For Biden, Standing Up to Netanyahu Would Be Pro-Israel

To listen to some of Joe Biden’s critics on the right, in suspending shipments of high-payload bombs and discouraging a large incursion into Rafah, the supposed last bastion of Hamas in Gaza, the president has “abandoned” Israel. In reality, the slight pressure Biden has put on Israel thus far is mild compared to what past presidents (such as that radical leftist Ronald Reagan) applied and falls far short of what his critics on the left are demanding.

More importantly, the idea that Biden is betraying or abandoning Israel by threatening to stop underwriting some of the most disastrous political and military decisions its leaders have ever made is nonsense. On the contrary, out of his love for Israel, he should be doing more. By using American influence to guide Israel off its current, dangerous path, Biden would not only save many Palestinian and Israeli lives but also help save Israel from the failures of its own leadership.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions in response to the horrific terrorist attacks of October 7 have put Israel in its most precarious military and diplomatic position in decades. Netanyahu, his far-right allies, and the military technocrats of his war cabinet have turned a justifiable defensive war into a humanitarian catastrophe and a strategic debacle.

Consider what Israel has accomplished since last October: Most of Gaza is in ruins, with hospitals, mosques, schools, and innumerable homes damaged or destroyed. Nearly all of the 2 million people living in Gaza have been at least temporarily displaced. Thousands of innocents are dead, many more are sick and starving, and Israel is still preventing the delivery of most humanitarian aid, despite international condemnation.

As a consequence, Israel has squandered the international goodwill it enjoyed as the victim of the atrocities of October 7. Public opinion abroad, including among Americans, turns further against Israel as the horrific war goes on. On Monday, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Netanyahu excoriated the ICC decision as outrageously equating the democratic state of Israel with the terrorists of Hamas. Biden, unsurprisingly, echoed that opinion. Yet the statement of the ICC prosecutor was eminently measured, reasonable, and based in verifiable fact. It does not demonize Israel as a state or Zionism as an idea, and even notes outright that “Israel, like all States, has a right to take action to defend its population.” It simply cannot do so in ways that violate international humanitarian law, as a growing body of evidence suggests it has done.

And what has Israel gained from all this carnage? Roughly 100 hostages taken on October 7 still languish in Hamas’s tunnels, as do the bodies of dozens more. Hamas has been diminished but not defeated — a goal former IDF chief of staff and war cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot said in January was likely unrealistic. Israel’s planned incursion into Rafah to “finish the job” may not be enough, either. Hamas has begun to regroup in many parts of Gaza Israel supposedly cleared months ago, forcing the IDF to go back and retake these areas. The country that once defeated the armies of all of its neighbors in six days now apparently cannot defeat a terrorist gang in eight months.

Meanwhile, Israel faces the constant threat of escalation. On its northern border with Lebanon, Iran-backed Hezbollah has launched regular missile attacks for the past seven months and has recently begun using more advanced weaponry such as armed drones. Other Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Yemen remain a threat.  And Israel has already come alarmingly close to a direct war with Iran itself.

Netanyahu has refused to articulate a strategy or vision for how the war will end and how Gaza will be governed once Hamas’s pseudo-state has been dismantled. He has only said what he will not agree to: no handing Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, no resumption of Israeli political control, and of course no discussion of Palestinian statehood. He continues to insist that these crucial issues cannot be discussed until Hamas is defeated militarily.

The situation has gotten bad enough that IDF leaders have started to speak out publicly. Earlier this month, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi slammed Netanyahu’s lack of a “day after” strategy, calling it the reason the army has had to refight battles in northern Gaza. Last week, defense minister Yoav Gallant said Netanyahu’s cabinet had refused his repeated requests to discuss a postwar alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza. He also called on the prime minister to declare that Israel will not reoccupy Gaza or establish an ongoing military presence there, where far-right parties are pushing for reestablishing Israeli settlements.

Then on Saturday, Benny Gantz, another former IDF chief of staff who leads the centrist National Unity party and joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet in October, gave the prime minister a deadline of June 8 to come up with a plan for freeing the remaining hostages and addressing the future governance of Gaza and other pressing issues like the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, or else Gantz and his party would quit the wartime unity government. This would not topple Netanyahu’s coalition, but it would tank his legitimacy and make it harder for him to act without the support of his most radical allies.

The prime minister is not losing the support of current and former military leaders because of a clash of ideologies. These men are not peaceniks. Perhaps ironically, the greatest threats to Netanyahu’s continued hold on power are not his bigotry, corruption, self-serving politics, or moral bankruptcy, but his incompetence and lack of strategic vision. Jewish Israelis are broadly supportive of the war in Gaza, which they see through an increasingly censored media that obstructs their view of the humanitarian catastrophe. Many Israelis are angry at Netanyahu, not for conducting the war immorally or illegally but because he is failing to achieve its objectives, especially rescuing the hostages.

