"President Biden and his top aides are closer to a breach with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than at any time since the Gaza war began. The mounting frustration with Netanyahu has prompted some of Biden’s aides to urge him to be more publicly critical of the prime minister.
"He is slowly warming to the idea ... as Netanyahu continues to infuriate Biden officials with public humiliations and prompt rejections of basic U.S. demands."
Most recently Netanyahu disparaged a hostage deal just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was trying to arrange it; he announced a military move into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, which U.S. officials have said would be a "disaster" for the 1.4 million Palestinians with nowhere to go; and he has persisted in the dangerous fantasy that Israel will fight until "total victory."
But The Post also reports that "for now, the White House has rejected calls to withhold military aid to Israel or impose conditions on it, saying that would only embolden Israel’s enemies." Some enemies more than others are impossible to identify with any precision, since Israel has made an enemy of the entire world. Its fiercest enemy will be the thousands of Palestinians being radicalized by Netanyahu's unrelenting slaughter.
Some White House advisers are urging only a political shift: The president must criticize Netanyahu "to distance himself from an unpopular leader and his scorched-earth policies" while changing U.S. policy not at all. This would ensure only a constant recycling of the reason for Biden's criticism of the prime minister in the first place. Netanyahu's atrocities in Gaza would persist and Biden's ineffectual tut-tutting would cause him to look even weaker.
Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, offered the lucid position: "So long as you are supporting Netanyahu’s military operation in Gaza without condition, it makes absolutely no difference how much you turn the dial in your comments. Fundamentally, you have to make a decision not to give Bibi a blank check of support."
A senior administration official looked beyond today and into an even more problematic tomorrow. "This gets to the frustration with the Israelis. Have they done the work on what comes next in Gaza? No. They haven’t grappled with the really hard questions." Netanyahu's answer to the hardest question he has already given: There shall be no Palestinian state.
That too ensures a constant recycling of Biden's criticisms and ultimately confirms the hopelessness of U.S. policy. Absent a two-state solution, the Israel-Palestine war will persevere for generations more. The singular, possible escape from this Middle East nightmare is Netanyahu's political demise. But who, or rather what, comes next?
Only the Israeli people can turn the senseless futility of an endless war into the peace of former enemies living side by side, each with full sovereignty. Netanyahu and his far-right allies in government promise perpetual tension and frequent bloodshed. Israelis must reject their promise and seek instead the only rational path to their own security.