Joe Biden’s Lame Duck Presidency Is the Opportunity of a Lifetime for Netanyahu

Mouin Rabbani on how the U.S. is (mis)managing Israel’s wars as America lurches toward an unpredictable change of power

U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on July 25, 2024. Photo: Andrew Harnik via Getty.

Benjamin Netanyahu has reached the pinnacle of his bloody reign. The fires of war are intensifying across the Middle East. Joe Biden, the Israeli prime minister’s close friend of more than four decades, has been left to roam the corridors of the White House as a lame duck, but still adamant in his “ironclad” support for Israel, and Netanyahu has seized the moment. This week, Israel’s spate of assassinations capped off 300 days of its genocidal destruction of Gaza.

A dramatic escalation that draws Iran and Hezbollah more deeply into confrontation with Israel is not the international backdrop the Democrats want heading into November’s election. For weeks, the Biden administration has fumbled in search of an offramp in the form of a ceasefire in Gaza as Netanyahu has publicly dared Biden to take any meaningful action to force it. Haniyeh’s assassination came as CIA Director William Burns wrapped up meetings in Rome with Israeli officials and mediators from Qatar and Egypt in an effort to restart negotiations.

“[Netanyahu] sees a Democratic administration now, which is almost uniquely pliable,” said Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. He told me, “While Netanyahu may be much more aligned with Trump than with Biden, I think he sees in Biden someone who he can put to much better Israeli use during the remaining period of Biden's term in office than a potential second Trump or a Harris administration.” 

My full interview with Rabbani is below.

During his trip last week to the United States, Netanyahu was welcomed by Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump—all of whom pledged their fealty to Israel’s “defense.” Speaking before a joint session of Congress, the Israeli leader—who has presided over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, largely through the use of U.S. weapons—was treated like a political pop star receiving sustained applause as he recited audacious lies and pledged to expand his wars. As he has since the hours following the launch of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, Netanyahu portrayed himself as defending the existence of not just Israel, but also the United States. 

“For Iran Israel is first, America is next. So, when Israel fights Hamas, we’re fighting Iran. When we fight Hezbollah, we’re fighting Iran. When we fight the Houthis, we’re fighting Iran. And when we fight Iran, we’re fighting the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States of America,” Netanyahu declared. “When Israel acts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons that could destroy Israel and threaten every American city, every city that you come from, we’re not only protecting ourselves. We’re protecting you.”

Netanyahu returned to Israel and greenlit two international assassination operations seen widely in the Middle East as declarations of war against Lebanon and Iran. It began on Tuesday when an Israeli strike in a southern suburb of Beirut killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shakr, and an Iranian military advisor. Hours later, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau and its chief ceasefire negotiator, was assassinated in Tehran shortly after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Both Iran and Hezbollah have vowed significant retaliation against Israel and all armed Palestinian factions have called on their supporters to prepare for a new phase in the fight against their Israeli occupiers. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said he will speak on Thursday evening following a funeral for senior commander Fuad Shukr, who was killed in Tuesday’s bombing in southern Beirut. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who presided over the equivalent of a state funeral for Haniyeh in Tehran, has reportedly authorized a direct strike against Israel. 

“I’m not going to be Pollyannaish about it; we’re obviously concerned about escalation,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby. “All of this adds to the complicated nature of what we’re trying to get done. And what we’re trying to get done is a ceasefire deal.” 

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, is on an Asian tour, though he said he spent Wednesday on calls with political leaders in the Middle East. “It’s urgent that all parties make the right choices in the days ahead,” he said on a visit to Mongolia. “The path that the region is on is toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity. And it is crucial that we break the cycle, and that starts with a cease-fire.”

Netanyahu waved off the public pleas from his U.S. underwriters. “For months now, there hasn’t been a week that we haven’t been told from home and abroad to end the war,” Netanyahu said Wednesday in a recorded address after Haniyeh’s assassination. “I didn’t give in to those voices then—and I won’t give in to them today either.”

