Netanyahu is turning against Biden

It looks as if President Biden will be running in two races this year: one in America against Donald Trump and one in Israel against Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe Trump could name Netanyahu his running mate and we could save a lot of time. Biden’s support for the Israeli leader is costing him with his own progressive base, while Netanyahu is now turning on Biden in ways that could win Trump fresh support from right-wing American Jews. Trump-Netanyahu 2024 — that has a certain ring to it, not to mention an air of truth.

Why do I say this? Because at a nationally televised news conference on Thursday, Netanyahu made clear something he had only hinted at in recent weeks. Despite the disastrous Hamas attack on Oct. 7 happening on his watch, he is going to frame his campaign to stay in power with this argument: The Americans and the Arabs want to force a Palestinian state down Israel’s throat, and I am the only Israeli leader strong enough to resist them. So vote for me, even if I messed up on Oct. 7 and the Gaza war is not going all that great. Only I can protect us from Biden’s plans for Gaza to become part of a Palestinian state, along with the West Bank, governed by a transformed Palestinian Authority.

I know what you’re asking: You mean Netanyahu would actually run for re-election by positioning himself against the American president who flew over to Israel right after Oct. 7, where he put a protective arm around Bibi and the whole Israeli body politic and basically gave Israel a green light to try to destroy Hamas in Gaza, even if it led to thousands of Palestinian civilians’ being killed in the process? You mean to save his own political skin, Netanyahu would actually run on a platform that would guarantee Israel had no American, Palestinian, Arab or European partners to help Israel govern or exit Gaza or get its hostages back?

Yes, I am seeing and saying both. Although Israel has been at war with Hamas for over 100 days and still has over 100 hostages to recover, Netanyahu’s No. 1 focus is Netanyahu.

He’s searching for the most emotive political message to get him just enough votes from the far right to remain prime minister and stay out of prison, should he lose any of the three corruption cases against him.

Let me walk you through the sequence of events that transpired this week that led to this conclusion, as I was a close-up witness to part of them.

On Wednesday, I interviewed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, first offstage for this column and then before a large audience at the Davos World Economic Forum. In the public session I asked him to briefly explain something I had discussed in private with him: why it feels as if Israel is losing on three key fronts and why Israel could turn things around on those fronts if it had a legitimate, effective Palestinian partner.

The three fronts where Israel is losing:

First, even though Hamas started this war by murdering, maiming, kidnapping and raping Israeli civilians just across the border, Hamas seems to be winning the global narrative war on social media because of the thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza caused by the Israeli bombing of Hamas fighters who had deliberately embedded themselves in tunnels and next to homes of Palestinian civilians.

Second, Netanyahu still has not defined a political outcome for Gaza, a plan for keeping the peace and overseeing governance and security, or a legitimate Palestinian partner to help make it all happen. Without that, Israel could be stuck in Gaza forever.

And third, Israel is being attacked from afar by pro-Iranian nonstate actors, particularly the Houthis from Yemen and Hezbollah from Lebanon. And the only way for Israel to deter and counter their threats, particularly when it is still tied down fighting in Gaza, is with the help of global and regional allies.

The answer to all three challenges, I argued to Blinken at the public session, was for Israel to find and help build a credible, legitimate, effective Palestinian partner, whether that is a reformed version of the current Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah — which has embraced the Oslo peace accord with Israel and worked with Israeli security forces — or some completely new institution named by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

If the P.L.O. — with the help of the Americans, the Europeans and the pro-American Arab states and the encouragement of Israel — is able to help stand up and sustain an effective Palestinian governing authority that has legitimacy in the eyes of Palestinians, this could answer all three of Israel’s problems. It would seize the narrative from Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian backer by proving that Israel was not out for just revenge or conquest in Gaza. It would provide Israel with a political authority to govern Gaza for the long run that Israel could work with to ensure that a defeated Hamas could not come back.

