A Chill between Israel and the U.S.?

On Monday, a photograph circulated of Naftali Bennett, Joe Biden, and Boris Johnson talking cordially at the climate-change summit in Glasgow—reportedly about their respective political situations. Bennett in fact arranged tête-à-têtes in Scotland not only with Johnson, but also with the leaders of France, Italy, India, Australia, Bahrain, and Honduras. But he had no such meeting with President Biden. While there could be any number of explanations for that, Benny Avni wonders if it reflects festering disagreements between the U.S. and Israel:

Despite Jerusalem’s praise of Mr. Biden’s friendship with the Jewish state, . . . a chill in relations with Washington is clearly in the air this fall. Secretary of State Antony Blinken . . . last week had a “tense” phone call with Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, calling his approval of 2,800 new housing units inside existing Jewish settlements “unacceptable.” The content of the call was immediately leaked to Israeli and American reporters.

Washington had earlier frowned upon Mr. Gantz’s designation as terrorist six Palestinian Arab organizations affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Washington has long recognized the PFLP as a terrorist organization. Yet it insists the six groups are part of Palestinian “civil society” even as evidence of symbiotic ties between them and the terror organization is abundant.

Then there’s the push by the Biden administration to reopen an American consulate in Jerusalem to serve Palestinian Arabs. . . . Most ominously, Bidenites seem giddy for a return to the nuclear deal with Iran. Trying to smooth over disagreements, Biden and Bennett came up with a diplomatic formula most recently repeated by Blinken on the Sunday news shows. The formula reckons that everyone prefers diplomacy while vowing to prepare an unspecified “plan B” if talks collapse. Meantime, fuzzy diplomatic language rarely succeeds in hiding disagreements.

Read more at New York Sun

More about: Joseph Biden, Naftali Bennett, US-Israel relations

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF