After Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, Biden prioritized his commitment to Israel’s security over his distaste for its leader. But Netanyahu has done nothing to make the truce last. When Biden told Capehart, “It’s contrary to what Israel stands for,” he was referring specifically to the death toll in Gaza. Arguably, though, the comment expressed Biden’s larger view: Netanyahu’s rule in Israel is a political mishap, an aberration from the Israel that the president supports.
Biden is pushing for more than an immediate change in Israeli tactics. His postwar diplomatic goals include, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said, a “timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living … in peace with Israel.” This defies another cliché about U.S.-Israel relations: that America “can’t want peace more than the parties themselves,” as Thomas Friedman wrote back in 2010.
Historically, the cliché ceases being true when Israeli-Arab conflict becomes a strategic danger for the United States. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War nearly led to a U.S.-Soviet showdown, for instance, Washington plunged into peacemaking. U.S. pressure on Israel peaked with the Ford administration’s 1975 “reassessment” of ties with Israel. That led to the second Israel-Egypt disengagement accord, a crucial stepping stone to the eventual peace agreement.