GNITN - Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 260

A Very Public Dispute

A War Of Words

In an article from The Jerusalem Post we learn that the Israel Defense Minister is being dispatched to the US to discuss the war and how it is supported:

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was set to fly to Washington on Saturday night to meet with top American foreign policy and defense officials from Sunday to Tuesday amid a new crisis that erupted between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden.

Both the southern and northern fronts are in the balance.

Several topics will be discussed:

More specifically, there is the future of the war and post-war Gaza policy, efforts to avoid war with Hezbollah, the status of weapons sales in various areas, Iran policy, and related regional issues.

Gallant will be playing part military strategist and part diplomat:

Due to Netanyahu’s testy relations with Biden and the absence of a fully empowered Israeli foreign minister, Gallant has often been the number-two critical interlocutor between the countries.

Earlier this week, Netanyahu attacked the Biden administration for delaying weapons sales, and then, on Wednesday, one of his spokespeople said he had restored American weapons sales.

Netanyahu was referring to Biden’s May public statement that Israel was holding up a shipment of large bombs to prevent Jerusalem from using them in an attack on Rafah.

Netanyahu blamed for aggravating crisis

Blame keeps being heaped on the PM for the current kerfuffle:

However, sources close to Gallant, as well as in the IDF and the defense establishment, have blamed Netanyahu for aggravating the weapons crisis rather than navigating it cleverly and quietly, especially since the IDF is so close to taking over Rafah without having significantly upset the US with its conduct of the battle.

As of now, who Gallant will talk with is not exactly known:

Due to the crisis, there are still questions about exactly who Gallant will meet.

During his most recent Washington trip on March 25-26, he met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and multiple times with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

He is expected to meet these officials, CIA Director Bill Burns, and Amos Hochstein, the envoy for the Lebanon crisis.

This diplomatic crisis has happened before and Gallant was dispatched to clear it up:

In the past, some of those meetings were planned, but others were added after a similar crisis between Netanyahu and Biden in March when each side canceled various meetings. Gallant ended up bridging some of the gaps at the time.

Internal politics may have been the reason as the article speculated that Netanyahu wanted to take credit for solving the arms issue before Gallant could.

Netanyahu Isn’t Playing By The “Rules”

According to an op-ed piece from the Jewish News Syndicate the PM has bucked his expected role with the US before:

As far as the White House and Democrats are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing it again. Similar to multiple occasions during the presidency of Barack Obama, Netanyahu is not playing by the rules Washington and the foreign-policy establishment believe are laid down to govern the behavior of client states.

Rather than assume the role of the loyal and pliant vassal to his nation’s superpower ally, there have been several times when Netanyahu has talked back in public to Obama and now President Joe Biden. Washington’s angry response to the video the prime minister released this week in which he spoke of the way the administration has been slow-walking arms deliveries made it clear that—assurances of goodwill from both sides notwithstanding—U.S.-Israel relations have reached a crisis point.

To be clear, we see in a separate report found on CBN.com that the US executive branch is indeed slowing things down:

Earlier this week, Netanyahu charged the White House was withholding weapons Israel desperately needs. The White House denied it.

However, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote in a letter to Biden, "Your administration is engaged in bureaucratic sleight-of-hand to withhold this crucial aid to Israel during a shooting war." Cotton added the White House is covering this up with "weasel words and bureaucratic process."

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) posted on X, “@WhiteHouse is mad bc @IsraeliPM @Netanyahu is telling the truth. Biden Admin has refused to send Congress **formal** notifications to finalize a host of arms sales to Israel—incl F-15s, JDAM smart bomb kits, munitions—even after SFRC & HFAC informally cleared these sales!”

While Netanyahu is right about the way things are going with the arms, he could have gone about it in a better way, although he asserts that he did with no results. Going back to the Post article we read this:

“When Secretary Blinken was recently here in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the support the U.S. has given Israel from the beginning of the war. But I also said something else. I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies. Secretary Blinken assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case. During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”

Putting Him In His Place

Still the US administration and even its acolytes in the press are making the PM look bad perhaps as a way to punish him for getting out of line:

Beyond the details of the dispute, in which the administration claims it is guiltless, this has resurrected the charge that Netanyahu doesn’t know his proper place.

That’s the line we’re hearing from the American foreign-policy establishment and its leading media spokesman, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who has recently accused Netanyahu of being the moral equivalent to Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar. He’s also called Netanyahu an extremist who is trying to destroy the alliance as well as an open supporter of former President Donald Trump (a point on which Trump doesn’t concur because Netanyahu congratulated Biden for winning the 2020 presidential election). It’s also echoed by the Israeli opposition, such as Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas, whose latest anti-Bibi diatribe in that far-left newspaper bluntly described the prime minister as hostile to the United States.

Could it be that the US is treating Ukraine better than Israel? The columnist thinks there is a case for that since the executive branch can cut through red tape when it wants to and apparently one war is funded differently than the other:

Indeed, there is no better example of how an administration can manipulate this process than the contrast between the way Ukraine and Israel are currently being handled.

Ukraine has received more aid from the United States in the last two years than Israel has in decades. Their funding is less accountable, and unlike Israel, not all of it is spent in the United States. But Kyiv continues to publicly complain about not getting everything it wants from American taxpayers, who have sent them hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re also unhappy that Washington has placed some limits on their use. Biden is aware that it is madness to allow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a blank check to fire them into Russia since doing so could start a nuclear war.

In spite of that, Ukraine gets priority over every other American ally, including Israel, and due to Biden’s insistence, there have been no bureaucratic logjams to slow the shipments down.

Beyond the details of the dispute, in which the administration claims it is guiltless, this has resurrected the charge that Netanyahu doesn’t know his proper place.

Still, Netanyahu may be more politically astute than the way he’s portrayed:

The claim that Netanyahu’s outspokenness is damaging the alliance misses the point. Israel may be an American client state, but given the existential nature of the conflict that was reignited by the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, it simply cannot afford to behave like a docile vassal.

Indeed, if there is anything that Netanyahu has learned in his long tenure as prime minister it is that those who always counsel caution and silence in the face of American betrayal don’t succeed. It is only by speaking up and making Israel’s case to the world, and most specifically, the American people, that it can maintain the alliance.

The PM can be criticized over the very public rebuke, but it’s a gamble that needs to be taken:

At this point, Netanyahu has nothing to lose by not allowing Biden to get away with slowing down the flow of arms to pressure Israel to stand down at its borders on the north and south.

There are plenty of cogent criticisms to be made about Netanyahu, including those involving Oct. 7 happening on his watch and the dysfunctional nature of his governmental coalition. Regardless of how long Netanyahu lasts in office—and right now, it is not the prime minister but Biden who, in appeasing the anti-Israel intersectional left wing of the Democratic Party, is playing politics over the war—or what you think of his character, policies or tactics, he needs to use every form of leverage to counter U.S. pressure that could ensure victories for Hamas and Iran. With so many lives at stake, client-state etiquette should be the last of his concerns.