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The last time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, hopes were high for peace — or, at least, one particular vision of it. It was September 2020, and Netanyahu appeared at a White House then home to Donald Trump. Through a pact brokered by the Trump administration, Israel was normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Arab monarchies that shared Israel’s antipathy toward Iran.
The diplomatic feat was grandiosely titled the “Abraham Accords” and its promoters cast it as a civilizational breakthrough and the beginning of a new age — no matter that the two Gulf states had never been at war with Israel and already had substantial clandestine dealings with the Jewish state. “This day is a pivot of history,” Netanyahu proclaimed, alongside Trump and top officials from the UAE and Bahrain. “It heralds a new dawn of peace. For thousands of years, the Jewish people have prayed for peace. For decades, the Jewish state has prayed for peace. And this is why, today, we’re filled with such profound gratitude.”
The deals generated some lucrative business links between Israel and the monarchies, and were padded by major U.S. arms sales to the Arab kingdoms. But even as more Arab countries warmed to the prospect of normalization with Israel, the new understandings did little to build peace in the context where it was needed most: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That was arguably by design: Netanyahu, a longtime opponent of a separate, sovereign Palestinian state, saw a pathway thanks to Trump to further integrate Israel into its neighborhood while placing the “Palestinian problem” on the back burner. Israel’s burgeoning crop of Arab partners, wary of Iran and frustrated with the dysfunctions within the Palestinian national movement, seemed content to go along with the process.
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Netanyahu was forced out of power but eventually returned at the helm of the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history. He showed up in September at the dais of the U.N. General Assembly with a map of Israel’s new connections in the region labeled “The New Middle East”; any trace of Palestine or Palestinian claims was wiped off the map.
Thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on July 7, calling for members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to resign. (Video: Reuters)
Then Oct. 7 happened, and the world changed. The war that followed militant group Hamas’s deadly strike on southern Israel has convulsed the region. Israel’s ongoing campaign against Hamas pulverized the Gaza Strip, led to tens of thousands of deaths and a sprawling humanitarian catastrophe. International legal action against Israel and its right-wing government have picked up: The International Criminal Court may issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a matter of days for their role in allegedly starving Gazans; the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s judicial arm, is hearing a case accusing Israel of carrying out genocide and separately ruled Friday that Israel ought to end its occupation of Palestinian territory and dismantle its settlements.
That’s a political nonstarter for Netanyahu, under whose long tenure in power the Israeli settlement project has flourished and expanded across the West Bank. He comes to Washington this week ahead of a controversial speech to Congress, with months of trauma and ruin looming behind him, and a murky political future ahead of him.
A clutch of Israel’s Arab neighbors, along with President Biden and his allies, have fitfully tried to negotiate a truce between the warring parties. Talks have yet to yield the cease-fire desired by Palestinians and much of the international community, or the wholesale release of Israeli hostages sought by a grief-stricken Israeli public. In private conversations, some U.S. and Arab officials blame Netanyahu — whose own position may be imperiled in the event of a cessation of hostilities — for deliberately thwarting an agreement.
“Netanyahu is under pressure from all quarters. He has a coalition that is unhappy with him and [far-right] partners in Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir threatening to bring it down if he agrees to a ceasefire,” explained Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum. “He has hostage families and the political opposition demonstrating in the streets in increasing numbers in favor of a ceasefire, and a security establishment that is also strongly in favor of a deal to pause the fighting and bring living hostages back home. Biden has been pushing unreservedly for a ceasefire and hostage agreement, and Israel’s regional partners all want the fighting to have come to an end months ago.”
The wily Israeli prime minister’s trip to Washington is a gambit to relieve some of this pressure. Netanyahu’s “prime directive is maintaining himself in power, and he’s succeeding,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a veteran former U.S. negotiator, told me. He is “coming here to use Congress and the White House as props, in demonstration of his indispensability” to the Israeli public, Miller added, suggesting Netanyahu was “playing for time.” Republicans, eager to twist the knife into an already beleaguered Biden, will probably embrace Netanyahu and his defiant position on the war.
“What Netanyahu is probably seeking is to make it to the end of the month and the parliamentary summer recess,” wrote Neri Zilber in the Financial Times. “The break stretches until late October, during which it is extremely difficult to topple or replace a sitting government. If Netanyahu makes it this far, the earliest an election could be held would be the first quarter of 2025.”
By that point, there may be a new occupant of the White House, and Netanyahu probably expects a second Trump term to boost his own political fortunes — much as the first term did. But the Republican presidential nominee has shown less enthusiasm for Netanyahu in recent months, while the Abraham Accords — cast by Trump as his hallmark foreign policy accomplishment — seem an irrelevance in the current moment.
Biden, meanwhile, is facing an insurgency from the left over Israel’s conduct of the war and the United States’ enabling of it. He has sought to enlist the Gulf kingdoms and some of Israel’s other Arab neighbors in an ambitious “day after” project for Gaza that would see a Palestinian technocratic entity jointly administer that territory and the West Bank, funding from the Gulf for reconstruction pour into Gaza and the Israelis and Palestinians reentering talks over a two-state solution.
As the war drags on and Netanyahu remains in office, that vision for peace also seems doomed. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted on Friday to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state — a symbolic move that underscored Netanyahu’s attitude ahead of his trip to the United States.
“As long as Netanyahu is there, there’s no chance of any movement toward the ‘day after’ plan,” an Arab official involved in the talks over postwar Gaza told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the press.
There’s no “pivot of history” in sight, in other words. That may be exactly how Netanyahu wants it.
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