Netanyahu’s line of credit with Biden has almost run out

In the days after the October 7 massacre, US President Joe Biden rushed to Israel, stood shoulder to shoulder with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and pledged what sounded like almost unlimited support for Israel’s highly justifiable counterstrike. At this point, however, Israel’s line of credit has almost run out.

Most Western leaders support Israel’s right to self-defence. Its goal of removing the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group from power in Gaza was not unreasonable after almost two decades of absorbing thousands of rockets and other terrorist attacks. The last straw was the horrendous Hamas invasion during which 1200 people were barbarously murdered and over 240 abducted and taken hostage, including women, children and the elderly.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraces President Joe Biden after the US president arrived in Israel on October 18.Credit: AP

But the Gaza war has not gone well. Approaching the half-year point, it has killed many thousands of Gazans (along with hundreds of Israeli combatants). More than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, dozens of them believed dead. Hamas remains in charge of the Rafah region in southern Gaza, to which most of the strip’s 2.2 million people have been displaced. Its terrorists continue to emerge from tunnels in other parts of the strip, commandeering aid shipments and causing mayhem. They’re beaten but unbowed.

Netanyahu, reviled around the world and widely distrusted at home, has refused to articulate a day-after plan that might calm the region; Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have upended maritime trade by impeding access to the Suez Canal; anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments rage around the world. And, critically, in the US, Biden’s re-election chances are undermined by Netanyahu’s provocations.

The war has become a conflict of narratives that surfaced the depth of general antipathy toward Israel in much of the world, including among many Western youth. It has divided US Democrats, pitting Muslims and progressives on one side versus Jews and centrists on the other – becoming a wedge issue in a party that needs its entire coalition together in November. Muslims are crucial in Michigan, a state carried by Biden in 2020 which if flipped could toss the whole election to Donald Trump.

It is clear that Biden needs the war to end, or at least for the images of carnage to stop. He did not sign up for another forever war in the Middle East. Indeed, his team has pulled together a rather impressive package for Israel to tempt it to desist. First, it seeks for a version of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, reformed, rejuvenated and improved, to be installed in Gaza. This is exactly what Israel itself had demanded since the 2007 coup by Hamas against the PA, and Hamas would surely otherwise return to take over any vacuum.

It also asks that Israel resumes a two-state negotiation with the Palestinian Authority, because Netanyahu himself agreed to this in the past and Israel needs it to not lose either the Jewish majority or its democratic foundations in the area under its control. Saudi Arabia and perhaps other moderate Sunni Arab countries might then also join the circle of peace with Israel, and set up a mutual strategic umbrella together with the United States and the West as a counterbalance to Iran and its proxies.

Pressure would then grow on Hamas to surrender, or else Israel will be allowed to finish off the group, but this time with international legitimacy restored.

This would be a good outcome for Israel after a devastating several months. But Netanyahu rejects it because he fears extreme right parties will bring down his coalition and every poll suggests he would be trounced in a new election because Israelis rightly blame him and his right-religious bloc for the mistakes that led to the October 7 debacle.

That Israel should be rejecting the outstretched hand of peace, and the victory of reason over chaos, is a strategic and moral failing of the highest order – perhaps the worst thing Netanyahu has done in his 35 years in politics, which is a high bar indeed.

Consequently, Biden in recent months has accused Israel of “indiscriminate” bombings and of “over the top actions,” and the Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate has accused Netanyahu specifically of being an impediment to peace. In Israel just last week, an anonymous “senior official” – generally a euphemism for the premier himself – accused the Biden administration of trying to bring down the Israeli government. And if that were indeed Netanyahu, it might be the truest thing this famously dissembling politician has ever said.

It is not just Biden who would like Netanyahu gone. The Israeli leader has been anathema in the entire Democratic Party – a process that began when he addressed Congress in 2015 arguing against the Iran nuclear deal (a position that contradicted that of many Israeli security experts and which today, after Trump’s thoughtless walkaway from the agreement, has Iran closer to a bomb than before).

He is reviled in most of the West and opposed by close to the entire security establishment of Israel as well as the business and academic communities, especially after his 2023 effort to eviscerate Israel’s judiciary. Every poll shows Netanyahu’s current coalition would be trounced in a new vote. This creates a clear interest on the part of Netanyahu to prolong the war, arguing that wartime is no time for politics.

Israelis are running out of patience. A looming deadline imposed by the Supreme Court for drafting Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox coalition allies – whose youth, by the tens of thousands, evade the military – could bring matters to a boil.

For the moment, Netanyahu’s majority of 64 of 120 Knesset seats is holding, despite its obvious incompetence. But the public is so hostile to many of them, and the logic of the situation is so howling for their demise, that there are a host of theories of how the government might be brought down. Rarely in history has there been such a clamour for five Brutuses to bring down – politically – a Julius Caesar.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. He also served as the chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem.

Gilead Sher is the former chief of staff of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and a senior peace negotiator. A fellow in Middle East peace and security at Rice University’s Baker Institute, he chairs Sapir Academic College adjacent to the Gaza border, operating under Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire since 2001.

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