Neither the US nor Israel is served by Biden and Netanyahu being bad allies
Tom Rogan
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President Joe Biden is being a poor ally to Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being a poor ally to the United States.
Let’s start with Biden. The president is showing a petulant disregard for a very close ally that is facing two escalating and serious threats — Iran’s nuclear program and a rising tide of Palestinian Islamic Jihad violence in and from the West Bank.
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Today, Iran is enriching uranium to near weapons-grade purity. If Iran is able to perfect its covert weaponization research and develop a viable nuclear warhead, it will have the capacity to threaten a second Holocaust. But Israel is now concerned that the U.S. is about to reach a compromise with Iran in which Tehran would suspend high enrichment activity in return for limited sanctions relief. The problem, from Israel’s perspective, is that this deal will not address Iran’s broader nuclear weaponization threat. Israel also knows that any sanctions relief would be worth tens of billions of dollars to Tehran. A lot of that money will go to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and terrorists like the PIJ. Why the Biden administration wants to give the IRGC money when it is actively trying to assassinate senior former U.S. officials is unclear.
Instead of recognizing Israeli concerns with a White House invitation to Netanyahu, the Biden administration is pathetically complaining that Israel is leaking details of the U.S.-Iran talks. The Israelis regularly do this kind of leaking but so does the U.S. Regardless, this newly found White House concern for leaking is deeply hypocritical and irrelevant to the bigger security picture.
On to Netanyahu: The primary problem here is not, as the White House sees it, Netanyahu’s government.
True, Netanyahu’s coalition partners Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are racists who care only for the advance of their own supremacist ideology. Yes, at the margin, their presence in the Israeli government undermines American security via their support for fanatical settlers in the West Bank and the associated provocation of very close U.S. allies like Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Still, Israel is a democracy and Netanyahu is not Smotrich.
Instead, the problem with Netanyahu is that he is willing to endanger U.S. national security by forging increasingly close ties with America’s preeminent global adversary: China.
Netanyahu told visiting members of Congress this week that he has accepted an invitation to visit Beijing. He’ll attend the China-Israel Joint Committee on Innovation Cooperation to be held later this year. “China-Israel … Innovation cooperation” are not words that sit well in Washington. Especially when it comes to Netanyahu. Where Netanyahu’s predecessors Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett took action, albeit insufficient, to better safeguard Israeli technology, Netanyahu used his previous term in office to open the doors to tech cooperation with China.
In so doing, Netanyahu directly endangered U.S. national security by allowing China access to highly advanced Israeli tech innovation. In 2017, Netanyahu even told Xi Jinping that Israel-China cooperation was “a marriage made in heaven.” The abiding U.S. concern here is that China will access Israeli innovations in the field of artificial intelligence and tech software to support the targeting and weapons capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army. Netanyahu knows this but apparently does not care. Which begs a question.
Namely, why is the leader of a nation which receives billions of dollars in U.S. defensive aid each year now willing to kowtow to the leader of a nation who is doing everything in his power to better kill American service personnel?
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Netanyahu is no idiot. He knows the U.S. and China are likely heading for war over Taiwan. He knows the U.S. is likely to lose many citizens even if it is victorious in that conflict. He knows that this is a top concern for the Republican Party, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reminded Netanyahu in May. It should thus be a no-brainer for Netanyahu to distance himself from China. Instead, he is doing the opposite. Netanyahu might point to visits to Beijing by Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron as excuses for his own trip. Yet unless Netanyahu wants Israel to be seen by Washington on this most exigent of U.S. concerns as New Zealand is seen, as a paper-thin ally, he should reconsider this trip.
Top line: the U.S.-Israel relationship was forged in the ashes of the Holocaust and has thrived to the moral, economic, and strategic benefit of both nations. In 2023, however, neither nation’s leader appears terribly interested in consolidating what has made this relationship so successful: the understanding that both nations do better when they stand shoulder to shoulder on the most critical of their concerns.