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President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 18 in Tel Aviv during the former's visit to Israel. Evelyn Hockstein (REUTERS)
The abstention of the United States in the vote on a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in the Strip, this Monday, instead of the veto that Israel had requested to stop the proposal, has definitively confronted the traditional allies, immersed for weeks in a spiral of tension and discord that on the American side has been evident in the telephone clashes between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or in the criticism of the latter by Chuck Schumer, Democratic leader in the Senate, whom he called “obstacle to peace.”
On the Israeli side, anger was manifested this Monday with the cancellation of the visit of a delegation to Washington to discuss the announced ground offensive on Rafah, which the United States openly opposes due to “the anarchy” it would cause.
The White House considers that the turning point that the bilateral relationship seems to have reached is due to internal political reasons, according to statements by three senior US officials to the
Axios
portal , but if the Israeli nervousness is of a domestic nature, the same could be said of the change position of the White House in recent weeks: the Democratic Administration is now capable of quantifying in votes how much unconditional, seamless support for Israel, such as that shown in the first months of the war, can cost.
The tens of thousands of punitive votes that Biden has garnered in the Democratic primaries, from voters willing not to support him in November if he does not distance himself from Israel, have been enough for him to back down, letting it pass - with an abstention that was like putting in profile - a resolution that the UN itself called historic, even though it was adopted after six months of war.
Faced with obvious Israeli anger, the United States tried to qualify its position, getting entangled in a terminological mess that has not convinced anyone.
The ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and the White House spokesman, John Kirby, stressed that the resolution was not binding, contrary to the opinion of other members of the Council and numerous experts for whom the text is (the resolutions approved by the Council are considered international law and have considerable political and legal weight; it is another matter whether they can be strictly applied).
On Washington's part it was more of a diplomatic feint to support its vote and, at the same time, not burn all bridges with Israel.
What has surprised Washington is the fact that Israel aired the differences this Monday, with the resounding slam of the door in the form of suspension of the trip to Washington of two of Netanyahu's closest advisors.
Disputes and differences
It is not the first time that both partners differ on sensitive issues.
In 2010, Joe Biden, then vice president of Barack Obama, landed in Tel Aviv to try to obtain from - then and today - Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a temporary halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, to promote peace dialogue with the Palestinians.
As a welcome, he was met with a slap in the face: the announcement of the construction of 1,600 houses in a colony in East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu hastily issued a statement to clarify that he was unaware of the move, but the mood of the visit changed.
The rudeness to Biden, who usually presents himself as Israel's main ally - he did so during his visit to the country in the first days of the war;
also in his last speech on the state of the union - is on the list of frustrations that the deal with Netanyahu left in Obama, with whom he coincided in power during his eight years in the White House (2009-2017).
The relationship was so bad that both of them, in their last bilateral meeting, found it difficult to force a smile and joke about golf.
Even more so when Netanyahu had made such a provocative gesture as taking advantage of the fact that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives to give a speech encouraging them to torpedo the nuclear deal with Iran promoted by the White House.
One of the Democratic legislators who was absent from that speech was precisely Biden.
In his last year in the White House, 2016, Obama left a great military aid plan for Israel for ten years, but also - when the polls had already given victory to Donald Trump - a final message to Netanyahu in the form now chosen. for Biden: abstention in a UN Security Council resolution.
In that case, condemnation of the settlements.
“We have tried everything,” the Deputy National Security Advisor, Benjamin J. Rhodes, justified then.
After almost six months of war in which the United States has not stopped vetoing ceasefire resolutions and providing abundant weapons and financing to its great ally in the Middle East, with its abstention from the Security Council the White House has given this Monday a symbolic slap on the wrist also after feeling that he has tried everything.
“It is a punitive action aimed at demonstrating their discontent with the Israeli Government.
Punitive and warning: the Americans made too many attempts to contain Israel, to convince it to introduce more humanitarian aid, to force it to discuss the 'morning after plan' [of the war].
Too many attempts that were met with a somewhat dismissive shrug,”
Shmuel Rosner, an expert on relations between Israel and the United States and senior researcher at the Jerusalem-based think tank Jewish People Policy Institute, writes in
TheMadad .
The importance of the Jewish vote
The United States has used its veto power 45 times to benefit Israel from the 1970s until the Gaza war, when it did so three times.
Biden, however, has not gone as far as Obama did in 2014, during a much shorter, less bloody offensive in Gaza and in which Israel did not use hunger as a weapon of war.
He then went so far as to stop a supply of Hellfire missiles for helicopters, due to the number of civilian casualties.
Previous administrations also stopped arms deliveries, such as in the seventies, when Israel rejected a peace proposal with Egypt, or a decade later, after the bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.
Between both allies there is a common territory: Jewish voters in the United States, many of them with direct ties to Israel.
Determinants both in fundraising for the respective campaigns and in the box marked on the ballots, internal political reasons therefore place the party in the White House in the balance, it does not matter whether it is Republican or Democrat: it will be forced to balance between its traditional support for Israel and the satisfaction of voters who deny it.
This difficult balance applies to President Biden, but also to congressmen like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both from the most progressive faction of the party, pushed by their voters to speak out unequivocally about the massacres of civilians in Gaza.
It was not until last Friday when the representative for New York described what is happening in Gaza as genocide.
“If you want to know what genocide looks like in person, open your eyes,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor.
“It looks like the forced starvation of 1.1 million innocent people.
“It looks like thousands of children eating grass while their bodies waste away, while food trucks slow and stop just miles away,” she said, of Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid shipments at the gates of the enclave.
In Israel, Netanyahu's indignation has a point of choreography.
If he has been repeating almost daily for weeks (both in Hebrew and English) that the army will invade Rafah ("alone or with the help of the United States," as he stressed on Friday) it is precisely because it contributes to cementing his image as a strong leader who He sacrifices himself in the face of external pressures to defend his only concern: the security of Israel.
It is a kind of flight forward at a time when his political survival depends on remaining in power and the war being prolonged: he defends that holding elections sooner would be “a gift to Hamas”).
In a similar way, he also defined the
betrayal
of the United States by abstaining this Monday in the Security Council vote.
Netanyahu's controversial electoral reform had already affected his popularity, but all polls since the October 7 attack put him out of power.
The last one, published two weeks ago by television channel 12, is just as clear: his party, the Likud, would fall from 32 to 18 deputies and the bloc that supported him before the war would obtain just 44 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.
Mairav Sonszein, senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group
think tank
, pointed out this on the social network X: “Israel is completely dependent on the United States to replenish its weapons supplies.
He cannot operate in Rafah without US coordination. All Netanyahu is saying/doing is grandstanding for his own political survival.
Including now cancellation of the Israeli delegation to Washington.”
The headline of the
online
edition of the newspaper
Haaretz
graphically warned late on Monday: “Netanyahu has put Israel on a collision course with the United States. The UN vote is the terrible result.”
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