The Rift Between America and Israel

What’s happening between the old allies? Steven Cook on an existential crisis, a humanitarian crisis, and two diverging political shifts. Recently at The Signal: Abraham Newman on [why U.S. sanctions now reach into nearly every country in the world](. Today: What’s happening between the U.S. and Israel? Steven Cook on an existential crisis, a humanitarian crisis, and two diverging political shifts. Also: Steven Levitsky on how political frustration has turned voters against elected authoritarians. A Series of Unsettling Events Jorge Fernandez 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? Advertisement 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? Steven Cook: Most of all, this is about Israel’s looming military operation in Rafah—in southern Gaza, on the border with Egypt. The U.S. thinks Israel’s plans to invade Rafah are poorly though-through and dangerous. The city usually has about 280,000 residents, but now some 1.2 million Palestinians are there. The border with Egypt is closed, so there’s no place for the refugees to go if Israel invades. The Americans are also angry with the Israelis because there’s a humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip. Schumer and the administration want to increase deliveries of humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The Israelis say they’re not responsible for the difficulties in delivering aid to Gaza, blaming the UN—which in turn says Israel hasn’t been as helpful as it could be. Biden is meanwhile in some political trouble at home on account of embracing Israel, and that’s, as well, driving the pressure on his administration to confront it. The administration had miscalculated here. They believed that if Biden went to Israel and embraced Netanyahu and his government right after October 7, then Biden would be able to influence the Israeli military operation. But even then, it was clear that Israelis were [defining this moment in existential terms](. And when a country defines a fight in existential terms, it’s very hard for external powers to influence them. Levi Meir Clancy More from Steven Cook at The Signal: “The one real element of leverage the U.S. has is military assistance. But no U.S. leader has ever been willing to suspend it—and if you’re not willing to do that, then you effectively have no real leverage at all. Leverage is purely theoretical unless you’re willing to use it. Which is why I don’t think the United States has a lot of leverage over Israel. That’s even truer at the moment, on account of the existential terms Israelis are seeing this conflict in—understandably, after what happened on October 7.” “In the spring of 2023, well before the conflict, a poll by the Pew Center found for the first time that Democrats had become more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel. That poll is an important data point in the changing relationship we’re talking about; it helps us see the shifts as more gradual than abrupt. The present tension between the Biden administration and the Israeli government is of course critical, because it’s increasing at an important moment in the course of both the war and American political life. But this tension is also part of a longer arc in the U.S.-Israel relationship. There are immediate, high political stakes in Israel and the United States right now, and there are long-term political realignments underway in both countries, as well.” “Polls show that two-thirds of Israelis support the war effort; two-thirds believe there should be a Rafah operation; and two-thirds oppose a two-state solution with an independent Palestine. This is all at odds with American policy—and helping foster a situation that’s fairly easy for Netanyahu to exploit politically. [Israelis have been moving to the right over past couple decades now](, and this conflict has accelerated that movement. While Schumer talks of seeing himself as a protector of Israel, I don’t think he or the Biden administration really understand the country’s political dynamics.” [Members can read the full interview here]( Enjoy The Signal? Send this newsletter along to a friend who’s as curious about the world as you are. Someone send it to you? Sign up [here](. FROM THE FILES Pexels Same as the Old Boss Surprisingly, Turkey’s political opposition defeated the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in nearly all the country’s major cities in local elections on March 31. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 35.5 percent of the vote nationwide—its worst performance in 20 years—while the Republican Party won 37.8 percent and now controls Turkey’s five largest cities. Turkish voters appeared to be punishing Erdoğan’s party for the country’s economic troubles after the official inflation rate hit nearly 70 percent in February. In December 2021, Steven Levitsky [explored the weakening position of authoritarian populists worldwide](—including Erdoğan and Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro, who went on to lose his bid for reelection in 2022. To Levitsky, economic mismanagement and poor handling of the pandemic had been eroding the standing of many populist authoritarians. Meanwhile, as he sees it, “thermostatic” political change—citizens wanting to toss rulers out after too many years in office—is always inevitable. But as popular frustration with establishment elites remains strong globally, there’s still nothing to diminish the allure among politicians around the world of tapping populist anger to gain or hold power. 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