The United States and Israel Are Coming Apart

A rift has opened between Israel and the United States. No breach between the two countries has been as wide or as deep since the mid-1950s, when the Eisenhower administration compelled Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. President Joe Biden expressed grave displeasure with Israel this week over the strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, and a phone call between him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was reportedly tense. But those are just the surface-level fissures that emanate from a much more profound split.

Washington and Tel Aviv don’t just differ over tactics, nor even just over plans for the medium term. For the first time in modern memory, the two countries are also at odds over long-term visions and goals, as Israel’s territorial ambitions are coming into ever-greater and more direct conflict with U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East.

Last week, the Biden administration abstained from a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza war. An abstention by a Security Council permanent member amounts to a “yes” vote, because a “no” vote constitutes a veto. To demonstrate his displeasure, Netanyahu canceled a White House visit by some of his most senior advisers.

The de facto “yes” vote on the cease-fire resolution was a long time coming. For months, the Biden administration has been slowly building pressure on Israel, starting with calls for brief pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian-aid transfers. The administration then pressed for longer-term truce proposals, including the 10-day halt in fighting during which women and children captives were exchanged. More recently, first Vice President Kamala Harris and then Biden himself have called explicitly for a cease-fire. The abstention last week leaves Israel standing alone before the international community’s now unanimous demand for the fighting to stop, at least temporarily.

[Read: U.S. support for Israel’s war has become indefensible]

Israeli denial of humanitarian aid to Gazans is another source of tension that has come to a head. The Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza is the only one equipped to handle major shipments of goods into the territory, and Israel has failed to open it in a meaningful way for aid transfers. Israel has turned the basic human needs of civilians in Gaza into an instrument of pressure in hostage negotiations with Hamas. In his State of the Union address on March 7, Biden bluntly warned Israel that “humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip.”

The United States and its partners have tried to circumvent Israeli obstruction by loading boxes of goods onto trucks at the Egyptian crossing near Rafah, then by air-dropping aid into Gaza. Now the U.S. military is building a temporary pier off the coast to get supplies into Gaza more efficiently. By doing so, the United States and its partners are effectively going around Israel and undercutting an important part of its negotiating strategy.

On March 14, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urged Israel to hold new elections as soon as possible because Netanyahu has “lost his way,” has become an obstacle to peace, and threatens to turn Israel into “a pariah” among nations. These striking remarks from a Biden ally suggest a desire to frame the rift as political, a dispute between leaders and personalities with different perspectives. But the split between the United States and Israel runs much deeper than that and will be much harder to resolve.

The most immediate dispute between Washington and Tel Aviv concerns the next tactical phase of the Gaza war. The Israeli offensive began in the north of Gaza and has pushed all the way to the outskirts of the southernmost city of Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Israelis are virtually unanimous in insisting that they cannot consider military operations complete until the remaining Hamas battalions, as well as commanders and even hostages, are rooted out of that city. In the abstract, the Biden administration agrees that Hamas remnants and assets in Rafah are a valid target.

But Israel’s drive from the north has also pushed Gaza’s civilians south. Approximately 1.4 million Palestinians now huddle in tent encampments surrounding Rafah. With the Egyptian border closed to them, they have literally nowhere to go. The Biden administration has told Israel that before assaulting Rafah, it must find these civilians a haven with at least minimal shelter, food, and potable water, if not basic medical care. Israel claims to be working on a plan, but the Biden administration appears distinctly unimpressed with its progress.

How and when Israel proceeds into Rafah is a short-term, tactical dispute. In the medium term, Israel and the Biden administration have a strategic difference over the prospect of an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Hezbollah is probably one of the most potent nonstate fighting forces in human history and the most serious immediate military threat to Israel. Its estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, many with precision guidance, are capable of striking any target in Israel and could probably overwhelm the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Hawkish members of the Israeli war cabinet, most notably Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have been pressing for a preemptive strike against Hezbollah since the first days after the October 7 Hamas-led attack. Daily skirmishes have caused fatalities on both sides, particularly among the Lebanese, but Hezbollah has made clear in word and deed that it does not want a broader war with Israel at the moment. Nonetheless, Israel appears to be preparing for a major ground offensive into Lebanon in the spring or early summer (at least, it is trying to convey that impression).

