Weeks before “uncommitted” voters sent a message to Joe Biden that he needs to bring an end to Israel’s war in Gaza or risk losing reelection, the president had evidently decided — to borrow another American neologism — to consciously uncouple from Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s recalcitrant prime minister.
In the past month, he has, through a series of relatively quiet but closely linked and deliberate moves, sought to marginalize Bibi, as Netanyahu is ubiquitously known, internationally and at home. The change spilled out publicly on Thursday night following the State of the Union address, when Biden announced he ordered the U.S. military to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza via a sea pier. After the speech, Biden was stopped by Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who told him to “keep pushing” Israel’s leader. Smiling, Biden said, “I told him, ‘Bibi’ — don’t repeat this — ‘you and I are going to have a come to Jesus moment.” Hidden behind Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a presidential aide whispered, “Sir, you’re on a hot mic,” to which a buoyant Biden replied, “I’m on a hot mic here. Good. That’s good.”
Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and an authority on the relationship between the two countries, says the White House has been unhappy with Netanyahu for a long time, “but now in my view they’re even angrier and they are sharpening the tone. Biden is not coming at him personally, but off the record and in closed meetings, the sentiment is clear. They disagree on many things: on Gaza the day after the war; on the Palestinian Authority; on a return to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; all very significant issues.”
One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.”
In the event the new American position over Netanyahu remained unclear, Vice-President Kamala Harris left no doubts in a Friday interview with CBS News, which asked “Are the Israelis at risk of losing U.S. aid if this continues?” Harris replied: “I think it’s important for us to distinguish or at least not conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people.”
In other words: Israelis, we’re with you. Netanyahu, be gone.
Biden’s command to build a sea pier is an end-run around Netanyahu’s dithering to allow aid to be transported overland from Israel, as the U.S. has demanded for months. The 300,000 people remaining in northern Gaza are at greatest danger of starvation, and almost 2 million are huddling in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, where Netanyahu is rattling sabers about an offensive against Hamas. His fight against more aid has helped him with his hard-right base, which opposes any support for the Gazan population, and has stymied negotiations for the release of the 134 remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a cease-fire.
The pier was the second initiative through which Biden undermined Netanyahu over that past week. On March 1, immediately following a stampede around trucks delivering food and water to Gaza City, in which the crush and shots fired by Israeli soldiers who say they were protecting the vehicles left more than 100 dead, Biden announced the U.S., alongside Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, would immediately initiate airdrops of food to besieged residents. (A senior U.S. official told the New York Times this was a tipping point for the Biden administration.) Israel appeared to know nothing of the airdrops, but the Israeli army — which also finds itself at loggerheads with Netanyahu — took the news in stride, saying in a statement that the operation had been “coordinated.”
Biden addressed Congress six months to the day after Hamas’ attack killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 others. Over the same period, more than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza (including, according to Palestinian and Israeli authorities, thousands of Hamas fighters). Netanyahu refuses to define any end point to the combat other than his constantly repeated slogan: “total victory.”
As the war escalated in spite of Biden’s repeated warnings to Israel not to go overboard and to have a clear exit strategy, his frustration with Netanyahu’s leadership began to swell. Amos Harel, the military analyst for Ha’aretz, says “apart from his promised ‘total victory,’ which no one can define, there’s no plan, so the army’s considerable achievements in Gaza are not being translated into anything strategic. These gains are being lost. The army may not share all of Biden’s positions, but each understands that they need a strategy to bring this war to an end.”
“This is something of a pivotal moment,” says Daniel Seideman, an Israeli attorney and expert on the geopolitics of the country. “The danger of regional war is palpable. They are thinking in terms of the Cuban Missile Crisis [or] of 1938. Things are going on that could easily trigger a broader conflict, and preventing that is clearly the administration’s interest — and Netanyahu is not being cooperative.”
Netanyahu is highly vulnerable at home. For months, he’s faced blistering anger from the family members of the remaining hostages, whose fate he seems ambivalent about at best. A recent poll shows that a majority of Israelis, 53 percent, believe Netanyahu is extending the war so as to “survive politically,” not to defeat Hamas. It’s just the latest negative finding about the political standing of Israel’s longest-serving leader, whose popularity among Israelis flounders at about 20 percent. The October 7 debacle Netanyahu presided over, for which he refuses to accept any responsibility, came on top of his corruption trial and his related push to neuter Israel’s judiciary, which threatened over the past year to tear the country apart. Until and if Israelis find a way to unseat Netanyahu, a relentless politician who returned to power in December 2022, there’s not much Biden can do to force him out, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to undermine Netanyahu politically.
The first move against Netanyahu came on February 1, when Biden signed an extraordinary executive order imposing sanctions “on persons undermining peace, security, and stability in the West Bank,” occupied by Israel since 1967, which the U.S., Europe, and, crucially, Palestinians, see as the heart of their future state. The sanctions targeted only four Israeli settlers but had a major ripple effect in Israel. In addition to rattling Netanyahu’s far-right, settler base that has grown accustomed to impunity, the order implicitly condemned Netanyahu: He has constrained police and judicial efforts to investigate and pursue settlers perpetrating acts of violence against Palestinians.
An overlooked line in the order underscores the gravity of Biden’s threat to Netanyahu and his hard-line coalition. The U.S., it reads, may sanction anyone “responsible for or complicit in” actions that endanger Palestinian residents, “including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies.” The final clause indicates the American conviction that Israel’s authorities are flouting their own laws. Not only violent settlers are liable: Netanyahu and his ministers are clearly in their sights.
The full effect of Biden’s public moves against Netanyahu’s government took several weeks to sink in. Three days after the Americans, Canada announced it would follow suit with sanctions. Britain and France rapidly fell into line, announcing their own sanctions, which Paris imposed on 28 unnamed settlers. Even Germany, Israel’s closest ally after the U.S., adhered to the measure.
Soon, Netanyahu’s most extremist ministers, national security adviser Itamar Ben Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, realized they may be among these unnamed targets. Then the Biden administration leaked that it was, in fact, considering direct measures against these two, whom Ehud Barak, a former prime minister, terms “Israeli Proud Boys.”
The White House “won’t speak directly against Netanyahu’s partners,” Rabinovitch says, “but the threat against Ben Gvir and Smotrich is coming closer, and if things aren’t resolved, I assume they will be made explicit.”
Weeks later, the White House let it be known it was considering recognition of a Palestinian state in Gaza and in the West Bank, which is anathema for Netanyahu: He reacted to the White House pivot by telling Israelis “only I can block a Palestinian state.” The prime minister justifies his longtime authorization of transfers of billions of dollars to Gaza — money ostensibly destined for humanitarian purposes but that only served to shore up Hamas — as a manner of weakening the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized Palestinian government. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu allegedly told members of his Likud Party in 2019. “This is part of our strategy”
By early March, the gruff Netanyahu appeared to have been reduced to something of afterthought for the Biden administration: Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s political rival who joined his war cabinet in October, went to the White House against the prime minister’s wishes and met with Harris, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser.
An American source familiar with the administration’s thinking says the White House realizes that “Netanyahu is in a corner of his own making. He has no room to maneuver. He is screwing us. The politics of this have to completely change, and I think time is running out.”
Seideman says the administration is getting ready “to put Netanyahu to the test in ways that have not happened before. ‘Are you with us or are you against us? We’re not going to dictate the result. But if you’re against us, there will be consequences.’”
“I don’t for a moment think that Biden will abandon Israel,” Seideman says, “but the Americans are arriving at the conclusion that supporting Netanyahu means being harmful to Israel. There is a distinction between Israel’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests.”
