President Biden’s popularity with the Israeli public gives him leverage, but placing conditions on American aid would likely backfire.
The high death toll among Palestinian civilians in Israel’s war with Hamas has triggered repeated calls for placing conditions on American assistance to the Jewish state. “The truth is that if asking nicely worked, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders in a floor speech in late November. “For many years, the United States has provided Israel with substantial sums of money with close to no strings attached…This blank check approach must end.”
The reality is that U.S. aid to Israel has never been a blank check. We have often used military assistance as a way to achieve our own policy goals—to encourage Israel to take risks for peace or to help deter American enemies in the Middle East. But these efforts haven’t always worked as planned. Because Israel is a democracy, its policy choices are often shaped and determined by public opinion, and history shows that if Israeli voters think the U.S. is making unreasonable demands, it will reject them, regardless of the costs.
Israel lives in a tough neighborhood, with enemies who call for its eradication. Jewish and Israeli history make it clear that such calls need to be taken seriously, because the unimaginable can happen; Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack demonstrated that dire reality once again. American presidents who demonstrate that they understand Israel’s predicament and the threats it faces can win over the Israeli public, making it politically costly for an Israeli prime minister to reject American demands. But the reverse is also true: An Israeli prime minister can gain politically by standing up to a U.S. president who is perceived not to understand the region and who seems willing to pressure Israel to make risky sacrifices.
When Israel was founded in 1948 and immediately invaded by its Arab neighbors, President Harry Truman quickly recognized the new Jewish state, but the U.S. offered no military support, only loans. John F. Kennedy was the first American president to change that policy, providing about $40 million in grant assistance and authorizing the sale to Israel of the Hawk anti-aircraft system, a major defensive weapon. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Richard Nixon was determined to prevent Arab armies with Soviet weapons from defeating Israel’s U.S.-equipped military and resupplied the Jewish state with arms.
The U.S. didn’t begin to offer guaranteed annual assistance to Israel until 1979, when Jimmy Carter used the promise of aid to encourage Egypt and Israel to sign a peace treaty. The amount was set at $3 billion a year in economic and military assistance for Israel (and just over $2 billion for Egypt). A generation later, Israel’s economy had grown significantly, and George W. Bush phased out U.S. economic support while providing increased military assistance, at a time when Israel faced heightened threats from Iran and its proxies. Bush further transformed the U.S.-Israel relationship by replacing annual aid commitments with multi-year ones. In 2007, the U.S. committed to provide Israel with $30 billion over the next 10 years.
From Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, every U.S. president has sought strategic cooperation with Israel. Political and historical sympathy has played a key role in this support, of course, but so too has the fact that the relationship is not simply a favor to Israel—it serves American geopolitical interests while also channeling much of the aid back to the U.S. defense industry. Israel has developed and shared critical new military technologies, whether “active armor” to protect tanks or the Arrow and Iron Dome anti-missile defense systems. The U.S. has positioned its own military material in Israel to project power in the Middle East, and the two countries share intelligence, since the forces that threaten Israel usually also threaten the U.S.
In 2016, the Obama administration negotiated a new aid agreement with Israel for $38 billion over 10 years. Obama consistently addressed Israeli security needs even as he publicly criticized Israeli policies on settlements and the Palestinians. But he got little or no credit with the Israeli public, who tended to see the criticism as one-sided and did not feel that Israel could rely on him. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of that perception by appearing before a joint session of Congress in March 2016, two weeks before an election in Israel, to oppose Obama’s approach to negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. At the time, Netanyahu was running behind in all the polls, but many Israelis liked seeing him stand up to Obama, and he won reelection.
By contrast, Biden’s strong response to the trauma of Oct. 7 has given him a great deal of credit with the Israeli public. Biden is the first American president to visit Israel during wartime, supports Israel’s objective of making sure Hamas can no longer rule Gaza, and has repeatedly rejected ceasefires that are supported by much of the international community but would save Hamas. At a time when the Israelis wanted to withhold humanitarian assistance as a way to pressure Hamas to release the hostages or at least allow the Red Cross to see them, Biden used this political credit to convince Israel to do things it did not want to do: to open humanitarian corridors and safe areas in Gaza, to adjust its military targeting to limit civilian casualties and even, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, to keep Israel from pre-emptively striking Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel still needs to do more to limit casualties and meet the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza. But threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless Israel changes its policies would only have the effect of making the Israelis feel they must go it alone. As one senior Israeli official recently told me, “If America says you have to stop or we will cut you off, we will fight with our fingernails if we have to—we have no choice.”
Biden isn’t the only president who understood that the best way to influence Israel is to build credibility with its public and leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon might not have been so willing to withdraw Israeli soldiers and settlements from Gaza in 2005 if he hadn’t had full confidence in George W. Bush. Bill Clinton’s bond with the Israeli public helped him to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu into transferring more West Bank territory to the Palestinian Authority, against his own fundamental political precepts.
This history suggests that the U.S. should use its leverage with Israel strategically. Today, with Israelis united in wartime and still traumatized by the Hamas attack, trying to force them to accept a Palestinian state would backfire. In time, the Israeli public will be readier to think about the real choices they face with the Palestinians.
But the U.S. should not tolerate—and should not hesitate to criticize—Israeli actions that undermine the possibility of a Palestinian state, like aggressive new settlement activity in the West Bank or attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinian villages. The Biden administration must make clear that the U.S. sees resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a fundamental interest, however impossible that goal may seem now. In doing so, however, the critical need is to strike the right balance with an ally that remains deeply shaken by the attack of Oct. 7.
Making assistance to Israel conditional on certain policies won’t build American influence or further American interests. Joe Biden’s standing with the Israeli public is the U.S.’s most powerful asset today in shaping events in Gaza, and it will force any Israeli prime minister to pay a price for resisting his administration’s priorities.
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