With the US presidential election fast approaching, what to do about Israel and Gaza has become a leading foreign policy issue. WhoWhatwhy’s International Editor William T. Dowell and contributor James M. Dorsey — an expert on the Middle East who also publishes ‘The Troubled World’ on Substack — discussed what’s at stake and the possible options.
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William T. Dowell: My question is: Given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to listen to US advice, should the US consider disengaging from Israel’s defense? It wouldn’t have to be abrupt, but we could at least cut down on the delivery of the heavy bombs that have caused much of the damage in Gaza.
Islamic terrorism, such as the October 7 attack carried out by Hamas, generally has two objectives: The first is to terrorize the victim of the attack; the second is to force an uncommitted Arab public to choose sides. In this case, that applies not just to Palestinians but also to Arabs throughout the Middle East.
Many are naturally horrified by the carnage that Netanyahu’s relentless bombing has inflicted on Gaza. If the US continues to associate itself with an Israeli administration that refuses to listen to Washington, US interests will eventually be affected throughout the region. Is it time to cut Netanyahu loose?
James M. Dorsey: The key is to define what constitutes a defense of Israel. I would argue that the Gaza war is no longer, if it ever was, about Israel’s defense. In other words, Gaza is about “Greater Israel,” not the defense of the Jewish state.
While a potential conflagration with Iran would be a byproduct of Gaza, the US does have an interest in averting an all-out Gaza war while ensuring that Israel can defend itself. That could be achieved with a ceasefire. Limiting arms sales to Israel could increase domestic pressure on Netanyahu from a political elite that does not want a rupture with the United States. Unless the United States puts that to the test, we will never know, but it would be a useful shot across Netanyahu and Israel’s bow.
Dowell: Is Israel still important to the US, or has it outlived its usefulness? Can Israel survive without the US?
Israel has only existed since 1948, and it could be argued that it is an artificial implant in a hostile region. Despite Israeli claims to thousands of years of history, most Israelis immigrated to the region from foreign countries fairly recently, and as far as the Middle East is concerned, Israel is pretty much a Western interloper in Arab territory. The Israelite domination of ancient Palestine only lasted a few hundred years before the successive diasporas began dispersing everyone to foreign places.
Would the world be worse off if Israel ceased to exist as an independent country?
Dorsey: Limiting arms deliveries to Israel could impact decisions by Hamas and Iran. They may not want to undermine the rising strains in the US-Israeli relationship and the perceived consequences of the Gaza war.
A US failure to defend Israel against Iran would reverberate in the Gulf and further raise questions about US reliability, similar to Obama’s refusal to help toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Trump’s failure to respond appropriately to the Houthi/Iranian attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
Your points on Israel go to broader issues. Most of the Middle East has accepted Israel as a fact. That is not good enough for Israel. Israel has moved from wanting to be recognized to demanding that its right to exist be recognized; i.e., from demanding legitimization of its narrative to insisting that it be recognized as a Jewish state.
In other words, this is not a battle about recognition but a battle about going beyond the norms of diplomatic recognition and relations to impose endorsement of an ideology and political system that does not extend equal rights to all its citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or religion.
Dowell: Recognition as a Jewish state raises an interesting question. Israel has a current population of around 9 million citizens. Two million of those are Muslim Arabs. If Israel wants to impose itself as a Jewish state, can it also be a democracy, or do the Arabs have to accept being non- (or at least second-class) citizens?
The situation becomes more complex if you include the occupied territories. If you do that, the balance between Jews and Muslims in a “Greater Israel” becomes much more equal. Netanyahu and his extreme-right coalition adamantly refuse a two-state solution for Gaza and the West Bank, yet they insist that they want to be a democracy — just a democracy limited to Jews. How does the US, which claims to be a multiethnic democracy, fit into this scenario?
Dorsey: Israel has long been at a crossroads in defining what it wants to be: a Jewish-majority authoritarian state or a democracy with equal rights for all citizens irrespective of ethnicity or religion.
Netanyahu and Israel’s ultranationalists and ultraconservatives have made their choice. They are willing to ditch democracy in favor of Greater Israel, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and repression, if not ethnic cleansing, of Palestinians.
Israel cannot have it both ways. The Hamas attack and the Gaza war have put Israel’s choices in stark relief and high up on the international community’s agenda. Post-Gaza, Israel is likely to discover that it will have to make its choice in a very different and far more hostile environment, that is likely to impact debate in Israel itself.
Dowell: So, the final questions are: What should the United States do about Israel and why should we do it?
Dorsey: The why is easy. Irrespective of whether Americans believe that the United States should be less engaged internationally, there seems to be a consensus that the US is locked into global competition with China and Russia. By definition, that means the US national interests extend to the Middle East, which has some of the world’s most strategic waterways, the world’s foremost fossil fuel reserves, and financial powerhouses. Add to this the fact that the US is home to large and powerful communities with an interest in the Middle East.
What to do is more complex, given US domestic constraints. What is clear is that the US needs to fire a powerful shot across Israel’s bow.
One shot the Biden administration could fire with relatively little pushback would be to sanction the government’s foremost ultranationalists, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Biden could also make a direct appeal to the Israeli public over the heads of the Netanyahu government.
I suspect that one reason the administration is unwilling to engage in arms suspensions is that it doesn’t want to risk narrowing the split between the Israeli military and intelligence community as they rally against US military-related moves. On the other hand, the split has so far not produced what the US would regard as positive change.
