Analysis: With an eye to 2024, Biden takes a ‘passive-aggressive’ approach to Israel
The president walks a fine line between embracing Israel and criticizing its prime minister
President Joe Biden signs the guestbook at the Israeli president’s residence in Jerusalem on July 14, 2022. Photo by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz
By Jacob Kornbluh August 10, 2023
Like the majority of American Jews, President Joe Biden deeply disapproves of Israel’s hard-right turn.
He conveyed his frustration to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by withholding an invitation to visit the White House for months. Publicly and repeatedly he has pushed Netanyahu to seek “broad consensus” over the package of judicial overhaul measures that has inspired hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets, decrying the changes as a power grab that will debilitate democracy.
Yet Biden hasn’t imposed any significant costs on Netanyahu or Israel. On the contrary, he bolstered security cooperation between the two nations and approved direct efforts to expand the Abraham Accords to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It’s hard to think of a bigger gift he could give the prime minister.
Historically, Biden, 80, has nurtured, more than former President Obama and many Democrats, a warm relationship with Netanyahu, 73. Biden nearly two decades ago signed a photograph of the two of them, using Netanyahu’s nickname: “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you had to say, but I love you.”
As president, Biden keeps Netanyahu at arm’s length. With an eye to the 2024 election, he knows Israel as an issue will swing very few voters. He also knows, though, that many in his constituency care about Israel and that it has factored into the races of many Democrats running down the ballot. So he continues to walk a fine line between embracing Israel and criticizing its prime minister.
As the Knesset continues to pass legislation that will bolster Netanyahu and his cadre of ministers bent on annexing the Occupied Territories and elevating religious over civil rights, American Jewish leaders are also gauging Israel’s role in the next election. They ponder how politicians can address the political crisis in Israel without alienating the voters they need in an election in which either party could take the presidency, the House and the Senate.
The Forward spoke with a dozen Jewish leaders and experts on the U.S.-Israel relationship to assess the ways in which Israel figures into their electoral calculus as U.S.-Israeli relations evolve, and Netanyahu’s government forges ahead on what many in his and this country consider a radical course.
Walking the line
“Passive-aggressive” is how Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on U.S.-Israel relations, described Biden’s current stance on Israel. Biden can’t get more aggressive for fear Republicans, in what could be a very close contest for the presidency, will paint him as Israel’s adversary, he said. Recent polls show former President Donald Trump dominating the crowded Republican primary field, and in a statistical tie with Biden, including in some key swing states in which the Jewish vote can make a difference.
American Jews have generally been repulsed by the Israeli government’s plan to skew the balance of powers toward the right-wing dominated Knesset. Already it has advanced a key component of the judicial overhaul package that limits the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government decisions. Other parts of the package will come up for votes in the fall.
Biden has declined to respond to pleas by some of his supporters for a more aggressive approach toward the Israeli government. The recipient of about 70% of the Jewish vote in 2020, he has been careful to issue no threats and express no more outrage than major American Jewish groups. Leaders within the Jewish Federations of North America, for example, as they criticize the Netanyahu government, avoid any call for action against Israel in funding or cooperation for fear of compromising Israel’s security and aligning themselves with the Jewish state’s critics in and beyond Congress.
Abraham Foxman, the former longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League and a Biden supporter, said the president has come to understand how to both embrace Israel but also distance himself from Netanyahu with “symbolic gestures.” That’s the place Biden needs to be, Foxman said, “in terms of the electorate and his constituency.”
Israel in the purple states
A recent survey of 800 registered Jewish voters, conducted by the Jewish Electoral Institute, showed that Israel continues to rank low as an issue of concern, in line with previous surveys. But the vast majority of respondents remained attached to Israel. And for certain segments of the Jewish community, including Orthodox and Republican-leaning independent voters, it ranks high.
Campaigns will court voters — Jews and evangelical Christians alike — who are thinking about Israel when they head to the polls, said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and head of the Democratic Majority for Israel. In a hypothetical Biden vs. Trump matchup, he said, “all the things that are true about Trump and Biden are going to weigh on voters, but there are certainly a critical number of voters in critical places for whom Israel is a very potent and important issue.”
