunis did, with more potential for civilian deaths in the event of a major assault. Sullivan was blunt this week in saying that “Israel has not presented us or the world with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them and ensure access to basic things like sanitation.”
For Biden, it’s all been a slow awakening. “After Oct. 7, Biden decided he needed to show his support in the most personal way. So phase one — long and perhaps too long — was the assumption that support and good will in word and deed would be rewarded,” says Nimrod Novik, a former senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The Biden team then “took the gloves off in a very incremental and disjointed way. There were the sanctions on settlers, then settlements, then the NSC memo. I think the turning point, ironically, was the visit of Benny Gantz, when [Biden’s team] reached the conclusion that what is called for is a very different approach. That was when the ‘come to Jesus’ moment took place, and I think it proved effective.”
Some Netanyahu opponents like Novik believe Biden’s pressure could make a critical difference. “It means that rather than a major operation in Rafah in the coming days or weeks, I think we’re going to see the encircling of Rafah. Insulating it from Egypt to prevent smuggling in and out and starting the process of easing the Palestinian population back to the north in a very controlled way, while doing some reconstruction in the north and urging Israel to use this time gap between now and Rafah to flood the [Gaza] Strip with humanitarian assistance,” said Novik, who is now with the Israel Policy Forum.
Last week Netanyahu’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, delivered a letter to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew saying Israel would comply with the demands laid out in Biden’s NSC memorandum from Feb. 8, which made humanitarian aid and the observance of international law a condition for future military assistance. But some, like Van Hollen, believe those words are hollow and are urging Blinken to resist “certifying” Israeli compliance, which he would need to do in the next few days. (The administration would then have 45 days to determine whether Israel is following through on its commitments.)
David Makovsky, a long-time Israel watcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace, says he also believes that Biden’s pressure is beginning to tell on Netanyahu. Another factor, he says, is that Netanyahu is deeply unpopular at home, opinion is shifting dramatically in both Israel and the American Jewish community, and Biden’s deep credibility on the issue is helping. “It’s been a one-two punch against Netanyahu: the humanitarian crisis and the lack of articulating a vision beyond victory. More and more Israelis and Americans see that the way to prosecute this is to do it the way Biden does,” said Makovsky, who is currently consulting in Israel. “If you want to beat Hamas, you have to beat it with a more compelling idea. You can’t beat it with nothing.”
The larger awakening for Biden and his administration, however, has been to realize that an increasingly desperate Netanyahu may no longer be acting in Israel’s interests as much as his own — he faces a slew of corruption charges that could land him in prison once he leaves office — and that for too long Washington has been nurturing Netanyahu’s delusions. One reason for Netanyahu’s current unpopularity in Israel — his approval numbers are hovering below 20 percent — is that many Israelis realize that he laid the groundwork for Oct. 7 by pursuing a policy of ignoring and sidelining the Palestinian issue for years.
Netanyahu pursued a grand strategy of normalizing relations with Arab states under the so-called Abraham Accords, and he boasted privately that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.” Long before the Oct. 7 attacks, his draconian policies turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison,” and he deceived himself that Israel would be safe behind its Iron Dome anti-missile system and fencing along the Gaza border. During his more than 16 years on-and-off as prime minister, Netanyahu’s various governments also deliberately weakened Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which vowed Israel’s destruction. Why? So Netanyahu wouldn’t have to negotiate a state, according to Novik and other Israeli opponents of Israel’s hard-right government.
For a while, at least, Biden more or less went along with Netanyahu’s approach — especially after the administration of George W. Bush, pursuing its quixotic democracy agenda, insisted on Palestinian elections in 2006 and the vote brought Hamas to power, permanently dividing the Palestinian population. Former aides say that, after the Palestinians repeatedly frustrated Biden by turning down one deal for statehood after another — and then began vicious infighting in the mid-2000s — Biden finally got fed up with them.
“He always felt the Palestinians couldn’t organize a two-car funeral,” said Mike Haltzel, a former senior aide to Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He said, ‘Fuck them, I’ve had it with them. If they can’t even get along with each other, how are they going to get along with the Israelis?’”
But this all blew up in everyone’s faces in the most horrific way last October. Now the U.S. mantra once again is: Defeat Hamas, certainly — but find a way to give the Palestinians something resembling statehood. But the Israelis aren’t even close to having that discussion. According to the senior administration official, the single biggest source of “extreme frustration with the Israeli side” is the lack of any credible day-after plan for governance. Yet more moderate members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, such as Gantz, are resisting U.S. efforts to install a revived version of the Palestinian Authority. He added that the absence of any kind of transitional Palestinian authority or security inside Gaza is also holding up distribution of aid and creating chaos as convoys are sometimes mobbed.
