Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi: The Washington Post oday's WorldView by Adam TAylor with Sammy Westfall : Biden has huge leverage on Israel. He hasn’t really used it yet.

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Today's WorldView

By Adam Taylor

with Sammy Westfall

Biden has huge leverage on Israel. He hasn’t really used it yet.

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participate in an expanded bilateral meeting with Israeli and U.S. government officials on Oct. 18, in Tel Aviv. (Evan Vucci/AP)

President Biden has become a vocal critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership of the Israeli war in Gaza. “He must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken,” Biden said of Netanyahu in an MSNBC interview, warning that any attack on the town of Rafah, effectively the last refuge for many civilians in Gaza, could be a “red line.”

“In my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel,” Biden said of the Israeli prime minister in the interview, which aired on Sunday.

It was just the latest sign of how the Biden administration is at odds with Netanyahu’s government over the humanitarian situation inside Gaza. In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden said the United States was working to establish a cease-fire lasting at least six weeks, despite Netanyahu’s opposition to calls for a pause in fighting. He also announced that the United States would build a temporary port in Gaza to allow maritime deliveries, an extraordinary circumvention of the Israeli restrictions on aid trucks at the Palestinian enclave’s land border.

Both demands were explicit criticisms of the conduct of Netanyahu’s government, a sign that Biden was aware of the anger felt within the Democratic Party about a conflict where 31,000 are reported to have died over five months of war and experts are seeing the early signs of famine. They are just the latest signs of U.S. pressure on Israel’s leadership: Top Biden administration officials last week met with Benny Gantz, a centrist domestic political rival to Netanyahu, in Washington. Biden’s administration also imposed restrictions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank in February.

Biden’s actions have drawn responses from Netanyahu, with the Israeli prime minister using an interview Sunday to push back on the American leader. “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Axel Springer, Politico’s parent company.

But there is one key area where the United States has not yet exerted its leverage on Netanyahu: Military aid.

Throughout the war in Gaza, the United States has remained a vital military supplier to Israel. Bader Al-Saif, a professor of history at Kuwait University, told The Washington Post last week that the United States shouldn’t have to ask Israel to allow more aid to Gaza. “It should be a command,” Al-Saif said, as the United States was “financing the war” with its arms deliveries to Israel.

As my colleague John Hudson reported, the United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since Oct. 7, when the war began following a Hamas-led attack on Israel that left around 1,200 dead according to Israeli authorities.

U.S. officials offered that triple-digit number to members of Congress at a recent classified briefing, according to reporting from The Post. They were not public because they fell under a specific dollar amount that required individual notification to Congress, even though they included lethal aid such as precision-guided munitions and bunker buster bombs.

The number is in addition to the $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5 million of artillery shell components that were publicly announced, even as the Biden administration bypassed Congress with an emergency authority.

The United States has long had a deep military relationship with Israel, which has received about $300 billion in combined economic and military assistance, adjusted for inflation, since its founding, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Even as Israel’s economy boomed and its need for economic assistance tapered off, military aid stayed at least $3 billion a year.

Since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas that left at least 1,200 dead, this military support has increased. Last week, one Israeli military official offered an appraisal of the support in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“There’s nothing that Israel can say that it has not gotten. Israel got basically what it needed,” said the official, who was not named by the Journal. “When you look into the future, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to stay like that”

Could the age of U.S. military support for Israel be about to change? Biden may have suggested not in his interview with MSNBC, where he seemingly contradicted his own “red line” on Rafah. “I’m never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical,” Biden said. “So there’s no red line [in which] I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”

But the mounting public anger over the huge toll in Gaza is hard for Biden to ignore. It may signify a permanent shift for Democrats. As Today’s WorldView reported last month, polling data suggests that the Democrats have become more divided on the Israel-Palestinian conflict since the conflict began on Oct. 7. Several U.S. lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to condition aid to Israel on humanitarian grounds, if not cut if off completely.

Politico on Monday reported that Biden may consider conditioning military aid to Israel if it presses ahead with a large-scale invasion of Rafah, citing four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking. The report noted that the president hasn’t made that decision yet, but “it’s something he’s definitely thought about,” the outlet reported one anonymous official as saying.

Ben Samuels, Washington correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noted in an analysis Monday that Biden’s remarks to MSNBC appeared to refer to defensive weapons specifically. Under a national security memorandum signed by Biden last month, Israel has until March 25 to provide the United States with written assurances it is following international law when using U.S.-supplied weapons and not obstructing the delivery of aid into Gaza.

If Israel fails to provide the assurances, it would face being cut off from some of its most important weapons. “It is nearly impossible to quantify the implications of Biden suspending offensive weapons sales. For one, Israel would rapidly find itself in the same position Ukraine has found itself in over recent months: in desperate need of ammunition and, accordingly, forced to recalibrate its strategy in real time,” Samuels wrote.