On Thursday, Israel announced that its massive bombing of Khan Younis on July 13 had killed Mohammed Deif, the military commander of Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades, which led the October 7 attacks against Israel. Those bombings killed at least 90 people. “This operation reflects the fact that Hamas is disintegrating, and that Hamas terrorists may either surrender or they will be eliminated,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

“Confirming or denying the martyrdom of any of the al-Qassam commanders is the business of the al-Qassam Brigades' commandership and the movement's leadership,” Ezzat Al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau said in a statement on Thursday. “Unless either of them announces it, no news published in the media or by any other parties can be confirmed.”

Hamas has made clear this week it will not surrender and that these assassinations have only emboldened the Palestinian armed resistance. Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for assassinating Haniyeh in Tehran, though anonymous U.S. officials told the New York Times they have assessed Israel carried out the hit.

Both Iran and Hezbollah have exhibited discipline in their responses to Israeli attacks over the past 10 months. Hezbollah has generally conducted its strikes on Israel in areas informally understood as the accepted battlefield. On April 1, when Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus killing 16 people, including eight officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran went out of its way to telegraph its barrage of missile and drone attacks on Israel well in advance.

If either Hezbollah or Iran carry out larger scale attacks against Israel, particularly if they cause significant deaths, it would likely shatter a status quo the U.S. has seemed willing to accept. This would then call the question on the Biden administration’s grand contradiction: Offering militant support for Israel when it engages in lethal provocations while claiming to want deescalation.

My Interview With Mouin Rabbani

Jeremy Scahill: Let’s start with your assessment of this week’s developments, beginning with the Israeli strike south of Beirut and then the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader. Israel has not officially confirmed it was their hit, but all indications are that it was an Israeli assassination strike.

Mouin Rabbani: That Israel was able to locate Fuad Shukr, a person of such stature within an organization who operates clandestinely, is obviously a significant blow to Hezbollah. Israel has bombed the Lebanese capital, has bombed the southern districts of Beirut where Hezbollah has one of its key constituencies, has targeted a senior leader of the organization. Even though it was only one individual targeted at a single building with less than a half a dozen fatalities, the idea that Hezbollah was going to see this as a limited strike that would therefore not require a forceful response is, I think, an illusory pipe dream. 

Of course, if there is now significant further Lebanese-Israeli escalation, this has a much higher risk of directly bringing in Iran than what we’re seeing in Gaza. That possibility has been exponentially amplified by an attack conducted within some 12 hours of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas Politburo, in an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps veterans’] housing compound in the Iranian capital, Tehran. 

[Israel] appears to have decided to pursue a strategy of escaping forward, if you will. Faced with failure in the Gaza Strip, it has decided to expand its war regionally.

Israel successfully managed to eliminate the formal head of Hamas and at least, if not more important,  it managed to do so in the Iranian capital a few days after the inauguration of its new president. Israel quite clearly knew exactly what it was doing and what the consequences were, and it appears to have decided to pursue a strategy of escaping forward, if you will. Faced with failure in the Gaza Strip, it has decided to expand its war regionally. And it seems particularly keen to draw Iran directly into this conflict. I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, when you get these kind of spectacular operations, no one is talking about Rafah or Khan Younis or Zeitoun anymore. And this could provide the cover for Israel, which is already kind of plumbing new depths of depravity in its attacks on the Gaza Strip every day, to escalate these very significantly further. 

The second is that Israel is… just because something on the face of it appears irrational doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It's true that dogs that don't bark, as a rule, don't bite—but sometimes, they do. And more importantly, I think, Israel has either come to the conclusion that it is not going to be restrained by the United States and its Western allies, that there are not going to be any repercussions for Israel for conducting these kinds of premeditated escalations. Israel may have concluded that under the current circumstances, it has a golden opportunity that may be virtually impossible to repeat to draw the United States directly into its conflicts in the region. Ideally, of course, a direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation. 

Of course, I don't know how either Hezbollah or the Iranians or Hamas are going to respond, but given the nature of the attacks, it's going to be very difficult for them to respond with some kind of clandestine operation and then claim it was an act of nature or an act of God. They're basically being goaded into responding directly. And my suspicion is that if they don't respond directly, there will be an even greater provocation that will leave them with no choice but to do so.

