What A Day - How Israel Became a Rogue Ally

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he’s invading the Palestinian city of Rafah despite strong opposition from the Biden administration. Why does Israel, a country that seems to rely on the U.S. for so much, increasingly ignore and defy its long time American patron? And at what point is a defiant ally not really an ally at all? This week on How We Got Here, Israel’s decades-long effort to break free of their military, economic, and diplomatic dependence on the United States—and what it means for the peace process.

So, Max, I've been following the dynamic between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu pretty closely. And listen to Chinoo, this is not because you have the world's worst sense of fun. No, no. It's because I've noticed something very hard to explain about their relationship, and I have a great sense of fun. I have multiple books on reproductive coercion around the world on hold at the Los Angeles Public Library as we speak. But you know who isn't having fun, Erin, is Joe Biden every time he talks to Benjamin Netanyahu. Well, this is the thing. They really don't like each other. Biden has been trying for months to rein in Netanyahu's war in Gaza.

And every day, two million people in Gaza pay the price for his failure. Biden just gave Netanyahu this big public ultimatum to not invade Rafah, which is a city in Gaza. And you'd think, you know, Israel is this tiny little country that relies on America for weapons, aid, diplomatic cover at the UN, etc. So presumably Israel has to listen to the U.S. But Netanyahu came right out and said he's invading Rafah no matter what the U.S. says. Boy, if you know anything about foreign policy, that is not how that is supposed to work. I'm Erin Ryan. And I'm Max Fisher.

This is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, why does Israel, a country that would seem to rely on the U.S. for so much, increasingly ignore and defy its longtime American patron? And at what point is a defiant ally not really an ally at all? And of course, some of this is specific to the way that Biden has handled this moment. Like, yes, he's issuing demands to the Israelis, but he's also cutting them a lot of blank checks. So you can see why they might think they can blow him off. For sure. Though this has been going on since long before this war or before Biden, so it's bigger than anything he's doing.

Or not doing. The story we want to tell you this week is one that goes a ways to explaining why Israeli leaders have been getting bolder and bolder in defying the Americans. It's the story of a very deliberate effort by the Israelis, one stretching back a few decades, to break free of their military, economic, and diplomatic dependence on the United States. American leaders are starting to notice. Just this Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish leader in American history, the dictionary definition of a pro-Israel Democrat,

got so frustrated with Israel that he condemned Netanyahu's leadership and called for new elections in Israel. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me the Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7th. Wow. Yeah, wow. It's a big moment. who are Chuck Schumer than for the tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza who have already been killed and the two million still facing daily threat of starvation, bombardment, and the trauma of losing family. Not to mention the three million more Palestinians in the West Bank living under an occupation that the U.S. has been failing for decades to get the Israelis to roll back. And of course, Israel still benefits enormously from U.S. support in lots of ways,

like maybe most importantly, from all the weapons that Washington supplies for its war in Gaza. Right. And we're not disputing that. What we are saying is that Israel has been carefully reengineering all this stuff from its military programs to its diplomatic relationships in ways that make it less reliant on America with the specific goal of freeing Israel to defy Washington exactly like it's doing now. Oh boy. Well, we should back up to show people how this all used to work. So the idea that Israel depends absolutely on American support started in 1973 when Israel fought what was another in a series of wars against the neighboring Arab states. Israel was on the verge of losing catastrophically, but then Richard Nixon, of all people, stepped in with this big emergency resupply that allowed Israel to beat back the invaders.

Ah, Richard Nixon, well-known liker of Jewish people, not at all notoriously anti-Semitic. Yeah, Nixon had, though, like like special feelings, special love for Israel. This was before Israel was a big issue in U.S. politics even. This is really just all about the Cold War and preventing the Soviet allied Arab states from dominating the Middle East. And Nixon wanted to prop up Israel as this new pillar of American influence. And I said, I will not let Israel go down the tube. Therefore, I approved an alert, alert of American influence. And I said, I will not let Israel go down the tube. Therefore, I approved an alert, alert of our forces, nuclear and conventional. A couple of days after that,

Brezhnev backed down. And finally, the ceasefire went into place. And then, of course, a few years later, Jimmy Carter sponsors the Camp David Accords that strike peace between Israel and Egypt, in part by promising to give both countries billions of dollars in aid every year in perpetuity. This moment is the origin of the idea that Israel is a small country surrounded by adversaries whose continued survival relies on American support. And that was pretty true for a long time. Israel, remember, was a much poorer country back then than it is today with a less sophisticated military. Even as Israel got richer and its neighbors posed less of an existential threat, it became more reliant on the U.S. in other ways. Yeah, that would be the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict. Israel, of course, had been occupying the Palestinian territory since 1967 and was coming into growing conflict with Palestinian resistance groups. This was also a time of global decolonization. So governments worldwide, especially in Asia and Africa, took up the cause of pressuring for Palestinian liberation. Enter again the United States, which... Ugh, we should have like a theme song. A little theme music. Yeah.

