Protecting Israel won’t stop Biden from pushing on Gaza

President Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel following Iran’s weekend strike isn’t curtailing the U.S. pressure campaign on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect civilians in Gaza, four Biden administration officials said.

The officials said the U.S. sees its military defense of Israel against Iran’s Saturday missile launches and drone attacks as completely separate from continuing negotiations over the Israel-Hamas war. Washington is still ready to rethink its support for Israel if it doesn’t do more to safeguard the enclave’s people while the war rages, they continued.

“They’re on different tracks,” said one of the four officials — a senior member of the administration. All were granted anonymity to detail a sensitive diplomatic and military matter.

Some analysts suggest Biden’s defense of Israel against Iran could give him the upper hand in tense negotiations with Netanyahu in the weeks ahead, particularly as disagreements remain over how to rid the border city of Rafah of Hamas’ remaining 3,000 fighters.

“He’s proven, once again, his bona fides in standing by Israel, and for many Israelis his leadership contrasts with the lack of leadership from Netanyahu,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Politically speaking, this strengthens his hand in the Israeli debate.”

The U.S. military’s decision to help shoot down more than 300 Iranian missiles and drones illustrates the complexities and contradictions at the heart of Biden’s Israel policy. He wants to show solidarity after Hamas’ attack and keep the country safe from adversaries — read: Iran and its proxies — while calibrating public and private warnings so Israel doesn’t storm into Rafah and put the city’s 1.4 million Palestinians at risk.

For the last six months, Biden has had to balance his offers of honey and vinegar in what often makes for a strange cocktail.

The U.S. defense of Israel against an unprecedented attack was not a move in a 3D chess match, a second senior administration official insisted. “We did the right thing because it was the right thing to do.”

Still, it will linger over a visit by an Israeli delegation to Washington as early as this week, during which the U.S. will apply more pressure on the Israelis to evacuate innocent men, women and children out of Rafah — many of whom arrived in southern Gaza after fleeing fighting elsewhere.

“Only a good friend [of Israel] can do what we did Saturday night and still be willing to have tough conversations about the prosecution of the operations they’re conducting inside Gaza,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Monday.

The U.S. and Israel remain far apart over how to do that. During a virtual meeting two weeks ago, senior Israeli officials said a planned migration away from Rafah could be completed in four weeks. Their American counterparts countered that it would take at least four months.

“That’s something we’re continuing to work through,” a third senior administration official told reporters Sunday night. The official added the Biden administration had not lost focus on hostage negotiations, even after Hamas rejected a proposal to release old, wounded and infirm people in exchange for “everything they had asked for.”

“It really kind of speaks to everything you need to know about Hamas,” the third official asserted.

Biden said Monday that “the United States is committed to a cease-fire that will bring the hostages home and prevent the conflict from spreading” more than it already has. On a phone call with Netanyahu this month, the president vowed to upend U.S. policy toward Israel if the situation in Gaza didn’t improve, opening the door to the once-unthinkable: conditions on future military aid to Israel.

Some proponents of the idea, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), say the U.S. should replenish the American-made weapons Israel used to protect itself against Iran’s attack.

“At the same time, the Biden administration should use all the levers of its influence to prevent innocent Palestinians in Gaza from starving to death and to stop an invasion of Rafah,” the lawmaker said, keeping the pressure on Biden to follow through with his threat.

U.S. and Israeli representatives are already wading through their differences in working groups with the hope of reaching a consensus at the imminent in-person session. There’s speculation inside and outside the administration that U.S. officials will point to their military efforts against Iran as evidence Washington always has Israel’s best interests at heart.

But such a tactic may not be necessary as, behind the scenes, painstaking diplomacy appears to be closing the yawning gap between the allies on Rafah.

“There is a sense of a growing measure of convergence,” said David Makovsky, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is in close touch with Biden administration figures.

The question no longer is about whether there should be a Rafah attack, but rather how long the precautions will take, he added. “The parties are not where they were a month ago.”

The situation could be further stressed, however, by what Israel may — or may not — do in response to Tehran’s attack, the first direct assault against Israel since the 1979 revolution that brought Iran’s ruling clerics to power.

Biden and his team have counseled their counterparts to consider it a win that Israel killed leading Iranian paramilitaries this month without suffering damage in return.

Biden and Netanyahu discussed the matter on a phone call shortly after Iran’s attack concluded, with the president encouraging his longtime acquaintance to think through the strategic ramifications of a major response. If Israel were to do something, it was better for the action to be limited and not further escalate an already tense situation, the third official said.

Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz — Netanyahu’s chief political rival — pledged Sunday to “exact a price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.” Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, added Monday that Iran “will be met with a response.”

Kirby, asked about Halevi’s remark during a Monday news conference, said “this is an Israeli decision to make on how they’ll respond.”