Jeremy Scahill: I want to run through a couple of factors here and get your response to them. One, on the Israeli strike in the southern suburb of Beirut, there are indications from well-connected Israeli analysts— analysts who in the past have been used to put out messages on behalf of Israel's security forces—that the U.S. had signed off on that strike. And one bit of historical background is that the U.S. has claimed that Fuad Shukr, the target of that strike, played a key role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed some 300 people, 241 of them American military personnel. 

But on the issue of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Singapore at the time, was asked about it, he said, roughly, “Oh, we didn't have any knowledge or anything to do with this. It's difficult to speculate.” Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, was on a Navy ship off the coast of the Philippines and said something like, “I don't have anything to offer on that.” Austin then speaks to Yoav Gallant, the Israeli minister of defense and Gallant's office and the Pentagon both say they discussed the Beirut bombing, but make no mention of the killing of Haniyeh. The Iranian foreign ministry has said they hold both Israel and the U.S. responsible for the assassination of Haniyeh on the territorial soil of Iran. 

What do you make of the U.S. denials and messaging right now?

Mouin Rabbani: Well, I would take them with a grain of salt. On the one hand, from what I've seen in the Israeli media, the story is that the Americans were given advance notice in the sense of being told these operations were underway. And the implication is that Israel fulfilled its duty of giving the Americans advance notice, but also did so in a way that would make it impossible for the Americans to put a halt to these operations. 

I'm not really convinced by this, let's say, unofficial official account. First of all, we know that the Americans and the Israelis have an extraordinarily close intelligence relationship. Israel is almost a member of Five Eyes when it comes to this. Secondly, we also know that the United States has, since October 7, in fact, significantly enhanced its intelligence cooperation with Israel and has done so in the context of allowing Israel to fulfill one of its war aims, which is to eliminate the Hamas leadership. And we've heard all kinds of reports that the U.S. and Great Britain also made special forms of intelligence or surveillance available to the Israelis that allowed them to conduct a previous assassination attempt against Hamas's deputy military commander in the Gaza Strip, Marwan Issa [who reportedly died in an Israeli bombing in Gaza in March 2024], and also more recently, the Hamas military commander, Mohammed Deif. [Deif was the target of an Israeli strike on July 10, 2024. On Thursday, Israel said it had confirmed he is dead. Hamas has not yet commented.] I'm sure if you take the time to go through official statements and press reports, it's quite clear that the United States wants the heads of these people as much as Israel does, perhaps for different reasons.

It's true that the situation may be different when it comes to a senior Hezbollah leader who was in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, or for that matter the formal leader of Hamas, who's also closely involved in negotiations to find a resolution to the Gaza crisis in which the U.S. is invested in a large way. 

But I wouldn't be surprised, particularly with the case of Shukr, who was a wanted man in the United States, as you indicated. And given that we know that Israel and the United States conducted the assassination of the former Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008—that was a joint operation as well. [The U.S. charged that Mughniyeh was involved in a range of attacks that killed American citizens, including the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut.] So the idea that somehow this was an Israeli operation that relied exclusively on Israeli intelligence and so on is hard for me to believe.

Jeremy Scahill: These assassinations in Tehran and Beirut come as senior Biden administration officials have been telling the press and the world essentially, “Don't believe your lying ears when you hear statements from Netanyahu about the ceasefire negotiations. We feel like it's within reach.”

Right now, you have Hamas repeatedly saying every time there's a new round of talks that Netanyahu has put forward new conditions or backtracked on previously agreed to components of a deal framework. But the U.S. administration has been saying, “No, no, no, we really think it's within reach.” And then you have this one-two punch where the Israelis strike in Lebanon, and then they assassinate the person who was effectively the chief negotiator on the Hamas side. And Secretary of State Blinken, after the assassination of Haniyeh, says this just reiterates the U.S. point—that the key to stopping all of this is a ceasefire in Gaza—as though he's completely oblivious to how these assassinations are being interpreted in Arab nations and in the broader Muslim world, not to mention Russia, China, and other major global powers who have denounced Haniyeh’s killing as a political assassination intended to sabotage a ceasefire in Gaza and spark a regional war.