So America used its diplomatic weight to shield Israel, for example, by vetoing any critical resolutions on the United Nations Security Council. The Americans also became the primary mediators of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And throughout, the Americans on sides. Israeli voters rewarded or punished politicians based on how effective they were at pleasing Washington. That sounds dysfunctional. I'm picturing the Israeli James Carville saying after the incumbents lose a Knesset election, it's the American alliance, stupid. That is actually kind of what happens. There's an Israeli James Carville?

Well, we are going to be the Israeli James Carville, but that reaction does happen. Okay. Yeah, that brings us to the story of how and why the Israelis start looking to break from their dependence on American help. So if you had to pinpoint a moment when things started to change for the Israelis, you could do a lot worse than May 1989. I swear to God, if you try to pin this all on Milli Vanilli. No. Another much debated recording from the late 80s, Secretary of State James Baker's speech to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Now is the time to lay aside once and for all

the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel. Israeli interests in the West Bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation. Stop settlement activity. Allow schools to reopen. Reach out to the Palestinians as neighbors who deserve political rights. Wow. James Baker, leftist icon. Granted,

I don't get to speak at AIPAC a lot, but this all sounds pretty uncontroversial. So Baker basically announced that the U.S. was shifting policy from being a simple mediator between Israelis and Palestinians to overtly opposing and working to end Israel's occupation. Israeli leaders, and I'm putting this gently, flipped their shit. I think that's accurate. Here's what a New York Times columnist wrote of the speech, and he wasn't speaking here for Israeli leaders, but he might as well have been. Quote, the Israel haters are slavering at the thought that the speech means the United States is getting ready to dump Israel or cut her off from economic and military support unless she follows Washington instructions. That might have been the end of it, if not for something that happened just about two years later in 1991.

1991 World Championships between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves? Yes, that's right. Greatest World Series of all time? That's the answer, yeah. To this day? So in addition, that's mainly what happened, but in addition to that, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Oh, yeah, that makes more sense in the context of what we're talking about. Saddam had invaded Kuwait.

The U.S. led a big coalition against him with support from several Arab states. And Saddam, in response, fired a bunch of missiles at Israel, threatened to fill the missiles with nerve gas, and he hammered Israeli cities for weeks. The Gulf War has transformed Tel Aviv from Israeli heartland into frontline. And as the attacks continue, in spite of the arrival of American Patriot missiles, the residents of this city are now living a nightmare that they had prayed would never happen. This was a really weird plan. Saddam, not a smart guy. Saddam wanted to provoke Israel into retaliating, which he thought would force Arab states to drop out of the war. And Israeli leaders did want to respond,

but their old frenemy, James Baker, and his boss, slash bestie, President George H.W. Bush, pressured them not to. Israelis were furious about this. This guy named Moshe Ahrens, who was the defense minister at the time, spent pretty much the rest of his life trying to warn Israelis that their country had, in his view, put itself in a position where the Americans could stop it from defending itself. Like here he is talking about this 20 years later in 2010.

We got into conversations, to some extent even arguments, about an Israeli response to the Scud missiles that were falling in Israel. And I remind you again, this was a five-week period, so there was plenty of time to do some thinking and talking and discussing and even arguing, and even for me to take a trip to Washington to tell President Bush that we could not reconcile ourselves with the continuing situation of these missiles falling in Israel. And then there was this housing loans thing a year later, which was way more important than it sounds. Yeah, Bush had promised Israel a $10 billion loan to help it build houses for Jews fleeing the then-collapsing Soviet Union. But then he conditioned the loans on Israel following certain steps in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

It is beyond wild to me that conditioning aid to Israel is now treated as some fringe issue. Too far left for any mainstream Democrat. But when it was actually done by noted left-wing radical comrade George H.W. Bush. Yeah, that's former CIA director and honorary fifth member of the squad, George H.W. Bush. Oil industry magnate and DSA International Affairs Committee co-chair, George H.W. Bush. Anyway, Israel's leader at the time never got those housing loans from Bush and ended up losing the next election over it. Just like Israeli James Carville tried to warn them. So there's three big things in a row.

