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President Biden has become a vocal critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership of the Israeli war in Gaza. “He must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken,” Biden said of Netanyahu in an MSNBC interview, warning that any attack on the town of Rafah, effectively the last refuge for many civilians in Gaza, could be a “red line.”
“In my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel,” Biden said of the Israeli prime minister in the interview, which aired on Sunday.
It was just the latest sign of how the Biden administration is at odds with Netanyahu’s government over the humanitarian situation inside Gaza. In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden said the United States was working to establish a cease-fire lasting at least six-weeks, despite Netanyahu’s opposition to calls for a pause in fighting. He also announced that the United States would build a temporary port in Gaza to allow maritime deliveries, an extraordinary circumvention of the Israeli restrictions on aid trucks at the Palestinian enclave’s land border.
Both demands were explicit criticisms of the conduct of Netanyahu’s government, a sign that Biden was aware of the anger felt within the Democratic Party about a conflict where 31,000 are reported to have died over five months of war and experts are seeing the early signs of famine. They are just the latest signs of U.S. pressure on Israel’s leadership: Top Biden administration officials last week met with Benny Gantz, a centrist domestic political rival to Netanyahu, in Washington. Biden’s administration also imposed restrictions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank in February.
Biden’s actions have drawn responses from Netanyahu, with the Israeli prime minister using an interview Sunday to push back on the American leader. “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Axel Springer, Politico’s parent company.
But there is one key area where the United States has not yet exerted its leverage on Netanyahu: Military aid.
Biden’s rift with Netanyahu grows wider
Throughout the war in Gaza, the United States has remained a vital military supplier to Israel. Bader Al-Saif, a professor of history at Kuwait University, told The Washington Post last week that the United States shouldn’t have to ask Israel to allow more aid to Gaza. “It should be a command,” Al-Saif said, as the United States was “financing the war” with its arms deliveries to Israel.
As my colleague John Hudson reported, the United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since Oct. 7, when the war began following a Hamas-led attack on Israel that left around 1,200 dead according to Israeli authorities.
U.S. officials offered that triple-digit number to members of Congress at a recent classified briefing, according to reporting from The Post. They were not public because they fell under a specific dollar amount that required individual notification to Congress, even though they included lethal aid such as precision-guided munitions and bunker buster bombs.
The number is in addition to the $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of artillery shell components that were publicly announced, even as the Biden administration bypassed Congress with an emergency authority.
The United States has long had a deep military relationship with Israel, which has received about $300 billion in combined economic and military assistance, adjusted for inflation, since its founding, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Even as Israel’s economy boomed and its need for economic assistance tapered off, military aid stayed at least $3 billion a year.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas that left at least 1,200 dead, this military support has increased. Last week, one Israeli military official offered an appraisal of the support in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten. Israel got basically what it needed,” said the official, who was not named by the Journal. “When you look into the future, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to stay like that”
Gaza’s spiraling, unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe
Could the age of U.S. military support for Israel be about to change? Biden may have suggested not in his interview with MSNBC, where he seemingly contradicted his own “red line” on Rafah. “I’m never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical,” Biden said. “So there’s no red line [in which] I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”
But the mounting public anger over the huge toll in Gaza is hard for Biden to ignore. It may signify a permanent shift for Democrats. As Today’s WorldView reported last month, polling data suggests that the Democrats have become more divided on the Israel-Palestinian conflict since the conflict began on Oct. 7. Several U.S. lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to condition aid to Israel on humanitarian grounds, if not cut if off completely.
Politico on Monday reported that Biden may consider conditioning military aid to Israel if it presses ahead with a large-scale invasion of Rafah, citing four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking. The report noted that the president hasn’t made that decision yet, but “it’s something he’s definitely thought about,” the outlet reported one anonymous official as saying.
Ben Samuels, Washington correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noted in an analysis Monday that Biden’s remarks to MSNBC appeared to refer to defensive weapons specifically. Under a national security memorandum signed by Biden last month, Israel has until March 25 to provide the United States with written assurances it is following international law when using U.S.-supplied weapons and not obstructing the delivery of aid into Gaza.
If Israel fails to provide the assurances, it would face being cut off from some of its most important weapons. “It is nearly impossible to quantify the implications of Biden suspending offensive weapons sales. For one, Israel would rapidly find itself in the same position Ukraine has found itself in over recent months: in desperate need of ammunition and, accordingly, forced to recalibrate its strategy in real time,” Samuels wrote.
Netanyahu may be willing to risk a break with Democrats, willing to bet on a Republican win in November that would return former president Donald Trump to the presidency. It’s a risky bet, even if Trump does win. The former president told the crowd at a campaign rally in South Carolina this weekend that he views U.S. military aid as a loan that has to be repaid.