And a legitimate Palestinian partner would give cover for a regional alliance of Americans, NATO and pro-Western Arab states that could help deter Hezbollah and confront the Houthis. Right now, only the Americans and the British have been willing to push back on the Houthis for disrupting global shipping and firing rockets at Israel, in part because others are worried about looking to be doing Israel’s bidding while it is hammering Gaza. If Israel were engaged with a Palestinian partner, Iran and its local puppets would be on the defensive, I argued.

In response to this argument, Blinken said at our public discussion: “You now have something you didn’t have before, and that is Arab countries and Muslim countries even beyond the region that are prepared to have a relationship with Israel in terms of its integration, its normalization, its security, that they were never prepared to have before and to do things, to give the necessary assurance, to make the necessary commitments and guarantees, so that Israel is not only integrated but it can feel secure.”

But the only way to achieve that alliance-in-waiting, Blinken added, is by respecting the “absolute conviction by those countries — one that we share — that this has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state, because you’re not going to get the genuine integration you need, you’re not going to get the genuine security you need, absent that. And of course, to that end as well, a stronger, reformed Palestinian Authority that can more effectively deliver for its own people has to be part of the equation.”

If Israel and the U.S. and its Arab allies were to adopt such a regional approach, Blinken said, “all of a sudden, you have a region that’s come together in ways that answer the most profound questions that Israel has tried to answer for years, and what has heretofore been its single biggest concern in terms of security, Iran, is suddenly isolated, along with its proxies, and will have to make decisions about what it wants its future to be.”

To that end, the U.S. is working on a two-stage process to present this opportunity to Israel, several officials explained to me.

The first stage would be a short-term cease-fire in Gaza that would bring about a return of all the 100-plus Israeli hostages held by Hamas in return for Hamas securing Palestinian prisoners in Israel while allowing for the emergence of local Palestinians to assume administrative governing functions there. The hope, U.S. officials say, is that as Israeli troops moved out — with the promise of eventual Palestinian control — some kind an Arab multinational force would be prepared to move in. A lot would depend, though, on the state of Hamas’s military forces and whether Hamas’s surviving leaders and maybe some senior fighters would be allowed to go to a third country, one senior U.S. official told me.

In the second stage, Palestinians, through the Palestine Liberation Organization, would go through their own process of naming a transitional governing authority — before they hold elections for a permanent one — and the West and Arab states would help this authority build proper institutions, including a security force for Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, Saudi Arabia would begin a process of normalization of relations with Israel that would culminate when a two-state solution was achieved. If it all sounds a bit fluid, it’s because so much depends on the balance of forces when any cease-fire starts.

To make sure Israelis understood how serious this idea was, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, declared in Davos on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia would “certainly” be prepared to normalize relations with Israel if Israel and the Palestinians concluded a settlement that ended with “a Palestinian state.”

All of this public diplomacy is part of a Biden strategy not to oust Netanyahu but to present him with a choice — a choice that the whole Israeli public can see: Netanyahu can either reject any collaboration with Palestinians to end the Gaza conflict and beyond and go down in history as the leader who presided over Oct. 7, or he can work with the U.S., Europe, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states and be the Israeli leader who delivered a Palestinian state able to guarantee Israeli security and opened the road to peace with the Saudis and the wider Muslim world.

So this was the important context for Netanyahu’s remarks at the news conference on Thursday evening. He presented himself as the only leader who could protect Israel from this U.S. plan ending with a Palestinian state — while offering no alternative strategy for dealing with Israel’s narrative problem, postwar-Gaza problem or regional problem. “Whoever is talking about the day after Netanyahu,” he said, “is essentially talking about the establishment of a Palestinian state with the Palestinian Authority,” which he fundamentally rejected out of hand.

In response to Blinken’s statement that Israel would never enjoy “genuine security” without a pathway to a Palestinian state, Netanyahu added: “In any future arrangement or in the absence of an arrangement,” Israel must maintain “security control” of all territory west of the Jordan River — meaning Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. “That is a vital condition.” If this contradicts the idea of sovereignty for the Palestinians, he said, “What can you do? I tell this truth to our American friends.”