Baker's speech, the Iraqi missile attacks, the lost loans, convince a big faction of Israeli politics that their reliance on the Americans has become a problem. Actually, more than a problem, an existential threat in its own right. The Israeli right wing is especially freaked out by Bush pressuring them on peace with the Palestinians, which they see as intolerable because it would mean the creation of a Palestinian state and giving up territory that they see as rightly theirs. Here's a clip of a then little-known, low-ranking, Israeli right-wing politician, the deputy prime minister, getting super mad about this. We will make our demands and they will make their demands, but we're not prepared to

negotiate one thing, our neck, our head, our heart, our existence. Oh my God, it's baby Denton Yahoo. Jump scare. He sounds like a Batman villain even then. It's kind of his comic book villain origin story. Okay. Anyway, the Israeli right lost power in 1992 as a result of all this. Left-wing Labor Party came in and spent the next few years engaged pretty sincerely in the peace process. In 1996, Bill Clinton kind of confirmed the Israeli right's worst fears by trying to quietly help the left-wing Labor Party beat the right-wing Likud Party in Israeli elections.

But it didn't work, and who should come to power now convinced that the Americans are both his benefactor and his adversary but new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? That's how a lot of teenagers feel about their dads. It's honestly, that's client state vibes. Angry teenager, angry and they don't know why. Benefactor slash adversary. Things got off to a rocky start. Here's Clinton a year later describing his talks with Netanyahu over the peace process.

We had a very specific, frank, candid, and long talk. And now we're going to talk to the Palestinians and see whether it's something we can do to get this thing going again. I would also like to have a frank, specific, and candid talk with Netanyahu. Yeah, you and me both. So Netanyahu does very grudgingly make a couple of concessions to peace, like prisoner releases, because he knows he's still vulnerable to pressure from the Americans. He takes a real hit from his base for these concessions. It's one of the reasons that in 1999 he lost an election and retired from politics? Yeah, it turns out that guy is the original bad penny. Okay. This is all to say that Israel in the 90s was not yet totally pursuing that big strategic shift where it tried to break free of their dependence on the Americans. But it was taking some real steps in that direction. a little over 3% of Israel's entire economy was dedicated to military R&D,

which is almost four times what it was in the United States at the peak of the Cold War. Conflict between Israel and nearby Arab states was mostly over by the 1990s, so they didn't need so much American help there. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was heating up. And that's a really big turning point for how that conflict changes Israeli politics. Before all this, it was really important to Israelis that they be seen as a Western democracy in good standings. So they pressured their leaders to keep the Americans and the Europeans happy. And mostly Israeli leaders did want peace.

There are two big rounds of conflict known as the first intifada or uprising from 1987 to 1993. And then the much more violent second Intifada from 2000 to 2005. And of course, this was hardly something that just happened to Israelis. The majority of deaths were Palestinians, many or most of whom were civilians killed by Israeli forces. The point is that the conflict includes a number of bus and cafe bombings targeting Israeli civilians, which ends with Israeli public opinion much less concerned with making peace or with being seen as a nice Western democracy.

Also ends with Israel re-engineering the conflict in ways that are designed to make it worse for Palestinians and more day-to-day bearable for Israelis. And that means things like military checkpoints and a now 400-mile-long wall cutting through the West Bank. You can't talk about the wall alone as it is, the concrete that we see here, nine meters high, 800 kilometers long around the West Bank. It is inside the West Bank. It's with the streets, the apartheid roads, the network,

the complicated network that separate the roads of the Palestinians fromid roads, the network, the complicated network that separate the roads of the Palestinians from the roads of the Israeli settlers. It is the checkpoints that are controlling the Palestinian life. It's creating a kind of a new reality that the Palestinians will be able, enable the Palestinians to live in the ghettos and enable Israel to control the Palestinians forever. This is for the three million Palestinians in the West Bank, a huge escalation in the severity of the Israeli occupation that has been ongoing, remember, since 1967. And it leaves a lot of Israelis thinking, hey, we can force the Palestinians behind walls and checkpoints now. Why do we need to have a peace process at all with the annoying Americans droning on about concessions?

