-Analytics-
PARIS — Joe Biden openly declares himself a friend and even protector of Israel. As such, he can be blunt: Israel, he warned Tuesday, is losing international support because of what he called “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Echoing his words, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly — 153 votes in favor, just 10 against, with 23 abstentions — for a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The resolution will have no effect, as it has no actual power: it’s the UN Security Council that decides, and Washington vetoed a similar resolution on Friday.
The Israeli representative at the UN denounced what he called the hypocrisy of the vote, and declared the text “useless.” Nevertheless, this double event — Biden’s warning, and the massive ceasefire support in the UN that included several European countries (France, but not Italy) — shows that time is not on Israel’s side.
A resounding No
The weight of Biden’s intervention was notable: not only did the American president criticize the bombings, he also made public his differences with Israeli leaders.
Biden has chosen the great divide: he supports the continuation of the war against Hamas, but is in total disagreement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the post-war period.
In his remarks, he advised Netanyahu to change the composition of his government, which he described as “the most conservative in Israel’s history,” a euphemism for the radical far-right fringe.
Biden pretends that Netanyahu would be different if he got rid of these cumbersome allies. In fact, the leader of Israel’s right-wing party Tuesday gave a resounding “no” to the ideas put forward by the U.S. president for the post-war period.
Netanyahu, after the war
“Gaza will be neither a Hamastan nor a Fatahstan,” he said, referring to Islamist Hamas, with which he is at war, but also to Fatah, the movement of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, which the West would like to see play a greater role in the post-war period. And Netanyahu doesn’t want to hear about the two-state solution being pushed by Biden and friends.
These disagreements cannot really be reconciled, but above all they point to a paradox: Benjamin Netanyahu may be the warlord whom the army obeys, but he is also a politician whom the vast majority of his fellow citizens would like to see leave.
They blame him for the security failure of October 7.
Thus Biden is adding fuel to a smoldering fire in Israel, that of political leadership. The White House would certainly prefer to deal with a man like Benny Gantz, a centrist opponent of Netanyahu, now a member of the War Cabinet biding his time for a possible shot at becoming prime minister.
Thus it is both unusual yet not surprising for the American president to meddle in Israeli domestic politics in the way he did on Tuesday: both about the continuation of the war, and above all the aftermath. The United States is up to its neck in it: what happened Tuesday at the UN is not good for Israel, but it’s not good for America and its president either.
