How Biden and Bibi fell out

After the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, President Biden offered his total and unflinching support for retribution against the terrorist-designated rulers of the Gaza Strip. Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu vowed to annihilate every member of Hamas and to gain the release of the 252 Israeli and foreign hostages abducted and taken into Gaza. Biden agreed that these objectives were right and proper. So, too, did other like-minded nations, appalled by the images and reports of slaughter, rape and brutality by Hamas.

Relations between Washington and Tel Aviv are not beyond repair

Nearly eight months later, that policy of unflinching support for Israel has gone through several stages of doubt, alarm, dismay and anger. What went so badly wrong? Did the Biden administration underestimate or misinterpret what Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing members of his cabinet had in mind? As a faithful and longstanding ally to Israel, did Biden naively trust Netanyahu to perform what many Middle East specialists saw as an impossible mission: to remove every trace of Hamas in Gaza by military force without inflicting suffering on the Palestinian people?

In other words, Netanyahu was promising not a total war, but a clinical dismantling of the Hamas leadership and organizational structure in Gaza. The Pentagon sent a high-ranking urban warfare veteran to spell out how he thought it could be done, and warned of the risks of high civilian casualties. Israel took all the advice from its allies but what followed over the following months looked to the outside world neither clinical nor precision-guided.

The manner in which the Israeli Defense Forces bombed and shelled their way into the multitude of Hamas hideouts, all located within or beneath the densely populated civilian population began very rapidly to undermine the Washington/Tel Aviv relationship, upon which the survival of Israel has depended for decades. Moreover, the back-and-forth by Biden’s top national security officials, urging Netanyahu to start planning for a post-war Gaza and to accept the reality that Hamas in some form would probably survive met with stubborn rejection.

“American officials and others are having the same difficulty that [Benny] Gantz and [Yoav] Gallant [part of the three-man war cabinet along with Netanyahu] are having which is understanding what Bibi’s strategic endgame is,” said a veteran US defense source with long experience of Middle East politics. “Ultimately, Biden and Bibi are operating on very different political calculations. Bibi’s is political survival after his disastrous management of Israeli security was revealed by 10/7 and Biden is trying to navigate US election-year politics and a party deeply divided over support for Israel,” the source said. 

“When one looks back over the history of US-Israel relations during Middle East wars it is not surprising that they would hit a bumpy patch but that it has taken so long to emerge.”

Conscious of his own vulnerability as Israel’s leader, Netanyahu has told his recent Washington visitors that he had no other option but to pursue the top military leadership of Hamas, and to destroy the remaining four out of an original twenty-four combat battalions still operating in Gaza. The IDF have killed around 14,000 Hamas fighters, according to Israeli figures. This would mean that of the 35,000 Palestinian deaths reported by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza but disputed by Tel Aviv, since the war began, 40 percent were members of the terror group. 

Netanyahu has been trying to get this message across, but the reality is that as the Palestinian civilian casualty figures rose exponentially and television broadcasters highlighted the terrible scenes of women and children injured and dying in Gaza, the impact was generating increasing alarm in Washington. 

Netanyahu wants not just the elimination of Hamas. He wants any future Gaza to be demilitarized

Pro-Palestinian protests, denouncing the continued sale of arms to Israel, proliferated in the US, adding to Biden’s discomfort in election year. The president started issuing red lines to Netanyahu. Israel, he said, must not do to the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, what it had done to Gaza City and to Khan Younis, also in the south, where destruction and civilian deaths — known in the military as “collateral damage” — had been judged in Washington to be wildly disproportionate. Even though the principal Hamas leaders in Gaza — Yahya Sinwar and Mohamed Deif — were at one point thought to be in bunkers beneath Rafah, Biden told Netanyahu an all-out attack on the city would be unacceptable and would have consequences for future arms shipments to Israel.

This warning was duly followed up with a suspended delivery of 1,800 of American 2,000-lb air-launched bombs and 1,700 500-lb bombs which had caused such devastation in northern and central Gaza, and in Khan Younis. “We are especially focused on the end-use of the 2,000-lb bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza,” said Major-General Pat Ryder, Pentagon press spokesman.  

“We have not made a final determination on how to proceed with this shipment,” he said.

Netanyahu did take due notice when the Pentagon delivery of heavy bombs was halted, on Biden’s instructions. Rafah has come under attack but so far not on the scale and shock-and-awe gravity of strikes in the earlier stages of the war elsewhere in Gaza. The vast majority of the 1.2 million Palestinian refugees in the city have moved out to a supposedly safer area to escape the Israeli airstrikes, following leaflet warnings and telephone calls made by the IDF.

While Washington may have breathed a sigh of relief, there has been rising irritation about Netanyahu’s refusal to think beyond the bombs, to start planning for a meaningful political future for Gaza, in which the Palestinians would have independent control over their own destiny. The so-called two-state solution — Israel for the Jewish people and Palestine for the Palestinian people — first negotiated as part of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s (and subsequently aborted) has been persistently promoted by the Biden administration. However, the likelihood of that concept emerging from the current war has become progressively unrealizable because of Netanyahu’s total opposition.

It is a major reason why Biden and his national security team have become so frustrated by the Israeli leader’s actions and his perceived obstructive approach to anything that looks and sounds like giving Palestinians their independence and sovereignty. Netanyahu wants not just the elimination of Hamas. He wants any future Gaza to be demilitarized so that no attack of any kind can ever again be launched against Israel from the territory. And that means, in his view, a strong Israeli presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, maintaining security control over all land west of Jordan, including the occupied West Bank and Gaza territories.

So, for months, relations between Washington and Tel Aviv have been deteriorating. But they are not beyond repair. 

When the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that arrest warrants would be applied for Netanyahu and for Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, as well as for the three top Hamas leaders, accusing them jointly of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Biden denounced the decision as “outrageous.” The unequivocal condemnation by Biden must have been a good moment for Netanyahu. But it won’t have removed the underlying tension and strain that continue to put the political, diplomatic and personal relations between Washington and Tel Aviv in jeopardy.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.