That's the Israel in which Benjamin Netanyahu comes roaring back into power in 2009. And with the exception of a brief stretch in 2021 and 2022, he's held that job ever since. Wow. He allegedly retired in 1999 when he lost. Ten years later, he came back. And he's been there ever since. It's not much of a retirement. The people who preach never give up are always the ones who probably should have given up. This is when Netanyahu's Israel really starts driving toward independence from American influence. Not coincidentally, it's the same year that Obama came into office. So Netanyahu began treating the Americans as both a source of

essential military and diplomatic support, but also a problem to be managed or even confronted. There were times when it almost seemed like he wanted conflict to accelerate the splintering of Israel from America, which is a very Homeland Season 1 plot point. There was this infamous Oval Office meeting between the two leaders in 2011 where Netanyahu like openly lectured Obama, really hectoring him over the U.S. peace plan, which was pretty much the same plan that had been around since Carter. It's not going to happen. Everybody knows it's not going to happen.

And I think it's time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it's not going to happen. I'm sorry to harp on his voice, but I feel like whenever I hear Netanyahu talk, that I am getting a call from a person who's asking me to pay some ransom. Well, that is in fact what you're hearing in that conversation, and we did pay him $4 billion for that. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that makes sense then. Netanyahu really believed that American peace talks represented a threat to Israeli security, and owing to his experience in the 90s, to his own hold on office. And to be clear, this reflects a very specific right-wing

Israeli nationalist worldview that says that any independent Palestinian state is a threat simply by its existence and that Israel has to control the West Bank forever to defend itself. We should just come out and say that he's wrong. He's wrong. He's wrong. What he's doing is institutionalizing the occupation as permanent and de facto annexing Palestinian territory through things like settlement expansion. And even if all of that had been effective at making Israelis safe, which, you know, clearly look around it is not, it's illegal under international law to subjugate Palestinians under a forever occupation that robs them of their rights.

The point here is that a lot of Israelis had already thought for years that Washington's push for peace made America a kind of threat, even as Israelis also saw American support as critical. Now, with Obama in office, they came to see winning at least partial autonomy from America as urgently important. So Netanyahu took a gamble. You might say in the parlance of the, that he called one of his lifelines. And the name of that lifeline? Governor Romney Mitt, it's a pleasure to welcome you in Jerusalem. We've known each other for many decades. God, we were so young then.

And for some reason, you still look young. I don't know how you do it. Oh, yes. and for some reason you still look young. I don't know how you do it. Oh yes, I too call my friends who I've known for decades by their last name, comma, first name, Governor Romney Mitt. Yes, Netanyahu invited Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to Israel where Netanyahu embraced him in an implied endorsement of his campaign.

So this is not the kind of thing that a client state like Israel normally does, try to intervene in the electoral politics of its great power patron. What if it fails, right? What if it backfires and you alienate the Americans? What if? This is why this is an important moment in that Israeli push to break free of American influence. The Netanyahu who took this gamble at all means that he and the Israelis he represented believe that the upside was high enough

to justify that risk and also that if it had blown up in his face, he could have survived having totally alienated Washington, which he was sure trying to do. Yeah, there was a whole bunch more ups and downs after this in the Obama-Netanyahu years. When Obama was reelected, Netanyahu's office actually put out reelected, Netanyahu's

office actually put out this video trying to make nice that we cannot play for you because it includes, and this is true, the Golden Girls theme. Yeah, thank you for being a friend. Indeed. That's actually a really mean song to play at somebody who is definitely not your friend. Yeah, it's a little passive aggressive. Yeah. Obama gave a speech in Israel that called out Israeli actions like settler violence that stood in the way of peace. Going a little bit James Baker mode. Netanyahu gave a speech to Congress trying to whip up opposition to Obama's nuclear talks with Iran. Huge deal at the time. And during all this, Obama is still giving Israel a lot of diplomatic cover at the UN and a lot of big ticket military support. Why am I not surprised?

So the U.S. is hardly wielding its most powerful leverage with Israel, which might mean, say, conditioning military aid rather than expanding it. What a crazy idea. There was a prevailing belief in Washington, one that went way back to the Bill Clinton years, that yes, Netanyahu is a problem. The Israeli right is a problem. But Netanyahu controls access to peace. So if you want peace, then you have to make him feel secure enough that he believes he has the margins to risk an occasional concession. Make Netanyahu feel secure enough. That was the plan. Go back in time and make sure he got enough attention as a child.

But concessions are not what this produces. No, and many of Netanyahu's supporters in Israel loved seeing him stand up to the Americans. But others were still nervous to see him alienating them until Trump got elected and gave the Israelis everything they wanted. Which created a sense of impunity for Israeli leaders in dealing with Washington. They took the lesson that they could all but kick sand in the president's face and eventually someone like Trump would get elected and all would be forgiven.