Netanyahu has had a dismal track record as prime minister over most of the past 15 years. He has enabled extremists to take control of Israel, coddling ultranationalist terrorists as they have harassed, driven out, and murdered Palestinians in the West Bank to make room for illegal settlements. He has protected and promoted the settlement movement, carving up the occupied territory into ever smaller and less inhabitable pieces. He has besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank while imagining Israel itself as under siege. He has rattled sabers at Iran and cozied up to the authoritarian government of Saudi Arabia while allowing Hamas to build up its power base in Gaza, all the better to keep the Palestinian territories divided and forestall any discussion of statehood.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s lack of a vision for the end of this war is a microcosm of his broader disinterest in long-term solutions. How does Netanyahu envision the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ending? In short, he doesn’t. He rejects the two-state solution and has done his best to make Palestinian statehood impossible on the ground, but he also would never countenance giving West Bankers and Gazans equal rights in a single, binational state. He is too politically intelligent to espouse ethnic cleansing in so many words, but some of his partners are increasingly comfortable saying the quiet part out loud and admitting that the only way their vision of “greater Israel” really works is if the Palestinians are gone.

For his part, Netanyahu has advanced a doctrine of managing the conflict rather than attempting to resolve it, promising voters that they could have security, prosperity, and even normalized relations with the Arab world without having to give up territory or make any concessions or compromises. Until the catastrophic security and intelligence failures of October 7, it almost looked like he could pull it off. Since then, the folly of that doctrine has been on full, horrifying display. A decade and a half of Netanyahu’s rule has made Israel weaker, not stronger — and with this war, he is putting it on the wrong side of history.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer put words to this reality in March, when he denounced Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace and called for new elections to replace him. “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,” Schumer said, expressing a liberal pro-Israel perspective on the conflict that is both practically and morally correct: As long as the Israeli government refuses to work toward a lasting peace, it is failing in its essential mission of providing security for its citizens and making the world safer for Jews writ large.

If Biden embraces this perspective, he should be more forthright in articulating it: Netanyahu’s poor leadership is endangering Israel, not protecting it; his actions are destabilizing the Middle East in a way that implicates U.S. interests; and while the U.S. will always support Israel’s right to exist and its citizens’ right to live in safety, it cannot support actions that ultimately jeopardize those goals.

Biden can stop bankrolling potential war crimes in Gaza without abandoning the U.S. commitment to Israel’s defense. As former Vermont senator Patrick Leahy explained in the Washington Post on Monday, the 1997 law (he authored) prohibiting U.S. aid to foreign security forces that violate human rights applies to individual units, not entire countries. Biden can and should apply the Leahy law to stop U.S. weapons from being used by Israeli military units that violate human rights unless or until Israel brings the perpetrators to justice.

Refusing to support Netanyahu’s conduct of this war is entirely consistent with believing that Israel has the right to defend itself, even “by any means necessary,” because the war in Gaza has gone far beyond what any objective observer would consider necessary means, and still, it is not achieving its actual defensive objectives. The notion that Israel cannot successfully wage war without 2,000-pound American bombs is belied by the fact that it has not been successful even while making liberal use of them.

Biden will never be able to avoid disingenuous right-wing attacks that equate saying “no” to Israel with giving aid and comfort to terrorists any more than he can avoid left-wing attacks that insist that any support for Israel amounts to backing racism, colonialism, and genocide. What he can do is more effectively differentiate between Israel, which he loves, and its prime minister, whom he does not and should not stand behind. Just as Israel’s top generals are now insisting that Netanyahu present a coherent strategy for ending the war, Biden should feel free to join them in that demand, along with plans for alleviating the immediate humanitarian crisis and rebuilding Gaza once the war is over.

Even with the lever of American military aid, Biden might not be able to force Netanyahu to change course. The only future the prime minister really envisions for Israel is one in which he gets to remain in power, and as long as the country is actively at war, the easier it will be for him to hold onto that power (as well as avoid prosecution on corruption charges). Israel’s military leadership, similarly, has an interest in prolonging the war to dodge accountability for the failures that allowed October 7 to happen. And Netanyahu’s religious and ultranationalist allies on the far right see the war as a means of crushing Palestinian national aspirations and affirming Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.

Nevertheless, if Biden wishes for Israel to survive its current government, he must use his influence to counter its self-destructive impulses as far as he can. Such a stance would be consistent with the interests and desires of American Jews, a bedrock demographic of Biden’s voter base, who feel a deep connection to Israel but have met its rightward turn with despair  and find ourselves increasingly unable to support its leaders’ decision. If he succeeds, history will remember it as the most pro-Israel thing he’s ever done.