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loop: the tangled ties between the US election and the Middle East war
Benjamin
Netanyahu has humiliated Biden’s America and seems to anticipate Trump’s
return, but what would that mean for Israel?
Julian
Borger
Julian
Borger
Fri 11 Oct
2024 17.06 EDT
The year
since the 7 October attack has demonstrated just how densely intertwined US
presidential politics is with the trajectory of events in the Middle East. Each
exerts a gravitational pull on the other, often in ways that are damaging for
both.
Foreign
policy rarely matters much in US presidential elections, but this year could be
an exception. In a contest likely to be decided by small margins in a handful
of states, the fallout from the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon,
with a potential war with Iran looming, could have a significant impact on
Kamala Harris’s prospects.
On the other
side of the coin, the outcome of the election on 5 November will affect the
Middle East in unpredictable but potentially momentous ways. Despite the clear
limits on Washington’s ability to control Israel, its closest partner, the US
remains by far the most influential external power in the region.
Joe Biden’s
steadfast support for Israel in the face of mass civilian casualties in Gaza,
and Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear defiance of US-led efforts to establish
ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, have alienated many progressive Democrats.
Kamala
Harris has not distanced herself in any significant way from Biden’s Middle
East policy and now faces a particularly tough fight in Michigan, home to a
sizable Arab American community. Losing that state would considerably
complicate Harris’s path to the presidency.
The spread
of war and the outbreak of open conflict between Israel and Iran is likely to
affect the presidential campaign far beyond Michigan, combining doubts over the
Biden-Harris team’s foreign policy competence with the threat of an oil price
rise at the worst possible time for Harris. It could be this election’s fatal
“October surprise”.
“You’re
seeing Americans being evacuated from Beirut now and it really helps the
overall Trump narrative of ‘the world’s a messier place with these weaklings’,”
said Daniel Levy, the head of the US/Middle East Project policy institute.
Just as the
Middle East can sway US politics more than any other foreign part of the world,
US politics exerts a clear and constant influence on the Middle East.
Demonstrative support for Israel has become a shibboleth for both Republican
and Democratic presidential candidates, almost irrespective of Israel’s
actions.
Dana Allin,
a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed
out that Israel’s untouchability in the US political arena had developed over
time.
“This was
not the way presidents spoke in the Richard Nixon era. There is irony in this
fealty insofar as the respective goals and worldviews of the two allies have
never been further apart,” Allin argued.
Netanyahu
has vigorously enforced the American taboo against using its leverage over
Israel. He has done so by mobilising the power of pro-Israel sentiment in the
US against any president who has tried to rein him in.
When Barack
Obama announced there should be a stop to the building of settlements in the
West Bank, Netanyahu called his bluff and ignored him. When Biden put a hold on
the delivery of US-made 2,000lb bombs which were being used to flatten
residential areas in Gaza, the Israeli prime minister declared it
“unconscionable”, and later accepted a Republican invitation to address
Congress and met Trump.
In Biden, he
was assailing a US president with more of a personal attachment to the Israeli
cause than any of his predecessors, who had flown to Israel days after the 7
October attack and literally hugged Netanyahu on the airport tarmac. The
Israeli prime minister still turned on Biden at the first sign of doubt.
Netanyahu’s
message has been clear: any hesitation in the provision of weapons or
diplomatic support will incur a heavy political cost. The US leader held
responsible will be portrayed as a traitor to Israel.
The result
of this tactic has been a deep reluctance on the part of successive presidents
to use US leverage, as Israel’s biggest arms supplier by far, to curb the
excesses of the Netanyahu coalition in any meaningful way, in Gaza, the West
Bank or Lebanon.
Without that
leverage, a succession of US ceasefire initiatives this year have come to
nothing, shrugged off by Netanyahu in ways that were sometimes deeply
humiliating to the US as a superpower and supposedly dominant partner in the
relationship.
“Netanyahu
has spent a long part of his career turning America into a partisan issue,
trying to convince Israelis that the fortunes of Israel are bound up with
Republican leaders,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst,
said.
It is
unclear whether a Harris administration would steer a significantly different
course to Biden’s. On one hand, Harris does not have the same personal history
with Israel as Biden and, if she wins in November, would be freer to experiment
with a change in policy.
On the other
hand, winning the election in the face of widespread Democratic discontent over
the Middle East could convince Harris that the progressive threat over the
issue could be discounted.
“One
scenario is that Kamala Harris wins and continues Joe Biden’s policies, which
is kind of: we want to do the right thing, but we’re basically going to let
Israel do what it wants,” Scheindlin said. “Or she could get a little tougher,
in line with a more progressive wing of the Democratic party, and say: ‘We’re
going to start applying American law on the export of our weapons,’ which I
doubt, honestly.”
It seems
almost certain that Netanyahu’s decision-making is influenced by anticipation
of a Trump restoration in the White House, and he is not alone. The Saudi
monarchy may also be waiting for Trump’s return before signing a diplomatic
normalisation agreement with Israel, though the current hostilities make such a
deal unlikely in the near term.
With Trump
back in the White House, Netanyahu would not have to deal with US resistance to
greater Israeli control, even annexation, of the West Bank. In 2019, the Trump
administration recognised Israeli sovereignty over the annexed Golan Heights.
Trump’s former ambassador to Israel David Friedman has been auditioning for a
role in a second term with a new book, One Jewish State, arguing that Israel
should swallow the West Bank whole.
“With Trump
in the White House, annexation becomes a much more active possibility,” Khaled
Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said. “It is an
administration that is going to be even less concerned with Palestinian lives
than the current one. They’re not even going to pay lip service to humanitarian
assistance.”
There is
less certainty over whether a newly elected president Trump would help
Netanyahu achieve his longstanding strategic goal: recruiting the US for a
decisive attack on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Middle East
policy in Trump’s first term was built around hostility to Iran. In his last
weeks in office, Trump gave the green light to the assassination of the
Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Suleimani. On the other hand, Trump
called off a missile strike on Iran in June 2019 because he thought the likely
civilian casualties were disproportionate for a response to the shooting down
of a US drone. And one of the points of consistency in Trump foreign policy is
his aversion to US involvement in foreign wars.
Netanyahu
may be hoping for a Trump win in November, but the consequent support from
Washington is likely to be more transactional and less sentimental than
Biden’s. Ram Ben-Barak, a former Israeli intelligence chief, worries that in
the long term, a Trump-Netanyahu combination could end up poisoning the
fundamental relationship between their two countries.
“What makes
our relationship with America is sharing the same values,” Ben-Barak said. “The
moment you have an Israeli prime minister with no values, as we have today, and
a US president without values like Trump, I’m not sure this bond will
continue.”
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