Yeah, you can see how they got there. And Netanyahu had been gradually adopting a new diplomatic strategy to gain even more autonomy from Washington. So in football terms, this is sort of the Andy Reid air raid offense of diplomatic philosophies. I have no idea. Complicated. Okay. Complicated, effective, sophisticated. I first heard this described, not quite in those terms, by an Israeli social scientist named Dalia Scheinland. She called it the other friend's

policy. Here's Dalia talking to me a couple of days ago. I pin it to at least from the mid 2010s that he seemed to have a very clear vision of how to expand Israel's foreign relations to non-traditional allies or even traditional allies, but cultivating new relations, expanding trade and expanding diplomatic relations and breaking new ground with countries who are not traditional allies. And it seemed to me a pretty concerted strategy to reduce Israel's dependency, not just on the U.S., but also on Western countries in general. So non-traditional allies, to be clear, is a nice way of saying right-wing strongmen. Think like Viktor Orban of Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and Narendra Modi of India.

These are all nationalist leaders who, in addition to making up the nightmare blunt rotation to end all nightmare blunt rotations, don't criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and in a lot of cases, treat it as laudable. Yeah, Trump actually helps this along by securing a series of peace agreements between Israel and Arab states that still did not formally recognize Israel. And if you're wondering how he did it, it's pretty simple. He gave the Arab states big payouts, and to win over the Israelis, unilaterally ceded almost every longstanding U.S. demand on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Wow, Donald Trump finally paid somebody. So here's a telling moment for you. When Netanyahu ran for re-election in 2019,

in the middle of all this, he got Vladimir Putin to come stand beside him in Jerusalem. This, I think, really spoke to the shifting politics of not all Israelis, but certainly the Israeli right, which by this point was fully embracing the politics of ethno-nationalism. Which means that those voters no longer cared so much about being seen as a Western democracy in good standing. What they want is a leader who will deliver support from strongmen like Putin and Modi who don't care about things like settlement expansion. They still want American support too, but it's hardly the end-all be-all anymore. Here's another telling moment from the 2019 Israeli elections. Remember that video of Netanyahu lecturing Obama in the Oval Office

that got him in so much trouble? Well, in 2019, Netanyahu released it as a campaign ad. All of this suggests Netanyahu had successfully blunted what was once one of the big levers of American influence over Israel, the desire of Israeli voters to keep Washington happy. And that's really just the start. Shortly after Joe Biden came into office, Israel fought a brief conflict in Gaza, and the Israelis, who in the past would have been asking the Americans for military aid and diplomatic cover, or at least for permission to go ahead, pretty much just ignored Washington.

The White House did call for a ceasefire, but tellingly only after the Israelis had already said that one was more or less in place, which just drew attention to how irrelevant the Americans had become. In past conflicts, Israel had relied on U.S. weapons, especially missile defense. But by then, the Israelis operated their own missile defense, and they had modified it to run cheaply enough that they'll take American help, but they don't need it. The Israeli economy is a lot bigger than it used to be, too. When the U.S. first started delivering those annual $4 billion aid packages as part of the Camp David Accords, that was the equivalent to almost 10% of Israel's economy. Now it's worth less than 1%. So take all this together. Israeli leaders don't need American military help as much because they have their own Israeli-made weapons now. They don't need American aid like they used to either. They don't face political backlash at home for pissing off American presidents, and they even get rewarded for it. And they don't face political backlash at home for pissing off American presidents, and they even get rewarded for it.

And they don't worry as much about losing Americans because they have all those other friendly countries now. That's part of how Netanyahu felt emboldened to, as of a year or two ago, start overhauling Israeli democracy or dismantling Israeli democracy to restrict rights for non-Jews and weaken checks on its power. But I'm wondering whether Israel can really still afford to reject American influence today, months into its war on Gaza. Yeah. So that war has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians. It has destroyed much of Gaza and forced 2 million people into crowded camps and rubble fields where they're at severe risk of disease, starvation, and continued Israeli bombardment. So there's rightly a lot of global outrage. I asked Dalia Scheinlein, that Israeli social scientist, about this. And just to put her answer in context, Dalia has been extremely critical of the Israeli war in Gaza. She was trying to

