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Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor
Critics from the right, including in the Republican Party, feel that Biden isn’t doing enough to clearly support Israel. They say Biden is too squeamish about Palestinian suffering, which, despite nearly half a year of Israeli onslaught, they pin squarely on Hamas, whose Oct. 7 strike on Israel marked the single deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.
And some, especially those who champion former president Donald Trump’s de facto alliance with Israel’s right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, resent Biden’s symbolic gestures to restore balance to U.S.-Israeli relations. These include his administration’s decision to slap sanctions on a handful of Israeli settlers implicated in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and a recent determination that Israeli settlements there were “inconsistent with international law,” a reversal of a Trump-era doctrine that controversially argued the opposite.
U.S. officials and their Arab counterparts are meeting over the potential outlines of a truce that can be brokered between Israel and Hamas. Over the weekend, Vice President Harris called on Hamas to accede to the terms being floated in order for there to be an “immediate” cease-fire. She also said there were “no excuses” for Israel not to do more to allow aid into starved, battered Gaza, where reports are mounting of babies dying of malnutrition and disease.
This week in Washington, the growing tensions between the White House and Netanyahu are coming to the fore. Biden may have offered Israel a “bear hug” in support in the wake of Oct. 7, but he is increasingly keeping the embattled Israeli prime minister at arm’s length. Instead, administration officials are meeting with Netanyahu’s centrist rival Benny Gantz, who is also a member of the country's wartime cabinet.
Gantz arrived in Washington for meetings Monday and Tuesday with administration officials, including Harris, as well as Democratic and Republican lawmakers. For the White House, Gantz represents a more reasonable, palatable Israeli leader, who, unlike Netanyahu, isn’t dogged by corruption charges and hasn’t spent the past decade meddling in Washington’s partisan politics. That’s no small consideration, as the Democratic establishment is reckoning with growing outrage about the ongoing war among its base.
“While Gantz will employ an undoubtedly hawkish approach to the Palestinians as well, he does not carry Netanyahu’s sullied name and reputation,” noted Ben Samuels in Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Democratic lawmakers are fully aware of the difficult position they find themselves in while trying to navigate criticism of Israeli policy with support of Israel as an ally. Gantz provides them with a self-correcting mechanism.”
Gantz’s trip was reportedly unsanctioned by the prime minister’s office and led to howls of disapproval from Netanyahu’s right-wing allies. Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich accused Gantz of being an accomplice to the Biden administration’s larger project of revitalizing the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis and working toward the long-sought creation of a Palestinian state.
“The U.S. government is looking for places to drive a wedge between Israelis, in order to advance its plans, with the help of Gantz,” Smotrich said Monday at a meeting in Jerusalem. “In this way, Gantz is working to advance their plans to establish a Palestinian state.”
Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition both to Palestinian statehood and Biden’s postwar vision. Many Israeli analysts suggest the prime minister is hitching his political survival to the continuation of the war and the foreclosing of any discussion of concessions to Palestinians, let alone the creation of an independent Palestinian state, to appease the Israeli far right which anchors his ruling coalition.
While Gantz and other more centrist leaders are hardly boosters of Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, administration officials believe they are more amenable to the postwar future the White House hopes to see: An incremental process through which a “reformed” Palestinian Authority takes on control of Gaza, with the considerable support of wealthy Arab neighbors that, at the same time, will work to improve ties with Israel and further integrate it into the region. The grand prize of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia looms large.
“The Biden approach gives Israel an alternative to an open-ended occupation of Gaza and hope to Palestinians who need an alternative to the Hamas ideology and the perpetual conflict it brings,” observed Nimrod Novik of the Israel Policy Forum in an op-ed. But he added that Biden and the United States must do more to “communicate to Israelis the potency of this promise … and refute Netanyahu’s distortions.”
Writing in the New Yorker, Bernard Avishai argued that Biden must put his thumb on the scales of Israeli politics and push back more strongly against Netanyahu and his cohort, even if that involves exerting leverage in international settings like the United Nations where the White House has shielded Israel from censure.
“There are secular leaders in Israel positioned to support an alternative vision for Gaza and the region, and, arguably, to bring Netanyahu down,” Avishai wrote. “But dread grips the public, and these leaders currently have no real standing in the absence of a U.S. president detailing a plan, proving the support of Arab allies, and warning Israel of the dire consequences of defying him.”