Mouin Rabbani: Well, I've consistently referred to Blinken as hopelessly clueless. And it has really upset some people, saying, “You don't understand what an evil role he is playing,” and all the rest of it. Well, that may be true, but your question, I think, confirms my hunch that this guy is hopelessly out of his depth. But look, there's been a change in tone in the United States. You know, when Biden put forward what he stated was an Israeli initiative to bring an end to the Gaza crisis, for lack of a better term, it was very clear that Israel had no intention of moving forward with this. [In May, Biden publicly announced a framework he said was based on an Israeli proposal and on July 12, he said that both Hamas and Israel had agreed to it.] But the US, true to form, blamed Hamas for the failure of the negotiations. In recent weeks, we've seen a change in tone where the U.S. is no longer exclusively blaming Hamas for the failure to bring these negotiations to fruition. And I think it's abundantly clear to anyone who's been following this issue for more than 36 hours that Israel has absolutely no intention of concluding an agreement that would put a formal end to its military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

One thing we can say, particularly about the assassination of Haniyeh, who was playing a prominent role in these negotiations, is that one of the objectives Israel sought to achieve was also to scuttle these negotiations. So it no longer has to worry about people talking about Netanyahu or Israel trying to sabotage these negotiations or not being sufficiently forthcoming on accepting clauses that it itself had formulated and persuaded the Americans to adopt as their own, and which the Egyptians and the Qataris had persuaded Hamas to accept, because Hamas has on multiple occasions accepted this proposal. But every time it does so, Israel comes back with a set of new demands with the intention of bringing us back to square one.

Jeremy Scahill: I also wonder how you view the political situation with the U.S. elections and Netanyahu's calculus about that aspect. Here you have Netanyahu just going for his triumphant visit to the U.S. Congress, where he got repeated standing ovations. He then has his meeting with Biden, who has just accepted his own political defeat and is no longer seeking the nomination for the Democratic Party for president. You have Kamala Harris stepping in now, and Trump is going to be her opponent. And Netanyahu also goes to Mar-a-Lago. He poses with Trump and Netanyahu is holding his “Total Victory” hat, his version of a MAGA hat except it’s a declaration of genocidal intent.

A photo, posted by Benjamin Netanyahu, shows Donald Trump and Netanyahu posing with a “Total Victory” hat.

I'll say to people, Yes, the U.S. could end this slaughter if it did something that it would never do, which is to fully cut off Israel. But that would make it untenable for Netanyahu to sustain the type of war of annihilation he clearly wants. And the U.S. is not going to do that. At the same time, while the U.S. has enormous influence over Israeli decision-making, Netanyahu has a fairly large playground to operate in within the parameters of the overarching U.S. pledge of ironclad support, which is to say Netanyahu doesn't just simply take the diktats from the United States and then the next day implement them. Yes, that has happened at times. It happened in the 2021 Gaza war when Netanyahu was told by Biden, wrap this thing up, and within two days, it was basically over. But right now, it's sort of like Netanyahu is alone on that playground, testing how strong the fences are of the U.S. parameters because of the political uncertainty in the U.S.

Mouin Rabbani: Look, on the one hand, it's true that Netanyahu's recent victory tour in the United States would make even Kim Il Sung [the former North Korean leader] blush in his grave. You had a joint session of Congress giving repeated standing ovations to Netanyahu. In one case, when Netanyahu claimed that there was not a single Palestinian civilian casualty in Rafah and he got, in addition to his four-minute opening standing ovation, got a standing ovation for this. And he was able, as you know, to meet with the sitting U.S. president and the Democratic Party's presumed nominee to replace him and the nominee of the Republican party, Trump. 

Against that, if you compare it to even his 2015 address to a joint session of Congress, which took place under much more controversial circumstances in the context of domestic U.S. politics in the present one, he was boycotted [this time] by more people, by more members of Congress. There were mass demonstrations every step of the way of his victory tour. And he had, at least at the level of optics, a somewhat frosty meeting with Kamala Harris, who, unlike Biden, has a real chance of being in the White House come January. 

Netanyahu sees that Biden is not prepared to use any leverage with Israel to prevent this escalation and to impose repercussions on Israel.

And so my suspicion is that all of this strengthened Netanyahu's instinct, which is not that Israel's most important strategic asset is the solid bipartisan U.S. consensus as Israeli leaders have traditionally done. But he sees that Israel's main strength of support in the United States is actually the Republican Party and some of its core constituencies, like Christian Evangelicals. And he has much less time for liberal Democrats who are solidly in support of Israel, or for that matter, the U.S. Jewish community, which is also becoming increasingly polarized with respect to Israel. So on the one hand, I think what some people have suggested is that one of his objectives during this trip was to strengthen the Trump candidacy. Well, I think that is correct. 