gauge whether the Israeli public might be rediscovering their wariness of alienating traditional allies like the U.S. I think that there's no question that Israelis are worried about their foreign relations in general. They know that the major consequence of this war for Israel so far in the global sphere has been global opprobrium and that everybody is angry at Israel. But I think that it would be wrong to assume that Israelis then conclude that they need to change their policy on the war. What the regular public tends to assume when they think about how badly Israel's foreign relations are now is why do they all hate us? Nobody else can understand what we went through on October 7th. If they went through it, they'd be doing the same thing. Maybe they just all hate Jews. You know, so that is the kind of

underlying thinking and not always underlying. Sometimes it's very explicit. In fact, often, it's very explicit. Dahlia, by the way, has a new book out. It's called The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel. You also have to wonder if, oh, I don't know, President Joseph R. Biden might be losing patience with the idea of Israeli leaders openly and repeatedly defying U.S. presidents. Yeah, there's been a pretty humiliating pattern of the Biden administration gently trying to guide the Israelis away from some escalation in Gaza and the Israelis blowing them off. And as part of that, Biden giving the Israelis a lot of open-ended support for a war

that his administration confusingly also seems to oppose. Five months in, Biden found a little bit of his inner James Baker this week when he publicly announced that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would be a red line for him. But Netanyahu, in response, went on German TV and told Biden to stuff it. 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 7th doesn't happen again. Never happens again.

And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. That's not how you talk if you think you're still the prime minister of an American client state. It's how you talk if you think you're leading a self-sufficient autonomous power that just happens to get a lot of free American weapons, but can risk alienating Washington. But we should say that doesn't mean that Netanyahu is right about Israel no longer needing to rely on Americans. He might be just overplaying his hand. Yeah. And just to be explicit, we are not saying that America for certain no longer has enough leverage to force Israel to halt its war in Gaza. The Israelis for sure spent many years eroding that leverage with the hopes of getting to the point where Washington can no longer boss them around. But it's not clear whether or not Israel has actually gotten there. And these are really extreme circumstances. Look, you don't know until you try. And Biden has not really tried in the way that he could. He could condition military aid on certain steps, like allowing the U.S. to deliver aid into Gaza. Or just stop giving military aid until the invasion and bombing stop.

Or threaten to stop vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions over the war. Here's Dalia Scheinman again. I guess the real question that I've been asking is, did Israel's strategy work? In other words, having cultivated the kinds of new alliances or trying to boast of better relations with BRICS countries and the Abrahamic countries, countries that signed agreements with Israel in 2020, the Arab countries. Did this help Israel with a room for maneuver at a time when other countries in the world are severely angry at Israel? And I don't know if there's one answer to that question, but I do think that those relations provide a kind of interesting balance to the traditional Western allies and America. Of course, the overriding

story is that Israel is deeply dependent on America to support the war. And everybody knows that. American voters know it. Certainly progressive Democrats know it. I think I'm left with two things here. I mean, I think on the one hand, the U.S. should just pull whatever levers it has, regardless of whether or not we think those levers are still enough to force Israel to change course. There are, you know, 2 million innocent people in grave peril right now from Israel's invasion. And even if the war ended tomorrow, there'd still be 5 million Palestinians living without rights under Israeli occupation. And if anyone has the power to remove these people from harm, other than the Israeli leadership itself, it's the White House. So there's a basic moral obligation to try. But on the other hand, I do think that that leverage is getting weaker every year, thanks to this Israeli strategy to weaken it. And that strategy

is working. You can see it working over the last 10, 20 years. I don't know when it will advance to the point that American influence is insufficient to end the occupation. But if it hasn't already, it's going to soon. And then that window will close. And then, you know, on the domestic end with Americans here, we are in a very consequential election year. Israel has a demonstrated, very sophisticated propaganda arm. And if we continue to not get along with the Israelis in a way that angers them enough, I mean, who's to say that a foreign country with that much power and sophistication wouldn't attempt to influence our elections? Well, now he was done it before.

Yeah. He's tried to intervene. It hasn't been through shadowy hacking or anything, but he's definitely tried to get openly involved. Let's end with Schumer's speech saying that Israel was at risk of becoming a pariah state and that the Netanyahu government had to go. It's just words are now, but it sure feels like a turning point. The fourth major obstacle to peace is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has all too frequently bowed to the demands of extremists like ministers Smotrich and Ben Gavir and the settlers in the West Bank Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way By allowing his political survival to take the precedence over the best interests of Israel He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza,

which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fischer, and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Austin Fischer. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Vatopoulos. Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, Natalie Bettendorf, and Adrienne Hill.

And a special thanks to What A Day's wonderful hosts, Travelle Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. If you didn't know, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events. And if you enjoyed this episode of What A Day, consider dropping us a review on your favorite podcast app.