Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu aren’t getting along—and they want to make sure the world knows it. President Biden went on MSNBC to tell an interviewer that Israel’s prime minister “is hurting Israel more than helping.” Via Politico, Netanyahu answered first with faux incomprehension that he didn’t know “exactly what the president meant,” then angrily declared that Israelis wouldn’t let anyone “ram down our throats a Palestinian state.”
In fact, what Biden wants is clear. It starts with an immediate change in Israel’s tactics to dramatically reduce civilian deaths in Gaza and continues to a day-after-the-war diplomatic process aimed at Palestinian statehood.
What’s more interesting is why both Biden and Netanyahu have chosen to make the dispute so public. For Netanyahu, the question is acute: Why risk a schism with Israel’s superpower patron, and with a president who has so fully supported Israel during the current war?
On Biden’s side, the easy answer was supplied by his MSNBC interviewer, Jonathan Capehart: The president faces a tough election, and parts of his electorate—especially Muslim voters in the swing state of Michigan—are furious with him for arming Israel. So Biden is pivoting: air-dropping aid to Gaza and insisting that Israel not carry the battle into Rafah, where most of Gaza’s displaced population is now huddled. Reversing a political cliché, Biden now needs lots of daylight between America and Israel.
The horse-race explanation, however, is too simplistic. Recall that the clash between the two men dates to the formation of Netanyahu’s current extreme government and its push to concentrate power in the ruling party’s hands. “They cannot continue down this road,” Biden said of Netanyahu’s plans for crippling judicial review of government actions. After months of pointedly refusing to invite Netanyahu to visit, Biden finally met Netanyahu on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly—not at the White House.
After Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7, Biden prioritized his commitment to........