He also sees a Democratic administration now which is almost uniquely pliable in the sense that we know there are differences between the U.S. and Israel. We know that for the U.S. and for this administration, a regional war is the one thing that they have consistently spoken out against and sought to prevent. But at the same time, he sees that Biden is not prepared to use any leverage with Israel to prevent this escalation and to impose repercussions on Israel, either for engaging in regional escalation or to impose consequences for Israel. 

The best example of this is the Israeli attack on Damascus [when it bombed the Iranian consulate on April 1, 2024, killing 16 people, including 8 members of the IRGC]. I find it difficult to believe that the U.S. willingly signed off on that and felt that an Israeli air raid on an Iranian diplomatic facility in the center of the Syrian capital somehow promotes U.S. interests in the Middle East. But if we look at how the U.S. responded to that, “Israel has a right to self defense” and then mobilized a regional coalition to blunt the Iranian response. 

And so, yes, while Netanyahu may be much more aligned with Trump than with Biden, I think he sees in Biden someone who he can put to much better Israeli use during the remaining period of Biden's term in office than a potential second Trump or a Harris administration. So I think those are Israel's calculations now. And I'm sure that people like CIA Director Burns, who knows the region quite well, sees things very differently, but people like him, perhaps even including [Defense Secretary] Austin, are probably looking on in horror at what's happening. And a good part of their horror is that they also realize that Biden has rendered them absolutely powerless to take any measures to call a halt to Israel setting the region aflame.

It’s also important here, as you pointed out, that Iran, and not only Iran, but also Hezbollah and so on, are making clear that they do not see this as a unilateral Israeli attack or Israel acting in violation of U.S. orders, but consider these developments to be basically joint Israeli-American initiatives, which makes it all the more remarkable the U.S. is allowing itself to be dragged into it this way.

Jeremy Scahill: We now have seen, in the context of these Israeli strikes, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, every smaller or mid-sized Palestinian faction with an armed wing saying that people should intensify their attacks against the Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and elsewhere in occupied Palestinian lands. You also have the Iranian regime itself not only saying it's going to respond, but then the IRGC issuing its own statement saying that it's going to deliver a harsh punishment to Israel. What do you think we should look out for in terms of the response from the Axis of Resistance and the Palestinian resistance factions in the coming days, weeks?

Mouin Rabbani: Well, I don't really want to speculate in terms of detail, so I'll just make a few general observations. First of all, if you look over decades of Palestinian history, whenever any Palestinian leader is killed, whether it's the founding leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, or the long term leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, who I'm convinced was also killed, or any of these other major figures, the reaction not only of Palestinian public opinion, but of Palestinian other leaders and senior cadres and so on, they relate to these as an Israeli killing of a Palestinian leader that affects all Palestinians rather than seeing this in the context of a conflict between Israel and a particular Palestinian organization or movement that is not theirs. In other words, this is seen as an issue of national rather than factional significance. And I think we will see this reflected in developments in the coming days and weeks, that this is not considered an issue that is solely of concern to Hamas. That would be my first observation. 

The second is that Israel has conducted attacks, in my view, willfully and knowingly, in a way designed to make it exceedingly difficult for either Hezbollah or Iran not to respond directly. Again, I'm not saying that is how they will respond, although I believe them, at least in the case of Hezbollah—that seems to me a dead certainty. I don't know when or how they will respond, but it is quite clear that we are now heading towards a more general and much more dangerous regional conflagration. We may well end up looking at the past day in hindsight as the Middle East's Sarajevo moment. And by Sarajevo, I'm not referring to the Yugoslav wars of secession [in the 1990s], but to 1914.

Jeremy Scahill:  You are referring to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria who was shot dead in Sarajevo in an attack widely portrayed as the inciting moment that sparked World War I. 

Mouin Rabbani: Yes.

Mouin Rabbani is co-editor of the Arab Studies Institute’s ezine Jadaliyya and a prolific writer of insightful threads on Twitter/X.