[Read: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer?]

Such an invasion could be the prelude to precisely what the Biden administration has been striving to avoid since October 7: a regional conflagration that could draw in the United States and Iran. Tehran doesn’t want this either. But other actors would be happy to see the war go regional. These include some of the militias in Iran’s “axis of resistance” network, such as Hamas and some Iraqi groups, but not Hezbollah, and a strong faction within Israel’s war cabinet.

An expanded war would certainly be bad for the United States, Hezbollah, and Iran, but it might be good for Israel, the country’s hawks surmise. By their logic, if a decisive victory is not achievable in Gaza, a war in Lebanon could yet restore Israeli deterrence, damage Iran’s deeper strategic interests, and possibly initiate a spiraling conflict that could lead the U.S. to strike Iran and its nuclear facilities. The Biden administration thus faces the vexing problem of having its most important policy goal regarding the Gaza crisis challenged and perhaps derailed by its primary regional partner.

The near- and medium-term disagreements between Washington and Tel Aviv are significant, but the true scope of the rift comes into view only from the highest altitude. The United States and Israel have divergent visions for the future of the region, Israel’s identity and borders, and U.S. strategic interests.

Virtually every major U.S. goal in the Middle East requires a strong, integrated, U.S.-led alliance that combines Israeli military capability with Saudi financial, cultural, and religious authority. Such was the thinking behind the Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement that was on the cusp of success just before October 7. The war in Gaza prompted Saudi Arabia to freeze those negotiations. But by early January, senior Saudi officials signaled interest in reviving the deal, provided that Israel accept the Palestinian right to a state and help create the framework for establishing one.

The United States, and really the entire international community, has also concluded that any resolution to this nearly 100-year-old conflict must involve a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But Israel is charging headlong the other way. Not only Netanyahu but his whole cabinet, and a large Knesset majority, reject the idea of a two-state solution.

Israel has never formally recognized the Palestinian right to a state or entered into any process that defined the establishment of one as its end goal. Rather, since the mid-1990s, Israel first slowly and then rapidly moved in the opposite direction—toward annexing large parts of the occupied West Bank, which would render Palestinian statehood practically unattainable. This anti-peace agenda is now the official position of the Israeli government, not just Likud and other right-wing parties. The Trump administration endorsed it in 2020 with the “Peace to Prosperity” proposal, which envisaged Israel annexing 30 percent more of the West Bank, including all of the Jordan Valley, such that any potential Palestinian entity would be entirely surrounded by a greater Israel. Senior ministers in the current Israeli cabinet have gone so far as to speak not only of annexing Gaza but of removing Palestinians from the territory.

The U.S. and Israel have a tactical disagreement about Rafah and a medium-term strategic one about Lebanon. Over a Palestinian state, however, the breach is visionary. The desire for Israeli expansion to include much of the occupied West Bank has not become a full consensus view in Israel, but enough Israelis support it—as much as half of the public, according to a poll from 2020—that no government is likely to move decisively against it. A slower walk toward this disaster is probably the best that Israeli politics can produce.

[Read: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Israel has come to a fork in the road. It can consolidate its affiliation with Washington—and strengthen it through partnerships with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries—or it can commit to illegally gobbling up occupied territory, expelling many Palestinians in the process and denying citizenship to those who remain. If it chooses the latter course, the opportunity for a broader Middle Eastern alliance will slip away. So might the American people: Right-wing evangelicals and Orthodox Jews may be sympathetic to the expansionist project, but many other Americans, including Jewish Americans, see it as illegitimate and profoundly unjust. Their misgivings will flow into the already existing consensus that Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue is disastrous for American interests in the region.

So the split between the United States and Israel that is obvious over Rafah in the moment, imminent over Lebanon for the spring and summer, and seemingly irreconcilable over annexation versus Palestinian independence in the long term becomes all the more cavernous as the aperture widens. The United States and Israel both oppose Iranian hegemony in the Middle East—but unless Israel changes its position on Palestinian statehood, that may be the only place where U.S. and Israeli interests coincide.