Biden-Netanyahu rift raises questions about US arms to Israel

A deepening rift between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza red lines has set up a potential showdown between the two leaders and raised questions about whether Washington might restrict military aid if Israel goes ahead with a ground offensive in the south of the enclave.

Strains between Biden and Netanyahu have added momentum to discussions within the US administration about how it could use its leverage to convince Israel to do more to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza and avoid further heavy Palestinian civilian casualties in its military offensive against the Palestinians in the enclave, say US officials.

Biden’s greatest source of leverage is the US supply of weapons. He has resisted using it, despite Netanyahu’s defiant response to Washington’s entreaties and increased calls from some of the president’s fellow Democrats. However, with Biden showing mounting signs of frustration with Netanyahu, US officials have not ruled out a possible shift in policy that could include putting conditions on military aid if Israel carries out its threatened invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza.

The US president’s 2024 re-election bid has complicated his efforts to craft strategy. Aides recognise that he needs to avoid giving Republicans an issue to seize upon with pro-Israel voters, while also halting the erosion of support from some progressive Democrats dismayed by his strong backing for Israel. Any decision by Biden, who is a self-confessed Zionist, to get tough with Israel would run counter to his decades-old record as an ardent supporter of the country.

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“No matter how you cut it, Biden is in a bind on how to deal with this crisis,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations.

There are no indications that any decisions have been made about restrictions on weapons supplies in the event of a Rafah invasion, which Biden has warned must not happen without an Israeli plan for protecting civilians there. More than half of Gaza’s population is sheltering in the Rafah area, the last so-called “safe zone” in the Palestinian territory.

Biden may have hinted at his thinking in an MSNBC interview over the weekend when, after insisting a Rafah invasion would be a “red line,” he nonetheless said that the defence of Israel is “critical” and there is no way “I’m going to cut off all weapons so that they don’t have the Iron Dome [missile defence system] to protect them.”

The president did not make such assurances about offensive weapons explicitly, adding to speculation in media reports that such arms could be included if he were to impose conditions on Israel, which relies heavily on US-made equipment. Any restrictions on offensive weapons could put Israel at greater risk if all-out war breaks out with Lebanon’s Hezbollah on its northern border, or if Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, enters the fray.

Asked about potential limits on weapons, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday that he would not engage in “hypotheticals” and that news reports about Biden’s thinking on the issue were “uninformed speculation.”

Dismissing Biden’s strident criticism on MSNBC in which he spoke of red lines and said Netanyahu was “hurting Israel more than helping,” the Israeli premier has vowed to press forward with the military campaign in Rafah, the last part of the Gaza Strip where Israeli forces have not carried out a ground offensive. “You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again,” Netanyahu told Politico on Sunday.

Israel has made clear to the US that it is prepared to withstand the international condemnation it had expected to face over its military response to the 7 October Hamas attack, according to a person in Washington familiar with the matter. The occupation state, which accuses Hamas of using human shields, has insisted that it takes precautions to minimise civilian casualties. More than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, have been killed by Israel since the October attack in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, many of them not by Hamas, but by the Israel Defence Forces, according to Israeli media.

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While US officials have said there is no sign of an imminent assault on Rafah, Biden and his aides have issued repeated warnings about the need for Israel restraint there. European Union countries have said that such an attack would be “catastrophic”.

Public messaging from the US has sharpened since the shooting and killing by Israeli soldiers of more than 100 Palestinians earlier this month as they rushed to get food from an aid convoy in northern Gaza.

Irked over the slow pace of aid that Israel was allowing in by land, the Biden administration last week began airdrops of humanitarian supplies and announced plans to build a floating port to enable the transport of aid from ship to the Gaza shore. Washington has seen Israel slowly cooperating on humanitarian aid, but one US official said progress had been incremental, adding: “It’s [like] pulling teeth on every little piece.”

There have been closed-door conversations at the US State Department on whether Washington should limit military aid to Israel, a second US official said, but the idea has not received support from the senior leadership. The so-called Leahy Laws are US human rights laws as amendments of the Foreign Assistance Act which prohibit the US State Department and Department of Defence from providing military aid and assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights with impunity. Given that the International Court of Justice has ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, military aid for the Israel Defence Forces breaks America’s own laws.

Most analysts said that given Biden’s election-year considerations, he would be expected to tread very carefully in deciding whether to pressure Netanyahu by using weapons-related leverage or pulling back on US diplomatic shielding of Israel at the UN Security Council. The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, would pounce on such moves as threats to Israel’s security.

The safer option for Biden would be to keep up his strategy of distancing himself gradually from Netanyahu, whose own approval ratings have plummeted among Israelis, while continuing his outreach to the Israeli people, where the US president is popular.

The administration’s recent welcome to Washington of Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz, a supposedly centrist politician who US officials hope will someday replace Netanyahu, was seen widely as a snub to the right-wing prime minister, who has yet to be invited to the Biden White House. Former army chief of staff Gantz threatened to invade Rafah “by Ramadan” if Israeli hostages held in Gaza were not released.

“Biden is performing a political amputation, cutting off [Netanyahu] to save the patient, the State of Israel,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East analyst at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington.

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