Washington
CNN
—
U.S.-Israel relations have reached a critical juncture, with President Joe Biden’s fervent support beginning to conflict with broader U.S. national security and moral interests and his own dangerous political positions. This indicates that there is a possibility of reaching the limit.
Biden’s warning in a CNN interview that he would halt some arms shipments to the country if Israel invades the Gaza city of Rafah is the first time since the Reagan administration that he has sought to restrain an ally in a national security crisis. This is the most direct attempt by the United States to make the United States aware of the situation, and the first significant conditionalization. American military aid since the beginning of the war.
Biden’s statement about the ultimate red line took the test of strength with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to its most intense level yet, sending immediate shockwaves through U.S. and Israeli politics and around the world.
The U.S. government says the Israeli military’s full-scale invasion of the heavily populated city of Rafah has resulted in civilian casualties that exceed the 34,000 Palestinians already reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health to have been killed in the Israeli-Hamas war. I’m worried that it will. A senior United Nations official told CNN on Thursday that the city was already “on the brink.” Hospitals are strained as Israeli attacks on the countryside have left Palestinians dead and tens of thousands already displaced.
The massacre of civilians in the Gaza conflict has sparked global outrage and created extreme pressure on Biden at home, threatening to split the Democratic coalition in his tight re-election race against Donald Trump. Republicans have already accused the president of placating terrorists in response to his comments.
Despite U.S. concerns, Netanyahu’s government says it has no choice but to end attacks on Hamas. Hamas has strongholds in civilian areas, including Rafah, where his key leaders are holed up in tunnels. For Netanyahu, eradicating the group that carried out the October 7 attack may be a matter of political survival.
The main questions after this seismic shift in US-Israel relations are:
Will Biden’s move influence Israel’s decision to launch air and ground operations in Rafah, seen as a precursor to a full-scale attack?
Can Israel go it alone with an operation that even the United States has rejected, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed?
• In the long term, will Biden’s move be a temporary lull in relations with the Jewish state’s hard-right government, or a full-scale rift between Israel and the United States?
Will a full-scale offensive in Rafah further impede already stalled attempts to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas? Will it dash US hopes for a regional agreement between Israel and Arab countries? And could an operation that kills hundreds of civilians bring regional temperatures back to a boil and spark new fears of regional war?
• In the United States, belated attempts to put pressure directly on Prime Minister Netanyahu over his defiance of U.S. concerns resulted in the president making far-fetched claims that Republicans were turning their backs on Israel. Will anything help ease the fragile political deadlock within the president’s party as he attacks the president?
18:05 – Source: CNN
President Biden talks economy, Trump and the war in Gaza (full interview with Erin Burnett)
Aron Pincus, the former Israeli consul general in New York, told CNN’s Becky Anderson that the public estrangement between Biden and Netanyahu over Rafah marks one of the most difficult moments in U.S.-Israel relations to date. He said he is doing so.
“I think this is a very low point, but can we maintain this relationship? Yes. Will it be possible while Prime Minister Netanyahu is in power? No,” Pincus said.
Biden’s warning, delivered Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett in the battleground state of Wisconsin, initially seemed like political whiplash.
In his Holocaust remembrance speech on Tuesday, Biden said he is “resolute in his commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and the right to exist as an independent Jewish state.” Even if we disagree. ” But the next day, the president seemed to be sending contradictory messages.
However, these two statements must be considered together, and the key phrase is “even if we disagree.” The president clearly wants to ease the intense internal and international electoral pressures, satisfy his moral desire to protect civilians, and prevent a broader Middle East war, while at the same time making a long-term commitment to Israel’s security. They seem to be trying to create a respectful political space.
However, given the worst attack on Israel’s security in decades and the dangerous intertwining of international and domestic politics, many of these goals may become irreconcilable.
Mr. Biden’s biggest break with Mr. Netanyahu is a moment that was always coming, even if it took months to materialize and was unwillingly engineered on the part of the US president. . The important political interests of the leaders of the United States and Israel, both of whom have their jobs threatened by war, are divergent.
The president and senior government officials have repeatedly warned against Rafah attacks. And after Netanyahu has repeatedly ignored U.S. calls to de-escalate the war in Gaza, his authority and credibility as a world leader will depend on whether Biden heeds his warnings. It depends on
Biden’s statement also said that U.S. interests now put the United States at odds with many allies in Europe and the Middle East, with many allies in the Gaza Strip, and in exacerbating an already epochal humanitarian disaster in the Strip. It implies a judgment that depends on not being seen as complicit. Pretending to be global leadership.
