Those Darned Disobedient Israelis
White House frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu has been a running theme this week, thanks to Vice President Harris’s interview with CBS and early peeks at Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book on President Biden. The coverage revolves around the notion that Israel is disobedient.
“We supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, and yet Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course,” CBS’s Bill Whitaker said to Harris. “The Biden-Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire; he’s resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon; he went in anyway. He has promised to make Iran pay for the missile attack, and that has the potential of expanding the war. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?”
Setting aside the lack of specificity—the administration has said in the past that Hamas was the holdup to a deal, so what exactly is Netanyahu being accused of resisting here?—Harris could easily have rejected the premise of the question. Military aid to Israel is spent here in the U.S., stimulating the domestic economy and ensuring America benefits from Israeli research and development (just as Israel benefits from US research and development). It’s a no-brainer.
But Harris didn’t want to reject the premise, so she gave an incoherent answer implicitly reinforcing the idea that the administration believes it has the right to dictate policy to Israel.
Today’s New York Times carries a long reflection on Biden’s inability to control events in the Middle East over the past year, framing the problem as one of “influence” and its limits. “Even as the United States has continued to arm Israel, the administration has been repeatedly thwarted in reining in Mr. Netanyahu, who has sidestepped or dismissed entreaties from the White House to de-escalate the conflict and leave room for a postwar creation of a Palestinian state,” writes reporter Michael Shear. “And with Israel now poised to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iran, the wider war that Mr. Biden sought to avert is at hand.”
Apparently Biden and Bibi haven’t spoken since Aug. 21. The president feels defeated by his inability to solve two riddles, according to Shear: “How do you pressure an ally facing a threat to its existence? How far should you go if that ally ignores your advice?”
Biden, Shear writes, didn’t fulfill his intent to get all the hostages home. His humanitarian interventions in Gaza flopped. He told Israel not to give in to a rage similar to America’s own after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and yet “decisions by Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet mirrored those of the post-9/11 American politicians who felt that only war would ensure long-term security.”
But there’s one specific category of failure that, if Biden looks closely enough at, he will discern the root cause of all the others. Shear writes: “Mr. Biden’s message then included a blunt warning to Iran and others in the Middle East not to use the fighting in Gaza as an excuse to attack Israel… In the year since, those warnings have proved ineffective. Iran has twice launched missile attacks directly against Israel, including last week, and Mr. Netanyahu is now weighing options for retaliatory strikes. Hezbollah’s near-constant barrage of attacks from Lebanon over Israel’s northern border has triggered a vast Israeli military response over the past several weeks, including the killing of Hezbollah’s leader.”
Biden’s problem, it turns out, isn’t Israel’s defiance—it’s Iran’s defiance. Israel resisted going into Gaza until Hamas got tired of waiting and invaded Israel instead. Israel didn’t go into Lebanon until Iran made clear that it would be the only way to return displaced Israelis to their homes in the north. Iran-backed attacks have continued also from Iraq and Yemen, as well as from Iran itself.
Nobody has been asking Biden or Harris why the Iranians don’t listen to them, perhaps because, outside of sanctions relief, we aren’t supplying them with foreign aid. But that doesn’t explain why these questions aren’t asked just as pointedly about Qatar. The U.S. is Qatar’s largest foreign investor and largest source of imports. In 2022, Biden designated Qatar a Major Non-NATO Ally, a status that brings with it economic benefits, usually in the areas of trade and loans.
It does not explain why these questions aren’t asked of Egypt, a recipient of U.S. aid that enabled this war in the first place by allowing Hamas to connect Gaza to Egyptian territory via underground tunnels and which has mostly declined to play any number of humanitarian roles in the past year.
Turkey is a recipient of US aid and a member of NATO. Does it take marching orders from Washington? How about the Palestinian Authority? Does the US have no sway over anybody? A major obstacle to getting an answer to the question about US influence is that we only seem to ask it about the one country under assault and surrounded by genocidal enemies: Israel.
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