Mellman added that the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policies will also benefit down-ballot Democratic candidates in pivotal districts. They include races in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, and congressional districts in Florida and New York with significant Orthodox populations.
Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington when Bill Clinton was president and Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister in the 1990s, said Biden “is not doing his utmost” to pick a fight with Netanyahu because he doesn’t want to antagonize Jewish voters who still support the Israeli government.
Then there’s the personal factor in Biden-Netanyahu relations. Daniel Kurtzer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt in the Clinton administration and then to Israel under President George W. Bush, said that criticizing Netanyahu simply “does not come easily” for Biden given their 40-year-long friendship.
“The fact that Biden has been critical of Netanyahu and the current coalition is attributable to his belief that Israel’s democracy is facing significant danger,” Kurtzer said.
How top Jewish Democrats and Republicans are thinking about Israel
In November, Netanyahu won his sixth election and began appointing cabinet members that many Israelis consider extremists. They wasted little time drafting legislation for the judicial overhaul, a suite of bills that prompted seven months of massive weekly legislations, labor boycotts and threats from military reservists to refuse to serve. Republican and Democratic Jewish groups in the U.S., which have worked to expand their base of Jewish voters in recent election cycles, knew they had to address the upheaval.
Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, referring to the Jewish Electoral Institute poll, noted that while it showed that the top issue on voters’ minds is the future of American democracy, 60% of respondents also worried that the judicial overhaul would weaken Israel’s democracy.
“It’s hard to say how much Israel itself is going to play into how Jewish voters vote in the 2024 election, but there’s no question that it is on their radar,” Soifer said. “There are direct parallels between the plan of the Netanyahu government to impede democracy and Republicans who have either denied the outcome of the 2020 election or refused to support protecting voting rights or supported other measures to weaken our own democracy.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also invoked such a parallel during a trip to Israel this week. “It’s my expectation, even though it will be turbulent for both of our countries moving ahead,” he said in a briefing with reporters, “at the end of the day, liberal democracy in both countries will prevail.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition, on the other hand, can be expected to paint Biden as hostile to Israel — accusing him of meddling in internal Israeli affairs and snubbing Israel’s president.
“Donald Trump redefined what it means to be a pro-Israel president,” said Matt Brooks, the RJC’s chief executive. “And there’s no way that if you look side by side at what Trump and his administration did to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship, bring peace to the Middle East and stand up to Iran, that you can say that Joe Biden is in the same camp.”
Still, Brooks added, to attract more Jewish voters to the GOP, the group should be “talking less and less about Israel” and more about domestic and national security issues. The group is not planning to make Israel the centerpiece of its messaging or television ads, he said.
The big prize
As Biden and other Democrats calibrate their responses to Netanyahu’s government, a striking new element has complicated their strategy.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that U.S. and Saudi officials have reached a preliminary understanding about a potential agreement in which the most powerful Sunni state in the Middle East would include recognition of Israel in exchange for Israeli concessions for the Palestinians.
If realized, such a deal could define Netanyahu’s legacy, as well as Biden’s.
The White House immediately denied the report and downplayed anticipation of an imminent breakthrough. John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, told reporters that there was no agreed framework with the Saudis about pursuing normalization with Israel.
But there is also no doubt that such talks are in the works. To make history, Biden will need the Israeli government to agree to moderate its positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many in Netanyahu’s coalition will push back.
In the U.S., a normalization deal would be both a political boon for Biden in an election year and broaden bipartisan support for Israel in Congress, said Ambassador Rabinovich, who was posted to Washington during the Oslo Accords.
And the deal would show that he had delivered on Trump’s promise for the Abraham Accords, and blunt criticism from the right.
Peter Beinart, a liberal commentator, raised doubts in his recent newsletter about whether the Biden administration actually cares about the impact an agreement with the Saudis would have in 2024. “You don’t need a Saudi normalization deal to keep Jews in the Democratic column, nor frankly do I think you need it to keep Democratic Jewish donors in the Democratic column,” Beinart said. “Just running against Donald Trump is plenty.”
Or as Mellman put it: “American Democrats are even more anti-Trump than they are anti-Netanyahu.”
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