Biden will soon have to break with Netanyahu

It is nearly six months since they poured over the border into Israel — looting, maiming, burning, raping, kidnapping, murdering — a medieval calamity visited upon the homeland of the Jews.

It seems long ago. It was before Israel retaliated and attacked Gaza, as Hamas expected. It was before talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia on a different relationship ended. It was before some 32,000 died in Gaza, before the destruction, devastation and displacement of its people.

It was when Israel, for a moment, had sympathy in some quarters for its children slaughtered and its women assaulted, a sexual violence that many would later dismiss because, after all, didn't the Israelis have it coming to them?

And it was, in the days after the attack on

Oct. 7, when Joe Biden could condemn it all as “pure evil.” When he went to Israel, embraced Benjamin Netanyahu and promised that the United States, Israel's armourer, would have its back. When he promised aid, which he thought Congress would reflexively approve.

Of course, that was an eternity ago. In the awful season since, everything has changed. Israel has gone from underdog — if it ever was — to oppressor. Israel is now Sudan, Syria, Yemen and anywhere else a regime has killed people but few called it genocide, as they do here. Delicate thing, morality, isn't it? The double-standard is useful, isn't it?

If the aim is to annihilate Hamas, Israel is losing. Its soldiers may have killed thousands of fighters in Gaza, but thousands more will join. It knows now that the tunnels are longer and deeper and it's impossible to destroy all of them. It knows that command centres sit under hospitals and that Hamas will sacrifice their own.

The argument is to continue waging war because, for Israel, what's the alternative? Its leaders think that the siege, with all its collateral damage, is the only way to end the threat.

The alternative: a campaign of targeted assassinations, airstrikes, raids, better intelligence-gathering, a newly hardened southern border and moderate leadership open to a twostate solution would ultimately make Israel safer.

Israel has lost the public-relations war. The goodwill is gone. The attacks on Palestinians on the West Bank, where the settlements are illegal, make things worse. So do the calls for revenge from members of the conservative cabinet. This, and propping up Netanyahu, who faces criminal charges, has made Israel's war a war on itself — and Jews everywhere.

Given the endless conflict, given Israeli's misguided leadership, given the enflamed conversation around the world, it is not surprising that Israel's relationship with the U.S. is coming apart. Netanyahu is wily, ornery and desperate. Biden can't abide him.

Things have gotten worse since the UN Security Council voted Monday for a ceasefire, which the U.S. had vetoed three times before. This time it abstained, and the resolution passed.

This was coming. Biden knows he cannot deal with Netanyahu, the worst prime minister in Israel's history, even as mainstream Jewry in the U.S. and Canada won't criticize him.

Bibi sees his future — if he has one in a country that will unseat him as soon as it can — with Donald Trump, not Biden. Biden distrusts Netanyahu, whose war has not only fostered a terrifying wave of antisemitism in the U.S. and beyond, but real opposition to his own administration.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the most senior Jewish politician in the country, was speaking for Biden last week when he denounced Netanyahu and urged elections in Israel. He knows that the U.S. no longer has a partner in Netanyahu, who is responsible for the strategic, intelligence and security failure of Oct. 7.

In the meantime, Biden has only one option to try to protect himself from the anger among progressives over the war: support the ceasefire, free the remaining hostages, end this campaign of mixed success.

Sooner than later, he will have to do what was unthinkable six months ago: he will have to break with Netanyahu in a way that his successors could not — before Gaza costs him his presidency.