Netanyahu declared that he “would be happy to find Gazans” to deal with health and administrative civil affairs in Gaza and enlist Arab states to help with its rehabilitation, but that this was unlikely to happen until Hamas was eradicated, because any Palestinians who worked with Israel would be afraid to “get a bullet in the head” from the terrorist group.

The U.S. view, and the rising view in the Israeli military, is that Israel is far from vanquishing Hamas and unlikely to do so any time soon or at a price to Gazan civilians that the world and Washington can tolerate. Therefore, the key to Gaza’s no longer being a permanent threat and burden to Israel is having an alternative Palestinian governing structure that is viewed as legitimate because it is part of a two-state solution and effective because it has Arab state funding and backing — not killing every last Hamas fighter in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s view, however, is this: “We are striving for total victory, not just ‘to strike Hamas’ or ‘to hurt Hamas,’ not ‘another round with Hamas’ but total victory over Hamas.”

Let me be clear: Some things are true, even if Netanyahu believes them.

Hamas is a terrible organization dedicated to destroying the Jewish state. The Palestinian Authority has been a corrupt and ineffective institution for a long time (although Netanyahu did all he could to hobble it). It needs to get its act together, and Israelis are justifiably wary of trusting it to govern in Gaza. And one reason Israel has lost the global narrative is that cynical countries like South Africa are ready to haul Israel before the International Court of Justice while they ignore the fact that Vladimir Putin has been trying to wipe Ukraine off the map and Iran kills dissidents every day and is indirectly occupying four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Sana.

When Israelis see their country singled out this way, many overlook all the holes in Bibi’s arguments — and the endless occupation of Gaza he is promising them — or even applauded when Netanyahu said Thursday, “The prime minister needs to be able to say no, even to our best friends.”

But you don’t need to be a political scientist to see through what Netanyahu is doing here. He is signaling to the right-wing West Bank settlers in his coalition: Stick with me; I will make sure the Palestinians never have a state in Gaza or the West Bank. And he is signaling to the wider Israeli public: I was for total victory in Gaza, and if it is not achieved, it will be because Biden and weakling Israeli politicians stopped me before I could finish the job.

This is pure, cynical politics by a leader who knows that he started a war with no endgame and that he has no idea now how to get out of it with a lasting peace that secures Israeli hostages and does not involve a permanent, morally draining Israeli occupation of Gaza.

Tellingly, Netanyahu was publicly called out yesterday by a key member of his war cabinet, his former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who declared that Israel needs elections and a more widely trusted government now. Eisenkot, whose son was recently killed in Gaza fighting, said that whoever speaks of the “absolute defeat” of Hamas “is not speaking the truth. … We should not tell stories.”

For all those reasons, I was glad to see the Biden administration respond, immediately, that for any U.S. president to be credible and to have the regional allies needed to protect Israel from Iran, he needs to be able to say no to our Israeli friends, too. Or as the State Department’s spokesman Matthew Miller said in an immediate answer to Netanyahu’s remarks: For the Israelis, there is “no way to solve their long-term challenges, to provide lasting security, and there is no way to solve the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza and establishing governance in Gaza and providing security for Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

I totally understand why, after Oct. 7, most Israelis don’t want to even hear the words “Palestinian state.”

And I totally understand why Biden, a true friend of Israel, insists on uttering them. Because every trend around Israel is only going to get worse — more nonstate actors, more superempowered angry men with drones from Best Buy, a more powerful Iran, more TikTok haters warped by streaming videos of dead Palestinian babies in Gaza.

Forging a legitimate, unified, effective Palestinian partner for a two-state deal with Israel that could defuse those threats may be impossible to achieve, but believing that abandoning any effort to do so is in the long-term interest of the Jewish state is a dangerous illusion. And that is exactly what Netanyahu is peddling for his own cynical purposes. Shame on him. Shame on his enablers.