US-Israel relations reach crossroads

MATTHEW LEE AND JOSEPH KRAUSS / Associated Press

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WASHINGTON — Their countries at crossroads, the new leaders of the United States and Israel have inherited a relationship that is at once imperiled by increasingly partisan domestic political considerations and deeply bound in history and an engrained recognition that they need each other.

How President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett manage that relationship will shape the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.

They are ushering in an era no longer defined by the powerful personality of long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu, who repeatedly defied the Obama administration and then reaped the rewards of a warm relationship with President Donald Trump.

Bennett’s government says it wants to repair relations with the Democrats and reestablish bipartisan support in the U.S. for Israel. Biden, meanwhile, is pursuing a more balanced approach on the Palestinian conflict and Iran. The relationship is critical to both countries.

Israel has long regarded the United States as its closest ally and guarantor of its security and international standing while the U.S. counts on Israel’s military alliance and intelligence prowess in a turbulent Middle East. But both Biden and Bennett are also restrained by domestic politics.

Bennett leads an uncertain coalition of eight parties from across Israel’s political spectrum whose main point of convergence was on removing Netanyahu from power after 12 years.

Biden is struggling to bridge a divide in his party where near-uniform support for Israel has eroded and a progressive wing wants the U.S. to do more to end Israel’s half-century occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

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Context added by this archive

One of the three places in batch B where an American paper uses the word in its own voice, and the plainest of them: 'Israel's half-century occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state'.

Note that the AP attaches it to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party rather than asserting it freestanding - the occupation enters the sentence as something a faction wants ended.

The fifth column is just as useful: Trump's 'abandonment of longstanding U.S. policy that settlements are illegitimate under international law', and the Golan described as 'territory seized from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war'. Bennett himself gets no ideological description at all here - he is simply 'Prime Minister Naftali Bennett', the man who leads a coalition.

Nothing about the Yesha Council, settlements or Palestinian statehood.

Cite this clipping

"US-Israel relations reach crossroads," Casper Star-Tribune, 21 June 2021, p. A6. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2021-027. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2021-027