Can America’s relationship with Israel survive the ‘phone call heard around the world’?

The very special relationship that has bound the United States to Israel for the best part of 50 years has been unravelling in a dramatic way since the Hamas attacks six months ago – or, more accurately, since Israel’s launched its military response three weeks later. How bad relations have become between the current occupant of the White House and the prime minister of Israel positively rang out from the official US account of a half-hour phone call between the leaders on Thursday.

To describe the tone as unfriendly would be an understatement. But it was more than that. The report reads like an aggrieved reprimand from a parent, US president Joe Biden, to a petulant child – Benjamin Netanyahu. As described, this was not an encounter between the leaders of equal sovereign states; it was a comprehensive dressing down, with warnings. If you grant that such reports tend to observe the niceties of diplomatic language, you can only imagine how acrimonious the actual conversation may have been.

It was the first time the two had spoken since seven international aid workers were killed in Gaza, in a series of Israeli missile strikes on their convoy, and Biden pulled no punches. He “emphasised” that the strikes on humanitarian workers and “the overall humanitarian situation” were “unacceptable”. He essentially ordered Israel “to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers”. And there was a scarcely veiled threat of consequences for failure to comply: “US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action...” In other words, it will be Washington, not Israel, that decides whether Israel’s response measures up.

In the same conversation, Biden had called for “an immediate ceasefire” – a demand that the US has only recently joined most of the rest of the world in clamouring for– and urged Netanyahu to “empower his negotiators to conclude a deal” on the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas. This barely disguised order effectively places the initial onus on Israel to negotiate, rather than on Hamas to release the hostages – a sequence that is unlikely to be viewed favourably by Netanyahu, although popular sentiment in Israel could be another matter.

The only (slight) consolation for Netanyahu was an almost perfunctory postscript in which Biden confirmed US support for Israel in the face of threats from Iran – a likely reference to the possibility of Iranian reprisals for air strikes – presumed, but not acknowledged, to have been launched by Israel – against Iranian interests, including revolutionary guard officers, in Damascus earlier this week.

In remarks clearly coordinated with Biden’s phone call with Netanyahu, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, fleshed out Biden’s hint of consequences, should Israel’s response be deemed to fall short. Speaking in Brussels after the Nato foreign ministers’ meeting, he warned that US support would be curtailed if Israel did not do more to protect civilians and improve access to food and other humanitarian aid. “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our policy,” he said, in what was widely seen as a threat to stop supplying Israel with weapons. “Israel must meet this moment.”

There will be those who are disappointed that Biden has not already slammed the brakes on weapons supplies. They would include a Democratic senator and Biden ally, Chris Coons, who said that in his view, it was time for the president to use the leverage the US enjoyed by virtue of being Israel’s chief arms supplier.

Then again, the only US president actually to use that leverage was the first George Bush in 1991, in a successful move to get Israel to take part in a Middle East peace conference in Madrid. The second George Bush threatened to suspend loan guarantees to forestall new Israeli settlements being built in the occupied West Bank, but he did not act on the threat.

This time around, it is even less certain that a threat to halt or suspend arms shipments or loan guarantees would have the desired effect. As a gesture, it would certainly send a powerful signal, not just to Israel but around the world – a much more potent signal, it should probably be said, than a similar threat made by, say, the UK, which sells far fewer arms to Israel.

In practice, however, Israel is now less dependent than it was 30 years ago on US weapons, having developed production and technology of its own. And for all Biden’s apparent misgivings in recent weeks, the White House has just authorised a big new batch of bombs and fighter jets for Israel as part of a deal that received congressional approval several years ago but has only now been signed off by the president.

Perhaps the biggest complicating factor, however, is that Netanyahu, and much of Israel, views Hamas – especially after 7 October – as an existential threat to their country. And when a country or a government regards what it is doing as a matter of survival, the calculus is different and outside calls for restraint may fall on deaf ears.

All that said, there has already been some movement from Israel, whether as a direct result of Netanyahu’s conversation with Biden, other US diplomatic intervention, or simply the realisation of the reputational damage done by the strikes on the aid convoy. These include new access to humanitarian aid and new protections for aid workers.

It is not clear, however, whether Netanyahu has been persuaded to reconsider his plan to enter the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where around 1.4 million displaced people are sheltering, and it is feared that any armed intervention could precipitate a new catastrophe. Some reports suggest the plan has been postponed until at least May but this has not been confirmed.

The fate of Rafah may be the most immediate question left hanging, following the Biden-Netanyahu phone call. But there are others.

One might be how far Biden was, in fact, playing to other audiences, even as he upbraided the Israeli prime minister. First, to his home audience – where traditional public support for Israel has been fading significantly and the presidential election is now only seven months away. And second, to international opinion, which has been overwhelmingly condemning of Israel over the manner of its assault on Gaza, the apparent disregard for civilian lives, and the human disaster left behind.

The White House read-out of the conversation – published promptly after the phone call – is, after all, only one side of the story, the side the White House wanted to be heard. At the time of writing, there was no equivalent account from the Israeli prime minister’s office.

There was, though, one clue as to his possible response, from the official report of a meeting he held that same day with a group of staunchly pro-Israel US senators. According to this, Netanyahu presented the war on Hamas as part of a much greater conflict with what he described as “the terror axis of Iran”, called for new US weapons supplies to be speeded up, and reiterated his utter rejection of the so-called “two-state solution”, with recognition of a Palestinian state, noting that the Knesset had just voted overwhelming against this proposition.

From this, it could be deduced that there are some concessions Netanyahu is prepared to make – on humanitarian aid and conditions for displaced people in Gaza – and others that he categorically rules out. These may include a new version of a two-state solution said to be under discussion in Qatar as part of a US and Saudi-supported “grand bargain” that Biden is eying as a diplomatic triumph to be launched before the November election.

How far would such a two-tiered response go towards meeting Biden’s demands? Probably not far enough.

And this poses two further questions. Would the United States, and a US president in its name, be talking to an Israeli prime minister in these terms if the preponderance of the Middle East was as hostile to Israel, and even its right to exist, as it has been in the past? The wider threat to Israel’s security from other states is probably lower than it has been since Israel was established as a state. That might seem to give the US some freedom of manoeuvre.

The other question is what happens if the US judges Israel’s response as inadequate. Could Washington convince Israel that it would be prepared to halt arms shipments, to the point where Israel would – as diplomatic parlance has it – “change its behaviour”? If not, would Biden actually cut off weapons supplies or funding? And how might electoral considerations play into any decision Biden might make?

If nothing else, this week’s Biden-Netanyahu phone call exposes the risks in such an unequal alliance. But it is hard to predict who, ultimately, might pay the higher price. There are few relationships in the world today that allow one leader to dictate to another as categorically as Biden appears to have done to Netanyahu. Historically, perhaps, the US to the UK and France over Suez; Soviet leaders to Warsaw Pact satellites; more recently, Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Belarus, or Putin again, in pressuring the erstwhile Ukraine president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign the association agreement with the EU. Whatever happens in Gaza, Netanyahu is likely to lose power at the hands of either his coalition partners or Israel’s voters, once the war is over, without any extra push from the United States.

At the same time, Israel’s Gaza campaign illustrates the risks for the patron or senior partner in such unequal relationships. US diplomats have spent an awkward few months reversing their opposition to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, as Israel’s conduct of the war became an ever greater liability. The US’s difficulty, which is also Biden’s difficulty, is that reprehensible actions by so close an associate inevitably rebound on the patron, whose power of constraint may be limited.

The White House read-out of Thursday’s phone call suggests that Biden wants to be seen at least to be trying. How far, and even whether, he can succeed, should become apparent in the coming days and weeks.