The president also has major political problems. While the Israel-Gaza war is far from the issue most concerned with by American voters, a close race with Trump is expected in crucial battleground states as tens of millions of votes are cast across the country. This means that the election race could be decided by just a few thousand votes. And the demographic groups most affected by the civilian costs of the war and the plight of the Palestinians are Michigan’s young progressive and Arab-American voters who could decide the election.
These are exactly the people the president cannot afford to lose. Biden has already been dubbed “Massacre Joe” at campaign events that are frequently interrupted by protests. The wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses plays into Mr. Trump’s claims that the United States is plagued by left-wing extremism and chaos that Mr. Biden cannot control.
And if large-scale protests take place at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, even if the riots and anti-Vietnam War outrage over the same event at the same venue in 1968 are similar to those that occurred that year when Republicans Even if it were the catalyst that propelled him to the White House, it would raise a painful omen for Biden. Not an exact historical analogy.
Israel’s war cabinet was scheduled to meet on Thursday, offering members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition an opportunity to express their outrage over Biden’s decision. Militarily, the government may have all the supplies it needs to enter Rafah, given its stockpile of weapons and ammunition. Still, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan said Thursday that the U.S. move could undermine Israel’s efforts to reach its goals.
Israel also needs to consider whether an invasion of Rafah without U.S. backing would further erode the global sympathy it received after the October 7 terrorist attacks. Such a step could shatter already protracted negotiations for a ceasefire with Hamas and the return of the remaining Israeli hostages, as well as its broader geopolitical aspirations. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-held view is that Hamas’ attacks are an attempt to wipe Israel off the map, and that he believes Judaism remains a viable option, even if the rest of the world does not share his views. considered to be a threat.
Israel has so far shown no signs of changing its plans. For example, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday: “I want to say this to Israel’s enemies and our best friends: You cannot overpower the State of Israel, you cannot overpower the IDF and the defense establishment.” I warned you.
But if a major invasion of Rafah causes the humanitarian catastrophe that the United States fears, Israel will endure the wave alone, ignoring the administration’s concerns and publicly criticizing Biden repeatedly. right.
The Republicans’ immediate angry reaction to Biden’s comments on CNN highlighted Netanyahu’s long history of political activity in Washington and his Likud alliance with his Republican brethren.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNBC that Biden was defying the will of Congress by threatening to halt arms shipments and “mandating war and Israel’s defense efforts as a condition of arms supplies, which we all know “I’m trying to control it,” he said. They are in dire need. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, said in a post on Truth Social that Biden was “just as he sided with the radical mobs occupying college campuses. “They are siding with the terrorists,” he said.
Arriving on another day of his hush money trial in New York, Trump added that American Jews who voted for Biden should be ashamed, and many in communities with deep ties to Israel who do not support it. Repeated unpleasant metaphors. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hardline government.
Biden’s half-century of support for the Jewish state, Netanyahu’s frequent public rebukes and attempts to undermine him, and the history of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in Washington. Accusations that Biden is undermining Israel’s security are difficult to stand up to, given what he has endured with Democratic presidents.
Just last month, Biden launched a massive U.S. and allied effort to protect Israel from a wave of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles sent by Iran in response to the assassination of a senior Iranian military intelligence official at a diplomatic compound in Damascus. ordered air operations. And Biden recently signed into law a multibillion-dollar arms and ammunition package for Israel that he requested from Congress.
Some observers have drawn similarities to Republican President Ronald Reagan’s delay in shipping arms and fighter jets to Israel in the early 1980s to protest the war effort in Lebanon. . But this showdown occurred at a time when U.S.-Israel relations were less politicized, both in Israel and in the United States, and far less politically damaging to the former president than to the current president.
Among progressive Democrats, initial reaction to Biden’s move was positive but not enthusiastic. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a leader in the progressive movement, said the threat to withhold arms was “an important step in the right direction for President Biden to end bomb shipments to Israel.”
But the political consequences of the president’s response to the Israel-Hamas war are so profound that it may be too late to change them. For many voters, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is a searing moral issue that will not be erased by the president’s belated pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu.
This crisis is one of the most intractable international political dramas to plague a president in a reelection year in living memory. And that would give Biden a series of uncomfortable choices from which it would be nearly impossible for him to emerge politically unscathed.