Netanyahu may be willing to risk a break with Democrats, willing to bet on a Republican win in November that would return former president Donald Trump to the presidency. It’s a risky bet, even if Trump does win. The former president told the crowd at a campaign rally in South Carolina this weekend that he views U.S. military aid as a loan that has to be repaid.

1,000 WORDS

Indonesian Muslims take part in the evening mass prayers called "Tarawih" on the first night of Ramadan, at the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Willy Kurniawan/Reuters)

Kids stand amongst Muslim women at a mass prayer for Ramadan at Seremban, Malaysia, on Monday. (Hasnoor Hussain/Reuters)

A family prepares Ramadan decorations inside their tent in Al-Mawasi, Gaza, on March 6. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)

Ramadan, the holiest period in the Islamic calendar, has begun. Muslims fast during Ramadan — abstaining from eating or drinking — between dawn and sunset. People eat their first meal, suhoor, before sunrise and break their fast at iftar, at dusk.

Israel and Hamas, through mediators, have been trying to reach a deal that would pause fighting and release Hamas-held hostages for Israeli-held Palestinian prisoners. Many hoped that the cease-fire deal would begin by the start of the holy month, but Ramadan began without such an agreement.

TALKING POINTS

• The Palestinian Authority security forces is regarded by the Biden administration as central to its goal to stabilize a post-war Gaza. The group reports to President Mahmoud Abbas and is estimated to be 35,500 members strong. However, despite two decades of reforms, the Palestinian Authority remains chronically underfunded and widely unpopular; many think its security force is ill-equipped to take on the massive responsibility that its Western backers are envisioning. In today’s Post Reports podcast, reporter Miriam Berger takes us inside the Palestinian Authority training center, and gives us a rare glimpse of the specific challenges this security force faces.

• Russia’s air force has dramatically boosted its effectiveness in the Ukraine war with its increased use of “glide bombs,” contributing to Moscow’s recent battlefield successes, according to Western experts. The plentiful Soviet-era bombs, which carry up to a half-ton of explosives, have been fitted with wings and guidance systems to fly long distances with some accuracy.

• The top U.S. intelligence official warned that the war in Gaza could embolden terrorist groups, which are aligned in their opposition to the United States for its support of Israel. “The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

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'LABORATORY FOR EUROPE'S ELECTORAL YEAR'

Portugal’s Social Democratic Party and Democratic Alliance leader Luis Montenegro speaks following the result of a general election in Lisbon, on Monday. (Pedro Nunes/Reuters)

The ruling Socialists conceded defeat in one of the closest elections in Portuguese history, saying they would not challenge the victory of a center-right alliance in a vote that also saw major gains for the far right in one of Europe’s most reliably liberal countries.

With more than 99 percent of the vote counted and the highest turnout in three decades, the center-right Democratic Alliance (AD) — led by the Social Democrats — and the center-left Socialists were separated by 2,058 votes, with both hovering near 29 percent. The far-right Chega Party, meanwhile, was overperforming in third with 18 percent, more than doubling its 2022 result.

Exit polls released after balloting stations closed Sunday had suggested a clear center-right victory. But as the tallies were counted, official results reflected a photo finish — in part because of the extraordinary inroads made by the far right. In fact, the Socialist concession oddly came just before the party pulled slightly ahead again in the official count with less than 1 percent of the vote to go, though its leader said an analysis of outstanding ballots suggested his party would lose.

By conceding, the Socialists, who have ruled since 2015, appeared to fend off the possibility that the center-right could break its pledge not to go into coalition with Chega to form a government. Instead, the center-right Social Democrats appeared poised to forge a minority government with the aid of a party of fiscal conservatives that landed in fourth place.

The Socialists “didn’t win the elections. It will lead the opposition,” said Pedro Nuno Santos, leader of the Socialists and candidate for prime minister, told supporters in Lisbon early Monday.

Nevertheless, Chega was widely seen as a major beneficiary of the night, and was pressuring the mainstream right to let it join any new conservative government. Together, with another conservative party that came in fourth, the center-right and the far right all told captured nearly 52 percent of the vote.

“The Portuguese gave [conservatives] a majority,” Chega’s head, André Ventura, told journalists in Lisbon. “We will be irresponsible if we don’t form a government.”

The Portuguese race is being closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic during a year when former U.S. president Donald Trump is seeking to take back the White House and far-right parties are polling strong in France, Austria, Germany and elsewhere.

“Portugal is a laboratory for the electoral year in Europe,” said António Costa Pinto, a political expert with the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon.

In Portugal, a country of 10.3 million, voters have been searching for an antidote to political corruption scandals, a housing crisis, high inflation and low wages. The election came four months after the Socialist government collapsed amid an influence-peddling investigation, and as the center-right Social Democrats faced their own financial scandal that forced the resignation of two party officials.

All eyes were on the far-right Chega Party, or “Enough” in English. Its campaign drew inspiration from the likes of Trump, Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro and French nationalist Marine Le Pen. – Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins