Lev Grinberg
+972 Magazine / July 16, 2024
For 15 years, the Israeli prime minister has proven his ability to scuttle political agreements — while never losing the United States’ backing.
Watching President Joe Biden clumsily debate Donald Trump on June 27, many Israelis could instantly recognize how their own prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been able to exploit the weaknesses of the aging commander-in-chief for so long.
Netanyahu has had a close relationship with his “friend Joe” for decades, going back to Biden’s days in the U.S. Senate and especially during the early years of the Barack Obama administration. According to Biden’s biographer Evan Osnos, the then-vice president served as a key mediator between Netanyahu and Obama as tensions grew between the two leaders, with Biden consistently advocating dialogue and preventing open confrontations.
The Israeli prime minister knows this all too well. And it is precisely that intimate and historical knowledge of Biden, American politics, and U.S. support for Israel that has helped Netanyahu stay in power almost uninterrupted since 2009, and even more so since October 7. With this knowledge, Netanyahu has also consistently been able to rebuff efforts in Washington to achieve its stated goal of a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine — tactics that the Israeli prime minister continues to use today to prolong the war in Gaza.
On June 14, 2009, Netanyahu delivered a historic speech at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, calling to reopen negotiations toward the establishment of a “demilitarized Palestinian state.” It was 10 days after Obama’s speech in Cairo calling for “a new beginning” in the relations between the United States and the Muslim world, including through the fulfillment of a Palestinian state. But after a year of vacuous talks, Netanyahu refused to abide by Washington’s demands to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, bringing the negotiations to a stalemate.
Netanyahu only continued to defy the Obama administration over the following years, with no political consequences. In May 2011, Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress, calling for an Israeli presence along the Jordan River and a united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and was met with 29 standing ovations from both Republicans and Democrats. Another speech in Congress by Netanyahu in 2015 sought to undermine the president’s multilateral diplomacy with Iran regarding its nuclear facilities. Yet despite suffering these political and increasingly personal indignities, Obama ended his presidency by signing the largest ever U.S. military aid package to Israel, to the tune of $38 billion over 10 years.
Since Hamas’ October 7 attack, Netanyahu appears to be seeking to repeat his success with Obama — namely by wasting time until the U.S. election in November, exploiting Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, and preventing the implementation of the “Biden doctrine for the Middle East.” This task is much easier today than it was in 2009: instead of Fatah, the main Palestinian counterpart is now Hamas; the starting point of the debate is the October 7 massacre, which provoked immediate international support for Israel’s lethal response; and instead of eight years of manipulations, he now needs only four more months — a piece of cake for Netanyahu.
When Biden laid out his ceasefire proposal on May 31, he called on the Israelis to support the plan. It was an attempt to exert domestic pressure on Netanyahu, while tacitly recognizing that the United States would not use all its leverage with Israel. In response, Netanyahu took a page from Trump’s playbook and simply lied about the Biden administration’s suspension of a weapons shipment earlier in May — giving Republicans political fodder to attack the president.
In his upcoming speech to Congress on July 24, Netanyahu will further entrench his role in the U.S. elections, and will likely receive standing ovations from Republicans but also some Democrats who depend on AIPAC to fund their campaigns. As he did with Obama, Netanyahu intends to exercise his own leverage and help defeat Biden on his home turf.
U.S.-backed impunity
It is important to understand how Netanyahu has been able to remain in power since 2009, even after his government’s disastrous negligence in the lead-up to and on October 7 — not to mention the obliteration of Gaza without a strategic end game, which, as well as causing untold suffering to Palestinian civilians, has needlessly sacrificed the lives of Israeli hostages and soldiers.
This is partly related to Israel’s internal politics, where peacemaking has largely been abandoned for the past three decades in favor of “military solutions.” To fully comprehend Israel’s complex domestic politics, we need to be aware of the contradiction between Israel’s professed democratic rules of the game on one side of the 1967 border, and its military domination of Palestinians on the other.
In 1994, I suggested analyzing the Oslo Accords as a triple democratization process, which could dismantle the military regime in the occupied territories, but also transform both Israeli and Palestinian domestic politics. After the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, however, both national political arenas deteriorated, growing more radical and violent. Hamas’ October 7 massacre, and the murderous Israeli response, are the lava erupting from the volcanic core of this radicalization process.
Without U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic support, though, Israel could have never successfully maintained its 17-year blockade of the Gaza Strip and its destructive strategy of “mowing the grass.” Unconditional U.S. backing has also allowed Israel to consolidate its control over the West Bank and expand settlement construction in the territory, while zealot settlers continue to terrorize, displace, and kill Palestinians with the protection of Israeli soldiers.
This linkage has been key to Netanyahu’s ability to stay in power, despite his failures: the Israeli public is aware of the crucial role that Washington plays to ensure Israeli impunity, and Netanyahu has eloquently convinced the public that he is the politician best able to cultivate that support.
But Netanyahu ran into trouble. His current coalition — made up of extremist settlers, and with plans to dismantle the autonomous power of the judiciary — provoked unprecedented mass protests in Israel. The protests, however, largely ignored Israel’s deeper political crisis: the absence of true democracy, amid ongoing military rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories. The illusion that such military rule could be indefinitely sustained was shattered on Oct. 7, and yet Israelis lack any leaders willing to acknowledge this basic fact, or to offer a different political vision for the future.
After the Hamas attacks, President Biden professed his clear support for Israel, and also cautioned its leaders not to “be consumed by rage” and repeat the mistakes the U.S. made in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In contrast to Netanyahu and his extremist government, many Israelis saw in Biden a true, responsible leader, and hoped that Washington would help Israel overcome its political ineptitude.
At the start of the ground invasion, Israeli commentators talked about the time limit of the war — the “sand clock” — assuming that “big brother” Washington would allow Israel to continue fighting only until December. Netanyahu, however, had different plans on how to manage his “private war clock”: most reserve soldiers were released in January 2024, and he burned time with fruitless ceasefire negotiations until May 7, when a deal was supposed to be signed. Then he declared that Israel still needed to complete the occupation of Rafah, postponing the negotiations for an additional month, and has since refused to end the operation — against the wishes of the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the army’s top brass, and the security agencies — and escalated the confrontation with the Biden administration.
Netanyahu has no clear plans for the Palestinian population in Gaza, nor for the Israeli soldiers there. He can continue the negotiations game endlessly, wasting precious time for the lives of Israeli hostages and troops, as well as the displaced and starving Palestinians.
In this light, observers would do well to pay attention to how Netanyahu’s father explained his son’s political tactics. After the 2009 Bar Ilan speech, Benzion Netanyahu, a notorious proponent of the Jewish right to rule “from the river to the sea,” explained to the nationalist base that although his son called to establish a Palestinian state, he didn’t actually mean it. The father revealed that his son told him that he would impose such tough conditions that the Palestinians would reject them, ensuring that any negotiations would be destined to fail.
In other words, to maintain the military domination of Palestinians and present Israel as a democratic and peace-seeking state, you must be a very eloquent liar. For the past 15 years, Netanyahu has proven his ability to deceive and maneuver to prevent a peaceful political agreement — while never losing the United States’ backing. Now, we are witnessing the tragic consequences of his politics for Israelis, Palestinians, and the whole region.
Lev Grinberg is a political sociologist at Ben Gurion University and the author of Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine (Routledge, 2010)
