US-Israel tensions underline White House unease at Netanyahu’s policies

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As Joe Biden received Israel’s figurehead president Isaac Herzog at the White House this week, he hailed the relationship between the US and Israel as “simply unbreakable”, and talked up the “ironclad” commitment to its Middle East ally.

Yet despite the US president’s warm words, this week’s flurry of diplomatic activity also laid bare the extent to which ties between the US and one of its closest allies been strained since Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in last year at the head of the most rightwing government in Israeli history.

“The administration is trying to walk between the lines,” said Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and now chair of Silver Road Capital Group. “To show they have Israel’s back — but also that they have a problem with this government.”

Part of the Biden administration’s criticism of Netanyahu’s government has been directed at its acceleration of plans to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which Palestinians have long sought as the heart of a future state, but which Israel has occupied since 1967.

Biden’s administration has repeatedly branded expansion of the settlements — deemed illegal by most of the international community — an obstacle to peace. Two weeks ago he said Netanyahu’s cabinet had some of the “most extreme” figures he had encountered in 50 years of dealing with Israel, criticising their desire to “settle anywhere” as “part of the problem” in the West Bank. But in this week’s public pronouncements, he largely avoided the topic.

Instead, the concern Biden expressed most publicly concerned the moves to weaken the powers of Israel’s judiciary that have sparked one of the biggest waves of protests in Israeli history and plunged the country into its deepest political crisis in years.

Netanyahu and his allies have insisted the judicial changes — the first of which is due to be voted through on Monday — are needed to rein in an overly powerful judiciary. But critics see them as a fundamental threat to Israel’s democratic institutions. This week, Biden once again urged Netanyahu not to push through far-reaching changes without consensus.

To hammer home his message, shortly after meeting Herzog on Tuesday, Biden told The New York Times that “the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy . . . must remain the core of our bilateral relationship”. The White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby then told Israel’s Channel 12 that the article had “accurately reflected where the president’s head is”.

“We have never before faced a situation in which the whole issue of Israel’s democratic institutions or its independent judiciary has been called into question,” said Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel and now Lowy distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And that takes on a greater importance when you have a president [in Biden] who . . . who believes in promoting democracy.”

Observers said part of the reason for Biden’s decision to focus his criticism on the judicial overhaul lay in US domestic politics. The stance of US politicians on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has gradually become a more partisan issue in recent years.

That trend was accelerated after the administration of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, veered away from the longstanding US approach to a two-state solution, taking a number of high-profile steps that unambiguously favoured Israel. It was underscored again this week when Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal branded Israel a “racist state”, prompting a Republican-sponsored resolution saying that it is not.

By contrast, Biden’s warnings about Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul have attracted far less Republican blowback, said Indyk, not least because much of the Jewish community in the US shares his concerns.

“[Biden] is not going to want to be engaged in a fight with Israel over settlements in an election year,” he said. “But it seems that he is quite prepared to have a fight over the independence of the judiciary.”

However, there is little indication that the Biden administration intended to follow its criticisms of Netanyahu’s government with actions. “There was “no talk of some kind of formal reassessment” of the US-Israel relationship, an NSC official said.

And having pointedly refused to invite Netanyahu to the US in the seven months since he returned to office, Biden finally did so this week — although no date or location was set and officials said this had largely been done to avoid the topic overshadowing Herzog’s visit.

Indeed, although the Biden administration has stopped a Trump-era policy of providing funding for Israeli research institutes operating in West Bank settlements, it has otherwise pursued several other policies that analysts said could provide Netanyahu with a political windfall.

Israel and the US signed an agreement this week that moves Israel closer to its long-held goal of gaining entry into the US visa-waiver programme. And even though US officials warned in private that the deteriorating situation in the West Bank was using up diplomatic bandwidth that could be dedicated to issues such as Israel’s ambitions to normalise ties with Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration has nonetheless been working to facilitate the establishment of relations.

Diplomats and former officials said that in the short term, that was unlikely to change. “The [US-Israel] defence co-operation continues fully fledged, because it’s also an American interest. The basic special relationship continues because it’s a people-to-people relationship,” said Ayalon. “But [the Americans] are raising a red flag.”