The US just fired a first diplomatic shot at Israel
“Abstention” is a deceptively diplomatic word, implying some sort of bureaucratic omission. And yet this week’s decision by the U.S. to abstain from casting its veto in the United Nations Security Council turned a page in history. For the first time since the terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel on Oct. 7 — and after nixing three previous draft resolutions to this effect — Washington has allowed the council to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
And so the U.S.-Israeli relationship, long among the world’s tightest bilateral bonds, keeps fraying beyond recognition. In December, I predicted that President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu would break first gradually, then suddenly. Well, suddenly just came a lot closer.
The Biden administration tried to talk the abstention down, saying that there had been no “shift in policy” and pointing out that the resolution also calls for the release of all hostages. But Bibi was still irate enough to cancel a trip by an Israeli delegation to Washington that was meant to patch things. And yet his own war tactics and missing peace strategy forced the U.S. and U.N. to reach this point (the other 14 members of the Security Council all voted in favor).
The Netanyahu government’s bombing of the Gaza Strip has, as Biden put it, been “indiscriminate” at times. Its facilitation of humanitarian aid has been inadequate. And its plans to invade the city of Rafah seem reckless. More than a million Gazan civilians, having fled their homes, are huddling there, alongside the remaining Hamas fighters that Israel wants (and ought) to eliminate. But a full-bore assault on Rafah would cause another humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S. seems finally to have drawn a red line.
If there was a psychological tipping point stateside, it came this month, when America’s highest-ranking elected official of Jewish faith, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, found controversial but moving words for this historical moment. Israel “cannot survive if it becomes a pariah,” he said, adding that Netanyahu increasingly conflates his personal interests with Israel’s. So Israel should hold new elections, Schumer suggested.
Netanyahu and his American allies on the Republican right howled at what they called interference in the democratic politics of an ally. That’s rich coming from Bibi, who’s spent much of the past three decades trying to manipulate U.S. politics. In 2015, he took up a Republican invitation to address a joint session of Congress in a snub to Barack Obama, the Democratic president at the time.
Even such back-and-forth, though, can’t distract from the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship. It’s Israel that needs the U.S., not the other way around. The Jewish state relies on American diplomatic protection at the U.N., the International Court of Justice and other institutions, and it needs American money, shells and bombs.
The U.S., for its part, can’t indefinitely supply those weapons if it then sees them dropped on Gazan combatants and civilians alike, in what may, according to non-governmental organizations, be violations of international humanitarian as well as U.S. law.
And so the two governments appear to have boxed themselves in. Netanyahu told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel will invade Rafah, and that
“if necessary, we will do it alone,” even without U.S. support. Such a campaign would contravene repeated messages from the White House, and now also the Security Council’s call for a ceasefire. If that act went uncensured, it would make international law and the United Nations, which the U.S. once helped build and which has already lost credibility, irrelevant. The U.S. might as well walk away from its entire postwar legacy.
This is the tragedy of the moment. By the looks of it, Netanyahu will soon give the order to attack Rafah, killing more terrorists but also causing even worse suffering for the 2 million civilians in the Gaza Strip, and even more isolation of Israel in the world. The U.S. will then have to answer, by restricting arms shipments and letting the U.N. condemn Israel. When that time comes, the U.S. may not even abstain.