What Can Joe Biden Do About Benjamin Netanyahu?

Since 1977, when Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud party, became Prime Minister, Israeli leaders liberal enough to entertain a peace process with the Palestinians that could end the conflict have controlled the government for just eight years. But they always had a not-exactly-stealth weapon: Israelis across the spectrum feared alienating Washington—its military technology, its diplomatic shield, its annual billions in aid, and what has been loosely called its “values.” By tradition, of course, U.S. Presidents don’t (openly) interfere with the domestic policies of America’s allies, but not all allies benefit from such largesse, and Israeli Prime Ministers have all been rated on how they’ve cultivated bipartisan U.S. concern for Israel’s security. Civil-rights groups have sought to stop human-rights violations, such as in the occupied territories, by shaming expansionist governments in the U.S. media and before American élites more generally.

So, now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, led by his Likud bloc and its allies in far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has openly menaced Israel’s democratic structures—demanding, for example, that the governing coalition be given decisive influence over the selection of judges—liberals are reflexively seeking a lifeline from Joe Biden’s Administration. And what seems increasingly clear is that President Biden is loath to throw it. “There are plenty of reasons for Americans to care” about what Netanyahu’s coalition is doing, but “there just aren’t that many reasons for the Administration to do anything,” Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser in the Obama White House and the author of the recently published “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East,” told me. “The U.S. relationship with Israel lives or dies by domestic U.S. political dynamics,” and though thirty-eight billion dollars—the ten-year military-aid package signed under Barack Obama—“could become a lever, no Democratic Administration would want to deploy it.” There would be “noise.”

U.S. aid and diplomatic support are primarily meant to abet Israeli security, in other words, and Biden appears to think that he cannot use them for leverage without losing support among constituencies he needs to win reëlection. He did urge Netanyahu to “walk away” from his judicial assault, and has yet to invite him to the White House. But, according to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, Biden’s team has maintained contact both with members of Netanyahu’s government and with opposition leaders—who purport to represent the protest movement that has roiled Israeli streets since January and briefly paralyzed the country in late March. The Biden Administration has also conveyed its desire to see “consensus” on judicial reform, as in the talks between coalition and opposition politicians that had been taking place at the official residence of the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, in recent months.

This approach sounds conscientious, but it buys into Netanyahu’s framing—that judicial “activism” was widely distrusted—and wrongly suggests that the coalition’s drive to reform the courts is something that Netanyahu can finesse and U.S. regional policy can wait out. Most in the protest movement and a majority of the public, including many Likud voters, oppose the proposals to limit the independence of the judiciary. Leaders of the protests say that the assault on the courts only proves the urgency of enacting a constitution and a bill of rights in a country that has only impaired forms of both—and that these should be amendable only by Knesset supermajorities. In the meantime, they maintain, an independent judicial branch is the sole bulwark against governments that have been elected with slight majorities promoting theocracy and ethnic populism in Israel and apartheid in the occupied territories—an evolving “religious, nationalist, messianic autocracy,” Guy Rolnik, the founder of the business journal TheMarker, told a rally outside the President’s residence. The talks were thus a kind of off-ramp for Netanyahu following the disturbances in March, which some in the opposition were willing to allow: an emergency measure to both return the country to a nervous normal and stall a package of bills, threatening the judiciary, which seemed about to be enacted in the Knesset. At the time, nearly two-thirds of Israeli voters said that they disapproved of the job Netanyahu was doing.

Netanyahu, for his part, has used the talks, or the lull they have provided, to further his coalition’s broader political aims and to posture as a tough leader. His polls rebounded some after the government launched a military operation against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, assassinating its leaders from the air, although that strike set off five days of violence that claimed the lives of more than thirty Palestinians, including women and children, and one Israeli woman. (The operation “should be called Operation Peace for Bibi,” the Haaretz columnist B. Michael wrote.)

In its wake, Netanyahu’s settler zealot finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, designed a fiscal scheme that would disproportionately tax richer, more secular municipalities to pay for services to poorer settlements and Orthodox communities. In late May, crucially, the coalition passed a two-year budget awarding infrastructure funding for, Smotrich said, increasing the number of settlers in the West Bank to a million. Religious parties also carved out more than a quarter of a billion dollars to pay for ultra-Orthodox schools, many of which do not teach their students mathematics, science, or English, while the proportion of the budget devoted to higher education continued to decrease.

In all, the budget reserved about four billion dollars for coalition funds, which favor theocratic priorities—about ten per cent of the entire budget for 2023 and, coincidentally, roughly what Israel gets yearly from the U.S. in aid. And the judicial package has not been shelved. After the budget passed, Netanyahu said that it would “return.” His trial for various alleged corruptions (which he denies) continues, and he might still need to muscle through legislative changes to rules of good governance if he wants a plea deal that will allow him to stay in office—rules that the courts are otherwise bound to enforce. The off-ramp, increasingly, seemed an alternative route to the coalition’s destination.

Little wonder that, on Wednesday, the opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz suspended their participation in the talks, following a fraught vote in the Knesset to elect members to the Judicial Selection Committee. Under existing law, which the coalition wants to bend, the committee is composed of nine representatives, including two members of the Knesset elected by secret ballot, one of whom traditionally belongs to the government and the other to the opposition.

The coalition pressed to elect both representatives from their ranks, but Netanyahu opted for a different strategy, persuading most of his caucus to vote “no” on all candidates—effectively freezing the appointment process for a month. The maneuver partially failed: renegade coalition members helped elect one candidate from the opposition, endorsed by Lapid. But one is not enough to constitute the committee, though it is enough to signal dissension in the coalition. Lapid and Gantz saw the stalling tactic as yet more evidence of bad faith. Netanyahu, Lapid said after the vote, “put an end to the pretense of dialogue.”

Urging “consensus,” in this context, seems wistful. “When the U.S. buys into this negotiation, it allows Bibi his Dr. Jekyll, while Mr. Hyde rampages on,” Nitzan Waisberg, a leader of the protests, told me. The uncertainty and the unrest have also contributed to instability in the economy. Economic growth slowed to an annualized 2.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, down from more than five per cent last year. In the first quarter of 2022, Israel’s technology sector attracted around six billion dollars in foreign investment capital. In the first quarter of 2023, it attracted less than two billion. By June, Israeli stock indices, which have tended to track the Nasdaq in recent years, had decreased by more than two per cent, while the Nasdaq gained twenty-seven per cent by the middle of May. The low participation rate of the ultra-Orthodox in the labor force, which the budget incentivizes, will mean—according to finance-ministry officials—a cumulative G.D.P. loss of about two trillion dollars by 2060.