Joe Biden’s rift with Benjamin Netanyahu is a fracture that has been coming for weeks

US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP

The fracture in the relationship between Joe Biden and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has huge implications for the Israel-Hamas war, the future of Gaza and the prospects for peace.

The stunning blow-up between the two leaders in the past 24 hours, where both warned the other about crossing ‘red lines’ and argued over how Israeli should conduct the war, is also a tipping point for the Israel-US relationship.

Biden warned that an Israeli ground attack on southern city Rafah, where around half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are sheltering, would be a ‘red line’ to the US if it caused large civilian casualties and that Netanyahu was now ‘hurting Israel more than helping Israel’. Netanyahu hit back, saying he would press ahead with a ground attack on Rafah, and that his ‘red line’ was that the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7 never happens again.

This breakdown in the relationship between the leaders has been coming for some time, with the Biden White House increasingly frustrated with what they believe has been a tone deaf approach by Netanyahu to their repeated calls to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza and increase the flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave. The leaders are also at odds over who should administer Gaza after the war is over and Biden’s call for an eventual two-state solution. And they are now at odds over calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and about the military strategy required to destroy the remnants of Hamas. Biden and Netanyahu no longer agree on any of these critical issues.

This relationship breakdown is significant because there has been no more loyal friend to Israel than the US since Hamas committed their bloody terrorist massacre of October 7. Biden has never deviated from full support for Israel’s mission to wipe out Hamas, and when other allies of Israel began increasingly to criticise Israel’s conduct of the war because of the high number of civilian deaths, Biden remained largely silent.

But now the White House has had enough with what it sees as Netanyahu’s hard line and inflexible view of the conflict and it believes that the roughly 30,000 Palestinians who have died – a figure that Biden now accepts – is too high and is destroying global support for Israel.

Washington fears that Netanyahu’s threatened ground assault on the southern city of Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas but also a city heaving with Palestinians who have been displaced from their home by fighting in northern Gaza, would lead to another humanitarian catastrophe.

The Pentagon wants Israeli forces instead to carry out highly targeted small scale raids into Rafah to kill Hamas forces there, rather than an all out ground assault on the city. But Netanyahu has given no sign that he would support anything but a full-scale ground offensive.

Biden’s growing frustration with Netanyahu also reflects changing domestic opinion in the US in an election year, where polls show that around half of US voters believe Israel has gone too far in its military attacks on Gaza. Around two-thirds of Democrat voters are now critical of Israel’s conduct in the war, although around two-third of Americans also support Israel’s right to destroy Hamas.

Biden has made it clear that despite his frustration with Netanyahu, he will continue to fully support Israel’s right to destroy Hamas and would guarantee the supply of weapons and assistance for Israel to carry this out.

So Israel is not going to suddenly be abandoned by its closest ally. But it is a tragedy for Israel that Netanyahu is its leader at this critical time in its history. He was already deeply unpopular before October 7 with his poorly thought out judicial shake-up and he leads a rag-tag coalition which contains several semi-crazy far-right ministers who have only served to inflame the conflict.

Netanyahu has rightly supported Israel’s quest to wipe-out Hamas but he has done so in a way which has seen far too many indiscriminate attacks on Gaza and therefore a civilian death toll which should never have reached this level. He has been bloody-minded about letting in more humanitarian aid to the enclave when the extent of the suffering there was clear to all.

He has stymied US attempts to work out a plan for post-Gaza and has done everything he can to kill the notion of a future two-state solution.

Israel needed a leader at this moment with more dexterity and nuance. Now Netanyahu has severely damaged his relationship with his only best friend, and Israel will be the poorer for it.