When it comes to the Israelis and Palestinians — two peoples who seek, impossibly, to occupy the same point on the map — the same issues just seem to recycle themselves. Today the open rupture between the U.S. and Israeli governments is probably the worst since at least 1989, when the George H.W. Bush administration began pushing hard for negotiations with the Palestinians. Baker stunned AIPAC by calling on Israel to abandon its “unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” that included Gaza and the West Bank and, in later remarks to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, gave then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir the White House phone number, 1-202-456-1414, saying, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.” In one of the very few times that Washington threatened to withhold aid, Baker also bluntly warned Shamir that unless Israel stopped building Jewish settlements in occupied territories, it would not get $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to help resettle hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Could some kind of similar breakthrough happen today, where American pressure finally makes a difference? With the new tack by Biden, Netanyahu’s old claim that he’s the only one who can deal with the Americans is no longer credible. But with the war in Gaza still raging and the Israeli population still traumatized by Oct. 7 and the ongoing hostage crisis, Netanyahu is under no immediate pressure to call new elections. And being Bibi, he’s unlikely to want to appear to cave to Biden. Beyond that, administration officials point out that the problem goes way beyond Netanyahu, since his entire war cabinet is united in wanting to move into Rafah. On Thursday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he plans to invite Netanyahu to address Congress — a defiant move that harks back to 2015, when the prime minister gave a speech to Congress inveighing against the Iran nuclear deal.
That speech enraged both Obama and Biden. But after Trump was elected the following year, he effectively did Netanyahu’s bidding by pulling out of the nuclear pact. (Iran is now closer to building a nuclear weapon than ever before based on the amount of uranium it has enriched, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.)
It remains unclear, at the moment, whether the Biden administration plans to ratchet up the pressure even more. But in recent days the war of words has gotten downright nasty. After Netanyahu complained on CNN about American interference in Israeli politics, Sullivan retorted that it was “an interesting irony” because Netanyahu himself over the years has done the same in U.S. politics and “in fact, we don’t do nearly as much as they [do].” In the 2020 election, Biden was angered by Netanyahu’s support for Trump and didn’t end up calling Netanyahu until a month after he entered office in January 2021.
“If I were advising him right now, I’d say, sir, this is a moral issue, and there is no scenario in which Netanyahu is going to be a credible partner,” says Blank. “So here a few different things you can do if you decide to get tougher.” Biden could start out with an Oval Office address laying out a new course and then suggest that the United States might no longer automatically veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Biden could also decide not to pursue Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia, which Riyadh wants to be conditioned on a defense pact with Washington (and which Netanyahu badly desires, since it would amount to long-sought recognition of Israel by the wealthiest Arab state and the so-called “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”).
Such a showdown may be in the offing. According to Axios, one U.S. official says that an Israeli ground operation in Rafah could prompt Washington, for the first time, to allow passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Already under Biden the U.S. has abstained from a resolution calling for more humanitarian aid in Gaza. Abstaining from the next vote on a ceasefire would send an unmistakable message.
But that may mean playing with political fire at a time when many polls show Biden losing to Trump in November. Biden has to worry about both sides of the issue. In the 1992 election, after pressing Israel hard, George H.W. Bush received just 15 percent of the Jewish vote, the lowest percentage obtained by a Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. At the same time, however, Biden may decide that the threat from progressives unhappy about his uncompromising support for Israel could hurt him in key swing states with large Arab-American populations like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden’s geopolitical standing is in danger, too, as Israel grows more isolated, with several nations including Canada, Holland and Denmark considering a total cut-off in military aid.
Still, Biden’s decision-making could be helped along by Trump, whose rhetoric about the Middle East is getting more and more wild. In an interview this week, Trump awkwardly characterized critics of Netanyahu as people who “hate Israel. And the Democrat party hates Israel.” But Trump then went on to say that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” eliciting sharp criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups as well as groans from his fellow Republicans.
Blinken, along with others in the Biden administration, remains hopeful that, Bibi or no Bibi, the current crisis presents a huge opportunity for Israel, the U.S. and the entire region. “I think as dark as this moment is, there’s also a tremendous opportunity — maybe even a unique opportunity,” Blinken told Al Hadath, a Saudi news outlet, in an interview Wednesday. “Because while there have been many efforts to make peace in the past — I was involved in some of them — what’s different now is that virtually every country in the region would like to actually integrate Israel, normalize relations for those that haven’t, and in effect help Israel provide for its own security. But that requires a resolution to the Palestinian question and particularly a Palestinian state, and, of course, it requires an end to the military operations in Gaza.”
One thing seems certain: Neither Biden nor Netanyahu is likely to back down entirely any time soon. “A lot of people don’t understand how tough Biden can be,” says Haltzel. “He can be a real hard ass. He’s a politician, and he knows how far he can compromise without fatally hurting his political standing. Don’t forget: This is a guy who’s never lost an election.”
But that may be small consolation to some critics, especially the rising tide of dissidents in Biden’s own party. “This is a very important moment,” says Van Hollen. “The president has been more outspoken and more publicly critical of the actions of the Netanyahu government. The president has repeatedly asked the Israelis to open up more. But the real question is, at what point is the Biden administration willing to back up that request with accountability?”
