Expressing the U.S. administration’s mounting frustration with the Israeli government, the Senate’s majority leader, Chuck Schumer, gave an address in Congress on March 14, pressing for early elections in Israel and describing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “an obstacle to peace.” The following day, President Joe Biden, long a champion of American support for Israel, called it “a good speech.”
On March 25, the United States then abstained from a vote in the UN Security Council on calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, allowing the measure to pass—after decades of vetoing any resolution that was critical of Israel at all. To protest the abstention, Netanyahu called off a trip to Washington by two of his cabinet’s senior security officials, while his party, Likud, responded to Schumer’s summons to disband the government by rejecting it out of hand.
This emerging clash between the U.S. and Israel comes at a critical time for each of them: Israel is poised to launch a military operation in Rafah, where about 1 million Palestinians displaced by the conflict are taking shelter; and Biden is facing rising domestic and global discontent with the Israeli military campaign as a whole—while struggling in the polls ahead of his electoral rematch with Donald Trump in November.
What does this destabilized relationship mean for the longstanding allies?
Steven Cook is a senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. To Cook, while tensions between the U.S. and Israel have been brought to the surface by Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, they’re also the result of long-term political shifts in both countries.
For decades now, Israeli voters—and their political representatives—have been moving to the right, taking an increasingly hard line on the question of how to deal with the Palestinians. At the same time, many of these voters and politicians have become increasingly critical of their country’s dynamic with Washington, seeing it as having created a dependency on a dominant patron.
In the U.S., Cook says, a transformative realignment is meanwhile taking place among many Democratic voters and politicians. Younger Democrats, along with Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and other groups, have become more and more critical of the significant military assistance Washington sends to Israel every year—condemning Israel for the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and recurring violations of Palestinians’ human rights. And these constituencies’ power within the Democratic Party is growing—allowing them to bring their doubts to a wider public hearing and, for the first time, to the floor of the U.S. Congress. It’s a change, Cook says, Republican politicians are tracking as an opportunity to pull in voters who are more supportive of Israel, with November’s elections on the horizon.
Younger Democrats, along with Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and other groups, have become more and more critical of the significant military assistance Washington sends to Israel every year, as they condemn it for the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and recurring violations of Palestinians’ human rights.
Michael Bluhm: Why are Schumer and the Biden administration this upset with Israel?
Levi Meir Clancy
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