Joe Biden has expended a lot of effort to avoid taking Benjamin Netanyahu at his word.
The Israeli prime minister has spent his political life opposing a Palestinian state and acting accordingly. And although Biden has trotted out a rote commitment to the two-state solution when confronted with a crisis in the Middle East, there was barely a murmur from the White House as Netanyahu’s far-right government ramped up creeping colonisation of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and hardened its domination of the Palestinians who live there.
So last week’s pronouncement by Netanyahu that there will be no Palestinian state, and that he intends to perpetuate Israel’s brand of apartheid through permanent military control of the West Bank, was no great revelation to Washington. The timing, however, means that this time it cannot be so easily shunted aside.
One effect of the Hamas attack on 7 October has been to push the Palestinian question back into the diplomatic spotlight after the US and its allies all but abandoned any real attempt to resolve the conflict in recent years and consigned it to the shadows.
During Netanyahu’s long tenure as prime minister of Israel, politicians in Washington, Brussels and London have continued to pay occasional lip service to two states but in talking to them privately it often seemed that they had concluded that the Palestinians were a defeated people – and so colluded in the Palestinians’ oppression by leaving Netanyahu to get on with his land grab.
Occasional objections to particularly egregious statements or actions by Netanyahu’s racist cabinet ministers might be raised, but no one was going to back up words with consequential action, least of all the Biden administration. This White House went a long way to avoid confrontation with Israel even before its largely unconditional support for the present war in Gaza, which has claimed more than 25,000 lives, most of them children and women, according to the health ministry there.
As Stephanie Kirchgaessner revealed in the Guardian last week, the US state department has a unit working to undermine American human rights laws by, in effect, covering up suspected crimes against humanity in the occupied territories in order to protect weapons shipments to Israel. The White House wouldn’t even stand up for a US citizen, the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, when she was shot in 2022 in what looked very much like a cold-blooded killing by the Israeli army. And the US, as ever, has continued to wield its veto at the UN security council in support of Israel.
Netanyahu has repaid all of this by humiliating Biden.
Two weeks after the Hamas attack, Biden said that the Israel-Gaza crisis should result in a “concentrated effort” to create a Palestinian state. Last week, as attention shifts to what comes next, Netanyahu bluntly rejected any such plan.
In his desperation to sidestep reality, Biden even tried to deny that Netanyahu meant what he said. The White House claimed that the Israeli prime minister told the president in a phone call that he remains open to two states under certain conditions.
Netanyahu responded with an abrupt tweet killing that idea: “I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over the entire area west of Jordan – and this is contrary to a Palestinian state.”
Why would Netanyahu make such a statement at this time, publicly embarrassing the president of Israel’s most important and powerful ally? Because he’s learned that he can so without any real cost.
Netanyahu would have had one eye on domestic politics: he wants to shore up support in his far-right coalition by putting a damper on the sudden revival of talk in foreign capitals about getting a Palestinian state back on track, including reports that the White House is looking to a deal with a future Israeli government and Arab countries.
But the statement also reflects Netanyahu’s sense of impunity. Israeli leaders used to take pains to at least stay on the right side of the White House. But Netanyahu found that there were no real consequences for open contempt when he ran up against Barack Obama. The military aid and diplomatic protection continued to flow uninterrupted.
Obama came to power in 2009 saying he regarded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “constant sore” that “infect[s] all of our foreign policy”. His national security adviser, Gen James Jones, told a European leader that the administration would be “forceful” with Israel, and that the US, EU and moderate Arab states must define “a satisfactory endgame solution”.
When Netanyahu rejected Obama’s demand for a halt to settlement construction, the president suggested that Israeli intransigence endangered America’s security, a dramatic departure from the standard Washington line about the Jewish state as the US’s closest ally.
Netanyahu responded to the pressure by publicly lecturing Obama on a 2011 visit to the White House, and even used a clip of his humiliating treatment of the president in a later election campaign ad.
In the end, Obama wasn’t ready to risk the political capital required to press the Palestinian cause and retreated. He then signed the biggest-ever military aid bill to Israel – $3.8bn a year. Biden learned the lesson.
Even Donald Trump, who firmly sided with Netanyahu, had few illusions about the man who goes by the nickname Bibi.
“Bibi never wanted peace. He just tapped us along. Tap, tap, tap, tap …,” the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid says Trump told him in 2021.
It’s tempting to think that things might be different when Netanyahu is gone. Opinion polls show that most Israelis blame him for the political and military failures which allowed Hamas and other militant groups to slaughter 1,200 people and abduct more than 200 others on 7 October. But there’s not much sign of a serious commitment to negotiating a viable deal with the Palestinians among Netanyahu’s prospective successors, and it’s unlikely to come without serious US pressure.
Biden has shown that he is prepared to pay a political price for his support for Israel, which has angered many progressive Democrats at home and large parts of the rest of the world, which see the assault on Gaza as a vengeful bloodletting and further evidence of the systematic oppression of the Palestinians.
It is probably too much to hope that, in the face of Netanyahu’s intransigence, Biden will take the political risks to fight for a Palestinian state just as forcefully as he defends Israel. But if the president is not prepared to do so, it will be clearer than ever to the rest of the world that the US has chosen to stand with oppression.
Chris McGreal writes for the Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem. He is the author of American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts
