When Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu spoke on Wednesday in a phone call about Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for its October 1st missile attack, it was their first conversation in three months. That reflects the antipathy between the two men. As Kamala Harris’s evasive answer during an interview this week indicates, the White House may still regard Israel as a close ally but it does not feel the same way about Netanyahu.
The escalation of the multi-faceted conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the US on the one hand and Iran and its proxies on the other comes at a moment of maximum pressure in the American political cycle. While Harris has sent signals to distance herself slightly from Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon, her party calculates that it is more important not to alienate Jewish and other pro-Israeli voters in Pennsylvania than to do the same for Arab-American and anti-war ones in Michigan. That decision may come back to haunt them, with recent polls indicating a significant swing towards Donald Trump among Muslim voters, despite the former president’s history of Islamophobic comments.
Such cold electoral calculations will not sit well with critics of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the rising civilian death toll in Lebanon and the increasing violence against the Palestinian population of the occupied West Bank. Despite its position as Israel’s closest ally, and the source of much of the weaponry being deployed in those actions, the US still appears unwilling or unable to exert meaningful pressure for restraint. That impression of weakness is reinforced by Biden’s changed status; the last time he and Netanyahu spoke, he was still running for a second term; now he is a lame duck prone to missteps, such as his suggestion last week – rapidly walked back – of American support for an Israeli attack on Iranian oil facilities.
Israel’s decapitation of Hizbullah’s leadership and destruction of its communications network presents a new challenge for Washington, although some in the foreign policy establishment may see it as an opportunity. The neo-conservative doctrine of regime change through military force may have been discredited on both sides of the American political divide, but the dream of undermining or even toppling the ayatollahs remains alive in some quarters.
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Both sides were tight-lipped about what was said at Wednesday’s meeting; Biden has been advised by officials that Iran does not want a broader conflict but that escalating tit-for-tat retaliations could spin out of control. Meanwhile, Israel’s defence minister has promised a “deadly, precise but above all surprising” attack. High military stakes in the Middle East and a political vacuum in the US is not a combination anyone should welcome.
